O COME ON NOW

O COME ON NOW

O come on now, you can bend space and time

more imaginatively than that when you’re

intense enough to sway the light with a glance

of your gravitational eyes. No iris in the eye

of the fire that burns invisibly all around you,

why blindfold yourself with rainbows

or paint the snail tracks of the stars on your eyelids,

as if glowing in the dark like the last window at night

to go out, were the same as lighting it up

like the Pleiades on a cold, winter evening when

you feel the stillness in the heart of time

even as it passes like crows across your lunar eyes

and everything seems like the echo of an abysmal silence

tuning the mind where the roads divide

to the tines of a snake’s tongue witching for fire?

You can put contact lenses on your retina

or replace your corneas with razor-sharp lasers,

and flavour the light like a lifesaver you’ve been

sucking on until it’s thinner than the thin ice

of the cataracts you’ve been walking on

like stained-glass windows. Hard rock, or good soil,

if a visual image sprouts roots it blooms

into a symbolic visionary with low-hanging fruits

like buckets from the boughs of a woman returning

from a well to water your mirages with a taste

of the real thing that can’t be divined by defining it.

The immensities of the universe aren’t measured

by the golden yardsticks of the telescopes

you point at it like artillery aiming through

a spider mount trained on superclusters of fireflies

crazed in a cult of light like gnats in the air at dusk.

Show me your starmaps. Show me the sundials

of your clockdrives, the six on the floor red shift

of your spectral speedometers laying rubber on the road

like the wavelengths of blacksnakes swimming like rain on asphalt.

I don’t want to read about the cliches that bond you

to your inlaws at Christmas like a high school home chemistry set

you’ve been fiddling with like a spare-time terrorist

who looks at the sky like fireworks at Halloween

masked like God by the screening myths of your culpable origins.

A genie can tell whether you love it or not

by the way you caress the lamp, and the camera

you summon like a photogenic muse to capture

reality like a firefly in a digital Mason jar

as if there were no other interpretation available

to the comparative passports you hand out

like Ellis Island to homeless refugees on the thresholds

of your borderlands, because you’re afraid

of crossing your own event horizons into the black holes

in the rhetorical arguments you propose

for blood-testing everybody’s homogeneity

to make sure their aesthetic sensibilities are consonant

with yours. Ensure they release the same dopamines as you do

when you see a drop of blood like the tear of a rose,

and what pierces your heart as the water turns into wine,

isn’t the simple beauty of it, but the enigma of its thorns.

And right away, I can tell, by the way your eyes

emerge from the darkness like stars and lamp posts

you suppose there’s some hidden secret

in the occult poetic arcana of the crazy and wise

you can seize upon like a shepherdess of wolves

while the sheep are howling at the moon in their sleep.

Some nightsea of a dark jewel that’s never

been touched by the light before like an unused eye

you’re swimming through for your life,

squalls of stars in your wake like the dust of the roads

behind you. No rudder. No sail. No anchor on your lifeboat.

All that iridescent, thin-skinned buoyancy of spirit

that leads you around like a seeing-eye dog

a blind lighthouse that caught a glimpse of two wavelengths

copulating to heal themselves like a winged caduceus

on the axis of a prayer wheel. You’re an angel

with a flaming sword outside the gates of Eden

and you’re trying to master the skills of dragons

older than fire, you’re trying to steal the moon

from the window and get away with it like an eclipse.

More power to you. That’s what I say. Let it rip

like a ticket to ride you got for parking it somewhere

for too long with the windows closed,

and an Egyptian dog-god inside dying to get out

and lap like a waterwheel at the reflection of its own mirage

among the stars, Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka

in the belt of Orion, Osiris at heel like a hunting dog

chained to the chase beyond the stargates

of time shining down upon the earth for once

as if, brighter than light, it revealed more

in one sacred syllable of a nightbird urgently alone

in the woods on the broken masthead of a battered pine,

calling out to others like echoes of the same silence

the hills answer as if they were talking in their sleep

about all the stars that have drowned like flashbacks

in the housewells of the waters of life piped like bad music

through the tear ducts of your underwhelming eyes.

I’m trying to be as kind a scalpel about this as

I possibly can. Forgive the nick of the incision

that’s trying to free you from you. I just don’t see the point

of constructing poems like dams to hold back a sunami of dew.

PATRICK WHITE