SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

Sometimes you start out digging a grave

and it turns out to be a black hole that fills up with stars like a house well.

Sometimes you want to write something insightful, beautiful, sad,

and you end up scribbling death threats to yourself

in the margins of an eclipse. You ask the rain for a dance

and you bleed to death waltzing with a leg-hold trap in three four time.

I burn my sermons from the pulpit of a sun dial

and then some cult of shadows I’ve never heard of before

steps forward and says why did you do that?

I set out to love you barefoot on a long pilgrimage to an unknown shrine,

walking on stars, thorns, rose petals, broken beer bottles,

roads cobbled with prophetic skulls like uninhabitable planets

that don’t know what I’m talking about when I open my heart about life

and every move I make explodes like a minefield covered in snow.

I say something crazy off the top of my head

and the plagiarists accuse me of being too original.

I read through an entire library of windows just to deepen

my understanding of Orion shining over the rooftops

and I’m inundated by a flashflood of glass in a downpour of weeping chandeliers.

Try living a life of purpose as if you made a vow on a star

you intended to keep and your last words will be those

of a freak in a flea circus of the absurd on tour.

One foot in the boat, one on shore, your topknot tied

to the overhanging bough of a willow like a sacrificial comet,

salmon swimming all around like wise-cracking Druids

and you’ll break like a wishbone where the rivers meet and the roads divide

and everybody forgets what they asked for, what you died for

as if it were all for nothing. And the wildflowers in the starfields

shocked by the worst frost since the beginning of death concur.

Metamorphic wavelengths in a snakepit of terrors

that keep you awake at night like a gnawing death wish without respite

like a scarecrow banging off punchlines like a stand-up comic for crows

that sets your nerves on edge like the uprooted molar of an oak with bad teeth.

Creatively bound to the quantum entanglements of the felicitous agonies

that inspire my life, I can never tell from one desert to the next

if I’m witching for water with a hazel branch or a mine-detector

as the long nights stretch time out like an hourglass full of tar.

And, o, don’t think for a moment, I don’t try reconcile my selves

and anti-selves in a conjunction of marital bliss between

my animus and anima like the nightsweats of fire-breathing dragons

in the crematoria of dead star parts and stealth butterflies

but I’m beginning to think my blood is deficiently unpositive,

either that, or I’m trying to keep too many eyes open at the same time.

O, what I’d give to be happily unambiguous about the lies

I tell myself to get through another night of vacillating

like a suspension bridge between the tender and gruesome

where the skydivers dispense with their safety nets

to commit suicide like adrenaline junkies teaching spiders to fly.

Why, why, why is life so relentlessly this way

all these sacred syllables I keep throwing into the Bonfire of the Vanities

keep rising out of the flames like the incinerated papyri of ancient ravens

that persist in playing genetic scrabble with the cartouche

of my untranslatable name. Was there a time I believed in one goddess

pervasive as darkness like black Isis behind the multiplicity of the stars?

I feel like the obelisk of a famous gravestone carved in scars.

Late at night, in the Rubrick’s cube of a confessional

to distract myself from listening to the rats scratching

at the continental shelves of the plaster in the walls

that dried too soon for a fresco or cuneiform, I hear

the mantras of old lovers trying to brainwash their young boyfriends

with platitudes of love and life and light, and more power to them,

I don’t say a word, wryly remembering when I was with them,

barring the occasional fiasco of joy, the sweetness of life

always seemed to peak like the Mons Veneris in a hive of killer bees.

Just the same, I lick the sticky-fingered honey of my bittersweet memories

like an oilslick off the feathers of my black swans

with honourable grace and generous obsequies that bespeak

the largesse of the latent surrealism in my late Romantic ideals

about love being big-hearted enough to understand

why the intense pleasure of the mysterious rose

is pierced by the inglorious thorn of some unknown militancy

that insists it’s more existentially germane to be

excruciatingly right all the time than unconditionally loved

in a contingent democracy where everyone gets a fair shot

at being fanatically wrong. Peace, peace, peace, my troubled spirits,

my mystic orchids, my deadly nightshades, my urban guerilla sunflowers,

I’m not trying to wipe your makeup off like the face of the moon

in the two-way mirror of the muse that looks at life from both sides

not to make a one-eyed liar out of a two-eyed truth

like icing sugar on a blue-blooded steak. Eat what you need.

I’m flattered by the unnecessary attention I receive

from the two sylphs of my silence and solitude

I’m teaching how to paint rainbows in a bloodbank.

One mounts candelabra on my head like antlers on a shaman in an ice age

so I can see what I’m painting at night without being gored

on the horns of the stalactites of limestone and ashes I work in

like a the visionary medium I’m most apt to be adapted to,

or accidentally eviscerating myself on a stalagmite

like a vision of the moon trying to save her many-petalled face

by committing seppuku on the throne with the slash of a last crescent

she keeps in her sash precisely for that ghastly purpose.

And the other one? She’s a natural genius that does

watercolour portraits of me in sepia tones of rust and dried blood

then washes what she found inexpressible about me

off her brush like a sunset hemorrhaging in a coffee can.

I celebrate the likeness of her art to the heart of life

that creatively imitates a negative space that eliminates the best part.

PATRICK WHITE