Sunday, February 24, 2013

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING


I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.
The stars were dazzling through the tops
of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings
like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight
on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake
in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet
as ancient as the wingspans of the stars
I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines
in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand
to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan
laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram
as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent
like the feathers of the highest weighed
on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam
of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps
in your eyes without seeing the blueprints
of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry
celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars
that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires
trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers
in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth
I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice
when you reached out and touched my skeleton
like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy
on the petals of the roses in your blood
I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life
like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell
for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me
or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse
that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did
the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,
trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets
in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood
I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way
to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,
like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear
the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea
handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs
so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels
and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers
at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon
where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts
of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies
bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken
and left the rest to the silence to explain because
it never took any of your dream grammars long
to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth
to say something when I realized immediately
my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat
like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared
to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed
the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire
and leaving me your spirit to follow suit
as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing
into the religious art of two wavelengths
of healing serpent fire entwined around
the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking
pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae
getting ready to put some English on the planets
in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking
the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes
of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds
of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss
from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE

No comments: