THERE ARE WORST THINGS IN LIFE YOU CAN
SUFFER THAN DEATH
There are worst things in life you can
suffer than death
like the excruciating absence of
lovers, children, friends
you cherish for the irreplaceable
negative space they leave
like black holes of pain in the
vacuities of your heart.
Gone through a lot in the shadows of
the taskmistress
of an art I’ve endured like a sibyl’s
apprentice
in the name of poetry to sing to her of
love like pillow talk.
You start out talking the talk, but you
fall to your knees
in adoration before her when you begin
to walk the walk
with a muse hand in hand like a bouquet
of black roses
with sidereal plinths and thorns on the
eclipses you leave
in tribute on her temple stairs,
waiting aloofly
in the wings of an inspired play like
an understudy
to see if she picks them up like the
words of lyrical loveletters
you wrote in the cursive script of your
longing
that she took deeply inside with her
instead
of throwing them on a wormy compost of
a garbage heap
without putting a penny of the full
moon on the eyelids
of anyone of them. A cemetery of
flowers on your grave
killed by the first frost of an eternal
autumn without
many windfalls left. But then again you
don’t need
many sleights of hand or tropes like a
house of cards
full of tricks to catch a fox like an
Archilocan hedgehog
with only one, but it’s got to be a
good one as the man said
and I would add out of the little
experience I’ve had
it better not be a leg hold trap or
she’ll eat your leg off
to get out of it intact like a surgical
barge of body parts
being towed out to sea like a nose ring
through
the tongue of a jealous slave with an
inferiority complex
whenever he comes close to a nervous
embrace of perfection.
Dance, laugh, sing, jump toward
paradise together
like dark angelic comets in a burning
house of life
without any back-up parachutes on
except for the wings
you fly around on hopping from bough to
bough
in the tree of life in the first draft
of the original garden
not caring whether it began with Lilith
or Eve
sowing weeds like wildflowers and apple
seeds
in the fertile crescents and farrows in
the garden of Eden
you overturned like farrows of starmud
ploughing the moon
as it rose over the event horizon of
your heart when you
first saw her inventing agriculture
like a left-breasted antidote
milked from the from a gland of ecstasy
and human kindness
to obviate the poison fang of the
snakey right mindedness
of a civilization that takes dying like
loving and living for granted.
This might not sound as seductive as
Ovid at times,
but at least I’m not exiled in Tomis
on the Black Sea
of a total eclipse of the sun in the
winter when
the mindstream freezes over and the
Sarmations
swarm over it like the bridges I’ve
burned behind me. Or
maybe I am and just haven’t figured
it out yet.
But it’s solid advice from a lover
with his head in the stars
and his feet firmly planted on the
earth like underground
root fires among the cedars that wander
down to the river
at night like white-tailed does with
big wide lachrymose eyes
to drink from their reflections to see
if they can taste
the waters of life like willows flowing
on the moon at night yet.
I don’t insist you listen to me but I
think you’d be wise
as an enlightened madman not to forget
what I’ve said.
When has love ever not been a lunatic
with the happy face
of a dark strange, radiant flashback of
an acid trip
with a smile on its lips as wide as the
west coast in the sixties?
A woman you’re in love with is a
window into the abysmal godhead
of a space without mithals or metaphors
to see exactly what you’re looking at
if you know how to open her up like the
harvest moon
gone blue like a Doppler shift
reflected in a see-through
thermal paned mirror with x-ray vision
of life and love
she looks into, if you’re lucky as a
gentle caress
that looks into the heart of you
sometimes twice a month.
She can make you feel like a beautiful
supernova
getting off like a climax in the
Andromeda galaxy
or a lethal gamma ray burst of a firing
squad of stars
you got caught in the line of fire like
the collateral damage of love.
In which case I suggest you don’t
refuse
whatever kind of blindfold she offers
you like a total eclipse
because, I swear, I’ve been there,
and you won’t like what you see
she can do to a misalignment of the
heart when she’s mad at you.
You can say to yourself apres moi le
deluge in an ice age
but it truly amounts to nothing more
than a shallow watershed
frozen like a boastful mud puddle
idling in turmoil on the moon.
Go dig up Ovid like a necromantic grave
robber
if you don’t believe me, and ask him.
He’ll tell you the same thing.
Like the art of love that inspired the
afterlife of so much tristia in exile.
PATRICK WHITE
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