HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

Half the truth is a fraud of the heart

and a lie kills it outright. The silence

pretends it’s a window, and the night

throws the moon through it like a bad imitation

of the sky. I never tried to make your delusions

mine. Nor ask you to drink from the same

well of mirages I did. Even after we’d been

together awhile you seemed content

to be a rogue planet in your homelessness

without a star to shepherd you to higher pastures

so I never offered you a threshold

you couldn’t cross like the wind in a wheatfield

blowing on the poppies like a wildfire

I thought it was wise to let burn itself out.

Did I love you? Yes. Even your scars

were beautiful. And there was always

something intriguing about your darkness

that made the fireflies and dragons of your mystery

burning every doorway you appeared in

seem uninhabitably alluring and dangerous.

I never made a starmap of your shining,

where the ink didn’t run like the black tears

of a coming eclipse in a reflecting telescope.

Missing you was usually a prelude to making love

in a false dawn, but the effect was always the same.

The stars never paled in the ghost light

and none of our fountains were ever interred

in a fire hydrant like a urn of water

for the eyeless ashes of the self-contained.

Now the shadows that followed you

like a maimed cult of overly-intentioned volunteers

have nothing to fear from the black holes

you were always afraid of being swallowed up by.

Raccoon and muskrat skulls, albino planetesimals

you collected like chess pieces on your windowsill

and wrapped your mind around like an atmosphere

so they could shine again by your reflected light.

After so many extinctions, there must have been

nights that engulfed you like the womb of a tarpit

trying to give birth to a moonrise after a hysterectomy

in your early twenties when your boyfriend

left you in hospital because he couldn’t cope

with disease. Just another plague rat jumping ship

in Genoa. And then a man you later married

left after a month and the ring turned green

and the dog and furniture were gone when you

got home from waitressing at the club, your

art scholarship missing from the joint account.

Then thirty pills like phases of the moon a day,

thirty pieces of silver, and your heart

so severely betrayed, the eclipse indelible,

you couldn’t trust your own derangement

without reading Tarot to know whether

the next stranger who showed up in your doorway

were an exit or an entrance. Or another

rich clown looking for an Egyptian princess

on the black market of the spooky and occult.

I knew from the start you were compelled

to cut things out of your life, that the knife

that had cut you had been thrust like a scalpel

into your hand like a torch in a relay of death masks

with surgical skills. I never blamed you.

Always thought I’d do a lot worse if it

had happened to me like an Aztec sacrifice

that had torn my heart out and offered it up

to the gods on the altar of a hospital bed

to propitiate the blood thirst of ignoble enemies.

Of which I was not one. Nor yet a judas-goat,

as you could have told by the fire and shadows

slashed on my pelt, and the way I kept my claws

indrawn around you like an outdated calendar

of fangs and crescent moons in an ageing arsenal.

Or by the nature of the scars I wore like Mars

when its water went underground like a frozen house well.

I remember the thick, sloppy flakes of the blizzard

I drove back to the farm in that night alone in a black Le Mans,

after the last meal at the executioner’s restaurant,

your absence riding shotgun like a habit

still in shock that it had been broken so easily,

driving like the bullet of a northern pike

through the right temple of the storm as if

I were immortal even at a hundred miles an hour

passing the snails of the lonely snow ploughs

on roads like buttered mirrors I dared to kill me

knowing anything alive or dead or spectral

in the snowblind darkness of that pluperfect hour

that seemed like the past tense of everything real

had more to lose than I already had. So bring it on.

And it did. Through several love affairs after that.

It’s excruciating to watch someone you love slowly crushed

like a black swan in the coils of an anaconda,

or an oracle by a python she used to prophesy by,

the promise of a new moon swallowed by a black hole

of paranoia. I’ve known darkness, made my allotted share

of mistakes in life, but by luck and intuition avoided

most of the major errors of the soul, even my demons

endowed with a kind of largesse I’ve always

been grateful for, not so much for God, or an ideal,

maybe to keep from being keel-hauled by the muse

on the dark side of the moon, who ever really knows why,

but it wasn’t in my nature to betray you, though

you almost seemed to ask. I may have been

an odd kind of wavelength, skewed and twisted

by the spaces I’ve travelled through, bent

by the gravitational eyes that glanced at me in passing,

but it wasn’t in my scar tissue to wound you

as you had been so many times so grievously before,

so nobly, as you truly were, by making you fall

by default on the sword of your most precious nightmare

and even stranger to think it might have kept us together.

What a world of bubbles and thorns that elates

and breaks us. The chandeliers it drowns in our tears.

You get naked as water to go skinny-dipping in moonlight

with someone you love and you end up swimming

through snakes in the rear view mirror for lightyears to come.

PATRICK WHITE