YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

YES, I LEFT YOU, CRYING IN THE NUDE LIKE INSPIRATION

Yes, I left you, crying in the nude like inspiration

at the end of the driveway while the trees

were tearing up a manuscript of leaves

they’d written like silver Russian olives for the moon.

I could hear you trying to smudge my name

like the misbegotten house of the zodiac

from the blackboard of your teaching starmap

several Magellenic Clouds down the dirt road

swearing my first magnitude stars were all tinfoil

not worth the light they were confederately printed on

as I drove away like a space probe into the dark,

trying to keep ahead of my own prophecy

and never come back, no, never like a chimney spark

to that smouldering fire that never broke into flame.

I wept in the smoke of your acrid oak

that hissed and bubbled like spit from a cobra’s mouth

long enough. Go, little woman, like a landmine

that thinks everybody’s dying to step on you

all the time and have their arms and legs blown off

listening to you apologize for not recognizing me

even though I called out that night’s pass word,

love, love, love as if I weren’t behind enemy lines,

as you stitched my body parts back together

like a prickly pear or spiny sea urchin with a defensive attitude,

trying to shine your best light on it like a candle

in a concentration camp you held my feet to

like birch bark and a funeral pyre of kindling

to the heat of your fireproof desire to be inflammable.

Yes, I left you, with your mouth gaping with incredulity

like the larger land mammals at the end of the last ice age

glorying in the freedom of their new found extinction

like a Dyer wolf pack tired of howling at the moon

that kept turning her back on them like lunatics

that couldn’t carry a tune like that chip of a bluebird

you carried on your shoulder to piss the world off.

The buzzing of innumerable onomatopoeic Tennysonian bees

isn’t a guarantee that your locust trees are full of honey.

Or the bulb of the moon you buried in my starmud

like a prophetic skull you never wanted to listen to again

was always the best judge of the daylilies that kept

breaking into flame between us like a rootfire of unquenchable sex.

Even when my lighthouses were turned thumbs down

on the latest of our famous west coast shipwrecks

I was only ever trying to put the torch of stars I bore for you

out in a tarpit with the eyes of a volatile dragon

to get you to spread your wings like a field fire

that knew how to green the short straws of a scarecrow

at a ghost dance that could rain on the ashes of everything

we wanted to bring back to life again and again and again.

Because when you said yes to being loved, firefly,

your light was inextinguishable and I could feel in my blood

as I approached you like a heretic the axis mundi of the stake

he was happy to immolated at like a Luna moth driven mad

by a female jinn enflamed by desire without smoke,

a thousand buddhas regretting they ever escaped suffering

by refusing to climb a ladder of thorns for the sake of the rose

they uprooted like three wishes any one of which

could annihilate you in joy wholly absorbed

in the false dawn of nirvana the distinction was lost upon.

You could overwhelm my body at will from the inside out

with the spell you cast on my blood like a hunter’s moonrise,

a lotus unspoiled by the slum she was rooted in

like enlightenment in a swamp of delusion

where the snakes swallowed the frogs like koans

head first until all their cannibalistic taboos

reversed the course of the curse and started

speaking in tongues of serpent fire like kundalini haikus.

I bent the blade of my sword in tribute on the waters of life

I had tempered it in like an igneous alloy of carbon and iron.

Night and blood. The mysterious appeal of a woman in hell.

Not so much dangerous because she was beautiful.

But beautiful because she was a risk I had to take

as she, for her sake, so an angel could fall from paradise

and a demon could rise from the underworld of half-lives

that could look the light straight in the eyes

like a black hole or full eclipse that was never the first to blink

when she spread her cowl like a Venus fly trap

and began to dance like a wavelength for my prophetic skull.

More Orphic, I think, than Judaic-Christian served on a silver platter.

I’ve always preferred to wane gibbously past my prime

like a ghost returning to the scene of my lyrical dismemberments

to add a few light touches, metaphorically, like star sapphires

to the mystic ferocity of the dark desires in the eyes of the myth.

PATRICK WHITE