THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

THE NEGLECT HE HAD TO IMPOSE UPON HIS LIFE

The neglect he had to impose upon his life

to write, to pursue an earthly excellence

to make up for the childhood he was told

was blighted by the time he was seven as if

to be angry in the age of innocence were

a culpable sin of deficiency. A sin of omission

worthy of an imagination pariahed by the truth

not to be as idylically blissful as other people’s expectations

demanded you smile as a child while your heart

was being torn out for adult reasons

by the people who said they loved you

but only as a matter of manners, not fact.

The want and humiliation he endured. The snakepit

of anxieties he slept on like a waterbed

that moved under him like a sunami

as he tried to dream his way back to the stars

to step away from the earthbound nuclear reactors

that kept melting their bells down

into the bullets of a firing squad trying

to make the point it was heresy to act

like a wavelength among so many sub-atomic particles.

Pleasures foregone. The women and kids

who looked at him like a shepherd moon

without any shopping malls. The killer bees

that swarmed his heart like an asteroid belt

when they left for good as if love didn’t matter

anymore than quality had a leg up

on what was being fobbed off as the real thing.

A succession of noble acts by an underdog of integrity

that had to live ten times more dangerously

than the couch poodles with pampered emotions

to express the dark oceans thriving

with unknown life-forms in the depths of Enceladus

within him, or a housewell he dug

like a grave for himself that filled up

like a black hole of galactic mirages

that bloomed in a desert of sea stars

everytime he lowered his heart like a bucket

to draw water he could drink from the skull

of the moon at a Zen tea ceremony with Aquarius?

A hermetic chrysalis in the life of a caddisfly,

always, it seemed, in preparation for a transformation

greater than himself, making a gift of a gift

that didn’t fool people with the mere lustre

of an empty stone that skipped out over the tide

like a pulse that died as if the sea had been crying

all over it even as it tried to revive it mouth to mouth,

but dark matter with a star sapphire for a third eye

embedded in the slag heaps of ore like an eye sore

to those star-nosed moles that couldn’t look upon the light

without wincing. Nightwatchman glowing

like a lantern fish by its own light in the depths

of Pisces, or feeble as a prophet in the belly of Cetus

suffocating under its own weight beached

on the unchained rocks of Andromeda rescued

by Perseus standing up to monsters like a dolmen?

Ambiguities of an echoless vocation, nothing less

than everything all the time, the hidden headwaters

of multi-headed clepshydras that flowed

faster than the towers of the hollyhocks

could bring their microwaves to blossom

as if they couldn’t speak for themselves

without pinging someone else’s thoughts

like bees and hummingbirds cleaning

the wax from their ears. Frogs and anthropods

in the tidal pools and shallow ponds

of the waterclocks dabbling in mosquitoes

like haiku at the beginning of the food chain

as if someone had sucked the enlightenment

out of life by thinning its blood hemotophagously

with feverfew and heparin and a needle exchange

that gave less than it could take fishing for the heart

like a pregnant junkie getting ready to lay its eggs.

Apostate veganism as a radical art of decay.

The jade rabbit sleeps in the clouds at the edge of the sky

watching them prune the tree on the moon with bush hogs.

He stayed up late and wrote like a candle doomed

to die at first light, when the hermit thrush

packed it in with the stars like posthumous insights

on the graveyard shift that dispossessed him of his demons

at an exorcism of fireflies and major constellations.

His eyes began to droop like medicine bags and bells

over the lightyears he travelled alone with his sorrows

trying to enlighten the past with backward looking tomorrows

that always arrived too late to do him much good.

The secret garden he cultivated on the moon

never found a way to put a gate on his solitude

that wasn’t worth walking through alone

like the tusks at the entrance of a kraal,

or a gauntlet of crossed sabres of first and last fangs

that enclosed love in lunar parentheses like an aside

some shadow of a sundial made under their breath as if there were

only a beginning and an end of time, and no eternal moments

in between one heartbeat and the next ad infinitum.

Such were the serpentine mainsprings of inspiration

he drank from like golden ratios of water when the moon

shed her skin like white petals of wind blown peonies

and Apollo lyrically tightened the strings on his turtle shell

as he sang like an abandoned housewell enthralled

by the mysterious voices of the birds on a prayerwheel

lucky enough to be blessed by the jinx of their calling.

Angels dancing on the heads of the pins

in the eyes of a voodoo doll plummeting like Icarus

through the false dawn of the sun toward nightfall in paradise.

PATRICK WHITE