ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

Accord me a gentle theme, just for a moment, let the world

touch me lightly as if I were a burn victim.

Too much hate and pain, the chronic atrocity

of everyone acting as lame as Jacob, Vulcan

and Richard III before they’ve even tried

wrestling with the angel in the way. I’ve deepened

my defeat. I’m growing immeasurably stronger.

I don’t insult the light by passing it through

phoney diamonds softened like processed honey

by mechanical bees with artificial sweeteners.

My eyes aren’t blunted and blurred by the foggy roses

of impressionist cataracts. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. Flowers in the sky. Cataracts

in the eye. I don’t launder the grapes

or bloodstains on my auroras by pressing them

through the rollers of my mother’s washing machine

to keep them clean for houseguests who look

at the nymph of the moon as if it were always waxing

like first crescent, and forget the waning of the crone

and both those claws, like the thorns of a rose,

have been blooded in the human heart like the cold shock

of a plinth of glass when the stars shatter.

Just for a while, let me fly like a bird

into the eye of the hurricane without washing me out

like a cinder from seeing the world is a house on fire

lying on a funeral pyre of crutches carved

from the heartwood of a tree that blossoms beautifully

but never shakes the superflux down to drop

like a windfall at the feet of people who are hungry,

so there’s no way of knowing by their fruits who they are.

Sweet river, let me ride your scalloped waves

all the way to the sea like the pentatonic scales

of a black snake freaked with stars, uncoiling

like dark, soothing music from a syrinx releasing

the healing from the herb. Let’s exchange metaphors

like knowing smiles between the crazy and the wise.

My heart’s pitted by self-righteous meteors

that are always the first to throw stones at the earth

when they’re challenged to remember their own transgressions.

Let me taste the milk of human kindness

dripping like snowdrops of anti-venom

from the nightshift syringe of your other fang.

Isn’t that you shining like the caduceus of Draco

helically coiling like a stair well around the axis

of the windmill earth quixotically tilting at dragons?

Can you hear me like a muezzin calling himself to prayer

from the station of the last chakra above my prophetic skull

petitioning you to live up to the legend of your serpent fire?

I won’t forget the children are starving or neglect

to scatter their ashes like mourning doves on the wind

from a high precipice with a lordly view of the valley

like those two who died of scarlet fever a hundred years ago

I found buried under an oak tree overlooking the beaver marsh.

My heart’s breaking like frost-bitten twigs in an ice storm,

but I promise to thaw them out like kindling

and start a new fire in an oil drum for the cold and homeless

they can hold their fingers up to like a candelabra.

Show me the wild irises again and let me compare them

to the blue-white stars of the Pleiades. Let the tendrils

of the wandering grapevines take hold of me again

like the veins and arteries of an elated bloodstream.

Let me hear my own longing in the urns of the nightbird

and not try to reword its lyrics into something happy and untrue,

but add a few of my own like peace, wisdom and compassion

to share the sadness of being alone like the voice

of black walnut tree that didn’t make it through the winter,

crying out in the wilderness like an acephalic seer

without pretending, irreconcilably, that it doesn’t hurt.

I want to sit on this rock like the immutable foundation stone

of the vicarious world and not feel the rasp

of stars and sand waterboarding my throat

like an hourglass that’s making me hoarse with time,

calling out like a lifeboat with a leak in it to the drowned.

PATRICK WHITE