YOU CAN'T DRINK SPIT FROM ANOTHER MAN'S MOUTH THOUGH I JUST DID

YOU CAN’T DRINK SPIT FROM ANOTHER MAN’S MOUTH THOUGH I JUST DID

You can’t drink spit from another man’s mouth though I just did

and convince me it’s a desertwell in an hourglass.

I wrote a book about the Tuarig. They teach their camels to dance.

And play the cithara like a synchronized guitar.

Point is. You’ve got to taste the water for yourself

to know what’s hot, what’s cold. Bifurcated faucets. It’s an optical delusion.

Dust devils of stars. Poof. It’s a magic trick of the heart.

To be so cruelly lonely you want to fool somebody good.

Cling to your loneliness. Cling to your solitude.

Do you good if you can hang in there until you bloom

but I’m not your living room. That is. At the tip of your nose

like a rosebud. Like a black horned rhinocerus in a parachute.

Parking meters in veils and rattlesnake hoods

that make them look either like a medicine bag

or an executioner. Am I making myself understood?

It’s apparitional. A dream. A mirage. A ghost

you stub your heart on like a prophetic skull that isn’t

where it’s suppose to be like Christmas dinnerware at Easter.

The coasters are wrong for the occasion. This isn’t

a delirium you can see through easily as if you were someone

and the Queen of Heaven didn’t mind. But don’t

approach it feverishly. It sleeps. And you don’t want to wake the lotus

before she’s finished her dream. Of you and me, bud. Who else?

But the world as it is and always has been and will be

past tense by the time you think about it. Gone

like yesterday’s sunset that made even the crows hesitate

or Basho in the autumn looking up. Even so. Even so . . .

The blue thrush calls over by the waterfalls that sound

like the Pleiades mourning for somebody with bells.

Forget that. This is as crucial as an abyss. Emptiness.

Endless emptiness where nothing is but the stars as if

they’d just been winnowed by time. Stillness. Silence.

After the stained glass windows, your eyes turning back

on themselves like a memory losing its mirrors

of something eternal as sand in a wine vat.

Stars in an hourglass timing cosmic eggs with Sufi flutes

at the still point of the crossroads where the equinoxes meet

like mystic weathervanes an octave lower than light.

Sing it. Sing it like you mean it like an unsigned loveletter to your soul.

Trample the grapes like mistletoe pawnbroker moons

and saccharine snow globes. I hesitate to say it

but this is all you know on earth, all you need to know.

It’s a sad, sad, sad, sad gift from somebody you don’t know.

But they gave it to you anyway. And it’s meant to be opened

in gratitude and anticipation. Then give away some

like a cake that begs to be shared with desolation.

Poetry. Here’s your hossu. Now you can whisk the dust of the stars

off your shoulders like epaulets on a fossil

and address somebody from the heart beside a well

that can hear the stars in what you say from so, so far away

they look like shortcircuiting fireflies at Armageddon

that are at peace with themselves over the stillness of an ocean

that thought it heard mermaids singing just a while ago.

PATRICK WHITE