Wednesday, November 6, 2013

THERE'S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

THERE’S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

There’s a blue flower in me and a black dog once
that lived like a big, black hole in the heart in Sirius.
Darkness is an engine. Darkness is a root.
Who knows what’s going to jump out of the hat
the stump, the boot? The cosmology of your guitar.
Set it on fire. See if there are any galaxies in it.
What’s happening to the music in that hole
besides giving birth to the universe because
a spiny little fish with a life line with the back bone
to light it all up was given the risk to live once
with no idea of what was coming after it
and everyone’s been dogpaddling in curses and blessings
ever since waiting for their ship to come in.

It does, one way or the another it always makes port
but you’re the dock, the long wharf and the short walk
that disappears to the end of the plank and over without a blindfold
to be keel-hauled on the hull of the moon like scalpels and calderas,
goblets of bone and prophetic skulls no one’s had
the gall to drink from in millions of silent years

the rudder, the wheel, the emptiness of the lifeboat on the shipwreck
you’re sitting in feeling like some ghostly mode
of foghorn and moonlight swirling all around
like a shroud that’s never had a tattoo before,
or the forearm of an embroidered pillowcase,
as if it didn’t have anything else better to do
than mope around a smoke dance with wet heartwood
cedar boughs in a tin bucket trying to smoke
the bats out of the attic like cinders of chimney sparks
scattering the ashes of a dead sister in a rose garden
as if it were raining somewhere deep inside you
like a calendar of tree rings that had a miscarriage
it almost sounds as if someone is crying
for a mortal loss that’s irreparable as a simple
potted cup at a Japanese tea ceremony that’s been
broken and mended with gold. Things get better. So I’m told.

But that’s something you’re going to have to
figure out for yourself. Is the water hot? Is it cold?
Will you ever forgive the dark for taking hold of your soul
until the stars came out like eyes in the night
that have been looking at you all along like a bloodstream
in that hourglass of stars every night before you go to bed
in a comforter you’ve made a friend of
until the real lover arrives and everything is splendid
as the dawn in the morning or an artificial moonrise
in the shopping mall of a Hallmark greeting card
you send yourself once a month like a death threat
or a loveletter you leave unsigned because, because, because
you’re endless but you know that you’re really not.

And that scares you. Scares me, too. Now let me tell you
about this big, black dog I had once. I let him off his chain
like chromosome with red eyes who could see in the dark
like an emergency exit sign and he hasn’t ever come back since.
And I don’t blame him. I miss him. Which is a kind
of peculiar sickness of mine I’m growing overly fond of
like a dog collar that’s as open and empty as Corona Borealis
for a blind seeing eye dog of savage indignation
probably out somewhere chasing deer through the woods
as if he were dark matter making constellations out his grave goods.
I shudder. And then I think of it all as a happy event in the end.


PATRICK WHITE

No comments: