CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

Calm. Cool. The fan on. The windows open.

The cat on the windowsill and the last yahoo

yeehawing his way out of town on his bad ass bike

as he opens the throttle to startle the people

sitting in doorways like candles in niches

up and down the street he’s the clown of frowns,

a legend of gossip when there’s nothing else to talk about.

Trying to write my way mutatatively out of the shadow

of a bell of sadness being lowered over my heart

like a Mason jar over a spider or a bee, depending

on how you look at it and which you fear the most.

Life a strange elixir of toxins and honey running

through my veins, it’s funny how even

the sweetest things in life always involve stingers.

Consider the secret destinies going on in upstairs apartments,

illicit lovers, dope deals, crushed hearts and dreams

waiting for someone to come and dig them out of the avalanche,

Severe solitudes letting the stars erode in the dust bowls

that lie silent, unmoving, and old on the moon

because nothing grows there but these intense shadows

I’ve been swimming through like a star caught

like a black dwarf on flypaper in the tar

of black matter in the irisless eye of a black hole

that wasn’t on any starmap but my own a few minutes ago.

Think of how much despair has been overcome

by the false dawn of hope in the windows

of all those rooms indicting the light of their lives

when they realize in each other’s eyes love

is a dream grammar of mirages and shadows

and the heart, for the most part, to judge from my own,

is semi-literate when it comes to reading its own signs.

The crazy sly don’t know where their lies begin and end

and call their falsehoods, axiomatic. The crazy wise

don’t know whether to laugh out loud from the hara

of their cosmic center between their loins and belly-button

like a trickster god that mocks their alibis

with the enlightened compassion of an heretical crow

or cry, cry, cry like an old sixties song that slashes

the heart open like a waterclock that fell upon its own sword

like the hour hand of era indifferent to the dignity of time.

Can you guess how much fear and terror, anxiety, paranoia,

grief, resignation, betrayal, and self-effacement

as if somebody threw acid in the eyes of a mirror

that could read them like a book, have been endured

like the coils of the nightmares that must have swallowed them whole

for there to be so little evidence left of them now,

and the parties and the sex-fests, the cloney, intellectual dens

of the confrontationally obnoxious adolescents

looking at the world through the eclipse in the eyes

of black match heads that burnt out well before they bloomed?

The broken promises of youth. The unpredictable disappointments

of old age made trivial by the absence of family,

and a backyard to grow cucumbers and geraniums in.

If I were a Cyclops and not a poet I would definitely

look at everything from a one-eyed positive point of view,

but as it happens I’ve got two eyes in the dark to see with

and I’m not blinded by my own blazing when it comes

to shining a light on the way things are binarily true

like galactic waltzes and the ghost dances of most stars.

Nor am I in the habit of mistaking a new moon

for a total eclipse, so, yes, I can see happy children

going to bed at night in the finger-painted bedrooms

of these converted office spaces, lightyears from here

looking back at them reflectively like a watershed

of the extraordinary ordinary themes of life that found

a place for themselves in the world like threads of fate

on the woof and weft of the waxing and waning loom of the moon.

For all the locked horns that gore the heart

on arguments that would rather be right than loved,

I can see the new moon in the arms of the old

like lovers on the sly getting away with each other.

I can see how beautiful the lilacs must have been

in the spring of so many years ago by counting

the tree rings under the eyes and in the heartwood

of an old woman who revelled in the rain

when joy was till coyly deciduous and the passage

of time and the tears deep down in things

not so solemn and evergreen at the approach of eternity

in the presence of the lilacs foaming over the fence.

PATRICK WHITE