I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I shed skins like eclipses and black latex gloves

peeled back from the new moons of unravelling snakes

that have outgrown their starmaps. Fire-sage

of a surgical dragon wound around circumpolar north,

there’s freezing in my fangs, little arrows of toxin,

and the milk of human kindness in my anti-venom.

I’m a wavelength unto myself, not a path

for anyone to follow. There are aimless rivers for that.

Poets skilled at setting paper funeral boats afire

as if they were burying their dead like real Vikings.

When you’ve left everything behind, you get used

to not leading anywhere. A cul de sac is as useless

as a labyrinth when you’re lost like the wind. Yarrow sticks

in all directions. Dishevelled stalks of dry summer grass

broken like the sarissas of a phalanx on a hillside.

You take the lowest of the low and join it

to the highest of the high and you have the makings

of a dragon that never overinflates or underestimates

the mythic potential of the quantum entanglements of life.

Scales and feathers. Winged horns ascending

over the birch groves of the lake like a dangerous moonrise

as I try not to cut my eyes on the talons and the sabres,

the Damascene crescents of clarity I’ve been running

across my tongue like the folded edges of ancient blood vows

to risk nothing less than everything all the time

making peace in a holy war of dead metaphors

buried too deep in the collective unconscious

to ever rise again with the same perceptive innocence

of their first alchemical revolution. The bloom

is off the rose. Beauty bares its thorns. Monks of gold

mine their own base metals for lesser transformations.

They unhinge their jaws to swallow their cosmic glains.

To them its all eggshells in a manger at Easter,

the two crows of Egypt, the triune identity

of three faces in one of St. Hillary, the Catholic Druid.

I sleep in my coils like a pagan hill fort

at the center of a mandalic crop circle

with occult starmaps tattooed under my eyelids.

I’m writing a grammar of symmetrical unlikenesses

to give my dissimilarities a chance to express themselves

without peristaltically swallowing thousands of contradictions

like the moon in a single gulp to bring the rain down

on the serpent fire of the lightning that engendered it.

Once you’ve passed through the monoliths

of dualistic reasoning like stone labia

at the Medusan entrance to the cave, you don’t suffer

the metamorphic uncertainties of what you were born to be,

quite as much. You’re free as a forest fire

to immolate yourself like a heretic at your own sky burial

on a pyre of crutches you threw away like the Tunguska meteor

radiating out in all directions like compass needles

from the unmarked grave of an auto de fe that made an impact

without gouging the eyes out of the truth like an unbearable fact.

PATRICK WHITE