MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

MY STOMACH IS A MAN GINGERLY WALKING ACROSS QUICKSAND

My stomach is a man gingerly walking across quicksand.

If they’re not looking at the sky, my eyes

do more looking on the inside than they do

the phenomenal world I’ve brought in doors

homelessly out of the cold, a stray

that burnt its paws on ice, shepherd moons

around a rogue star, fire enough for the night.

I’m painting waterlilies, late summer sunsets,

apple bloom on a moody spring day. Spring

in violet and green. I find a dynamic repose,

sanctuary, shrine, a white hole that shines

on the other side of this carboniferous eclipse,

an embassy I can run to from the secret police

by painting mirages that drift out of the ether

like the visions of desert poets with an oral tradition

of making watergardens out of hourglasses out of time,

a madman who knows by the taste of the wine,

the jewels encrusted like barnacles to the grail,

amber, rubies, star sapphires, emeralds, diamonds,

amethyst and topaz, are mere tears of the rainbow

and not the night nor the radiance he’s in love with

like a hundred billion stars wheeling like a prayer wheel

at the crossroads of a Sufi ghost dance. I’m

absorbed into the mysteries of life, light,

the human heart, darkness, the elaboration

of the imagination aware of its own mindstream

flowing from one form into another, transmorphically,

butterflies out of their cocoons, dragonflies

from their makeshift chrysales, a sentient heart

lilaceously embedded in its starmud like the bulb

of a skull about to break into light like a waterlily

that effulgently lost its mind, trying to cling

to a starmap that can tell you approximately

where everything is, but not, syllogistically, why it shines.

I’ve been sweating the details about how

I’m going to pay the rent as I hang

helical coils of flypaper from the rafter

of the seasick feeling I have on the gallows

where I’m suppose to forgive the maenads

for severing me from my prophetic skull like Orpheus,

keel-hauled on the hull of a cretaceous moon.

I wish I was a chandelier of sticky monoicious catkins,

an alder that wasn’t so co-dependent upon attracting bees

to the wildflowers, the asters and chicory

of my paintings and roadside poems to churn out

just enough of a taste of honey to keep me going

long enough to spread like loosestrife through

the cemeteries and sunken fleets of the birch and cedar trees.

Uprootable. Like lightning, rivers and nerves.

The brachiation of dark matter, the skeletal trees

bound to their own masts like three bells of morning glory

singing all’s well to the pink skies of a warning

that’s isn’t enough of a storm front to dislodge them

like the big bad wolf at the door of the little pigs’ house

trying to blow the roof off the zodiac again

as if every hurricane were a sign from God

to found a new tent city of stargazer lilies for the dispossessed.

No joke. Sometime you just have to let go of the wheel

of birth and death when you’re swept overboard

by a maverick wave from the stern of a Tarot deck

trying to wash you like a cinder out of the one good eye

you’ve got left to navigate with like a mystic

clinging to the planks he’s been compelled to walk

like water on the dark night of his soul, trying

to salvage himself from his own wrack and ruin

as if Apollo Delphinus were going to send Delphi to his rescue

so the oracular dragoness that coils around me now

like the umbilical cord of Pythos, the earth mother,

post-mature as I grow gummy in the womb

of her lunar seas, with long hair and the Mandarin fingernails

of Edward Scissorhands trying to perform a Caesarian

from the inside out like a medicine bag he’s using

as a collapsed lung to stay afloat until he’s born

with a less ambivalent outlook on learning to dogpaddle

in a gale of raving mundanities that shriek like banshees

at the jagged windows of the eyes into his soul.

Times like this, counter-intuitively I purse an earthly excellence

as if I were painting landscapes like placards in protest

and writing poems as if I were framing the Declaration

of Independence with French overtones of the gathering fireflies

of revolutionary insight into the Enlightenment

about to strike the tree of life from the roots up

like a guillotine of lightning dropping the blade of the moon

on the neck of a black swan like an intinerant executioner

leaving murals on the walls for the next prisoner

who’s about to go under the knife, or about to be hung

from an easel by the neck as he lyrically addresses the crowd

like the body bag of the Shroud of Tourin, or Napoleon

going into exile, weeping se souvenir de moi as he

kissed the colours, proclaiming, like Mnemosyne,

the mother of the muses, apres moi le deluge. Je me souviens.

Like a license plate that hadn’t forgotten its cultural heritage.

PATRICK WHITE