I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.

The way boys and cowards romanticize war.

I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.

I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.

I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors

and have them placed in all the best cafes

so when you put a quarter moon in

they reflect anything you ask them to.

You’ve got a beautiful face. Man

are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus

and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity

I try to praise the larkspur.

I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies

that have almost come to mean

as much to me as the stars on a summer night.

I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events

between people, I don’t expect to experience again

the way he walks beside her like a green crutch

coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter

trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,

and so much is so crucial to a blessed few

or a father walking down the street,

listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha

or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,

though there are days I live like a dog,

and I know that denying this suggestive reality

is to summon its affirmation as if

something in the context of life heard you

and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.

And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.

This is the middle extreme and it should be lived

immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope

in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan

whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night

and your heart is a bell of shadows

or you’re one of the good sugars of life

fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds

sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,

they’re all out of tune with each other,

this one a bass run and that an arpeggio

on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew

on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.

When the long wavelengths of its tears

aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond

the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,

love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight

and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,

and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life

like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train

that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales

were beached overnight and crushed their lungs

under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant

as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not

an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough

sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon

though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak

for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze

of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,

and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes

as if you had to go through this ordeal

to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.

Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.

I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream

of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain

like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass

that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.

Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium

at two in the morning with three goldfish

hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds

gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.

And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things

and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,

maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,

and though it’s impossible to assess the worth

of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century

I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom

in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.

PATRICK WHITE