UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

UNBUCKLE YOUR HEART

Unbuckle your heart, undo the luggage strap.

Wash the smell of old lovers out of your laundry.

Sow the dreams you’ve carved from your skull

like dice in sacred ground

and let’s see what springs up.

There’s the bathtub you can renew

your virginity in, and there’s a corner

you can stand your bass guitar in

like an Irishman at his wake in a coffin.

And there’s the garden for that persona

you took on the road like a scarecrow

for a travelling companion with a limp.

All the flowers taste of hummingbirds.

And it’s ok the raccoons come for the corn

like second storey cat burglars in the night.

They never take more than they need

and in a world of greed, that’s integrity.

I always leave a smile ajar to let them in.

But with you, my heart’s an open doorway

the moon’s standing in, and my blood’s

a transfusion of black roses into the occult.

My eyes, a rare conjunction of fireflies

that won’t happen again for another hundred years.

Doom can spend all the time it wants

messing with its calendars to co-ordinate

the apocalypse in all zodiacs at once

so the year of the rat and the year of the swan

don’t synchronize their prophets to the dawn

like waterclocks who think things are

just going to go on and on as they always have

like imperially inclined aqueducts without a rupture.

Eclipse, millennial poseur, you’re a lyric of carbon

that makes the diamonds flow like tears

to realize there’s galaxies of white sweet clover

more to you than appears under the cloud cover

of a hundred billion stars burning into the silver nitrates

of the photographic plates I take of you

in the humbled mountains of my all night observatories.

And even at this distance, alone in the cold company

of these one-eyed telescopes, I’m tempted

to cross your event horizons into your black holes

and see what worlds might come of us

on the other side. Throw caution to the wind

like a rodeo clown and take the ride

as if you were not too wise or wild for tenderness.

Even when you hurt I’ve seen how you wear

the corona of the sun so lightly in full eclipse

all the haloes shining by a reflected glory

seem mere brassy moon dogs by comparison.

Out of fury you insist upon your originality

like a gamma ray burst in the path of the earth

as you weave your interlocutory wavelengths

into the flying carpets and labyrinths

of an alien cartographer mapping out the stars

with your third eye open to the loneliness of beauty

and how everyone’s threatened by an intelligent orchid.

I imagine sometimes you’re almost as unloveable as I am

when I’m at my best, when I’ve been accurately blessed,

not too much, more or less, beyond my aspirations

and I see at the speed of light how time stops,

and my mass and volume become as infinite

as my body and mind, and everything

is perfectly inconceivable in a fallible eternity

that’s adapted to us like the medium of a mystery

in a graveyard of dead metaphors we keep giving

new meaning to as if we were all randomly immortal.

Are you the supple bubble of effervescence

in a tsunami of sorrow that could keep my spirits up,

or a methane moon waiting for an airlift of oxygen

to light you up. You’re too incandescent

to shine like a brown star, too imaginatively immense

to be a black dwarf. Are you the omnipresence of a particle

or the oracular wavelength of an apostate saint

when no one’s looking but me and you

through your holy books to see if what we said

came true or not? If we kept our word

to the innovative absurdity of it all in peace and war

or threw the moon through the window

like an alarm clock that didn’t go off in time

to save the earth? I know you’re not

the existential bricklayer of the paradoxically sublime

outside the gates of Babylon, nor the whore within.

I’ve seen you wing your way from one planet to the next

trying to thread your lifelines into a nest

that wasn’t a begging bowl in the hands of tree

that came on like a slumlord in a ghetto of birds.

There are no aviaries for the hopelessly free.

But could you live with me in this homelessness

like a tent in the wind that scours Mars for survivors

of the last expedition of seeds that tried to bloom here?

I’d build you a palace of black water that eclipsed

the beauty of the Taj Mahal and plant stars

all around it that would fountain into waterlilies

and we’d be so full of moonlight and solitude

in the silence of each other’s eyes, the darkness

couldn’t help but envy us the danger of the enterprise.

PATRICK WHITE