one grain of light among a hundred million
on the leg of a sticky starfish washed up in space,
but more radiant for the knowing, going up
to the forbidden roof in the night, coffee and smoke
and the cold, red, folding metal chair that’s more apple-from-the-fridge
than a firetruck, too leggy to be a hydrant, probably
a modernistic Celtic kell of blood to start a love-letter:
Dear Alysia: I’m sitting here alone in the moist dark
above the surf of the trees, and one, a willow,
more entrancing than the others, pouring herself into me,
as if I were worthy of the river she makes of my heart and my eyes
to receive her, the cool, green comet, the portentous late night visitor
that fell from the sky in a frenzy of paint and poetry, and came to rest,
and rooted in the earth, and breathes beside me now, a waterclock,
climbing back up through herself like a bloodstream to do it again,
as the moon goes over her falls, I want to drown in,
and be discovered in the effulgence of the morning tide
a tongue in the bell of waters of the weeping bride
that sings softly behind the net of the wavelengths
she’s swaying into veils, soft whips, a necklace of silver chromosomes,
and the travel-logue of tears that went looking for a northwest passage
like a thread through the eye of a needle I want to drown in,
go down in for the last time like Atlantis
and see my whole life flashing before me as if
it were nothing more than the first, heady draft
of an enlightened prelude I’ve been writing for years to her.
And I know that life is a river with only one bank
and I’m not even standing on that,
but I make a bird of my hands
that looks ominously like a prayer
and tie a little ribbon of blood to one of its legs
and send it out among the constellations anchored offshore,
the final s.o.s. of a sinking civilization
reduced to a message in a bottle, ink in the rain,
the burning cross floating down the stream of the Milky Way,
along the Road of Ghosts, the crucial, long-necked stars of Cygnus, the Swan,
wings outspread on the apex of the summer triangle
brilliant with eagles and lyres in the widening compass of its wake,
and watch as it disappears like a penny in a well,
a splinter of hope, two feathers in the eye of a lifeboat
into the deadly nightshade of the vast, indigo vacancy that contains her.
A lifetime writing poetry, two, three, eons of lives and lightyears
holding the oceanic shell of the cosmos up to my ear
to hear the bloodroar breaking on the shores of a distant heart,
and know I’m alone on an orbiting island in the void
that wants to turn everything into an archives, museum, cemetery, ark
where the animals are all dead, and there’s nothing to eat
but this luminous spread of unsweetened stars on a piece of hard black bread,
how many times, wandering the aimless expanses of my desolation
have I picked my heart up at my feet like the gutted carapace of another dawn,
the severed remains of a dismembered telescope, the mirror, a ruin of salt,
the cannibalized skull of a brutal crustaceon with irises for pincers,
and felt my humanity, this small boy’s notion of doing something
wonderful and good that might appease the crazed furies in the nightsqualls,
and answer this season of being a tiny, brief moment in a waterfall
with a mind that can hold the stone of the world like a coin under its tongue,
how many times, how many tears that have died like rivers in a desert,
have I felt this jest of me torn out underwater like tiny clouds of soggy crabmeat
by indifferent predators whose only mineral mandate was to eat and replicate,
this feast of life that sat me at the table like a king above the salt,
now, below, in a darker time, this gesture of paupers and clowns
squabbling over the leftover morsels of a wax crown on a cracked plate?
I’m only the whisper of a microchip away,
an electronic dragonfly fanning
the soft cilia, the tiny feather dusters of your skin
with the scintillant circuitry, the nacreous filigree
of filaments and wicks, stray threads,
arteries, deltas, rivers, maps and lifelines
that I’ve palmed into the wings on the breath
of the black translucency brooched like a ghost
to the fall of your hair behind you, butterfly feelers
and the gentle wands and batons of the ants on their sugar path,
and the witching sticks, the lightning rods, the stamens and the white canes,
and the dove quills of the goose barnacle in its brittle inkwell
when it feels it’s safe at the cue of the moon
to open up and pour its tiny heart out
like a thimble, a goblet, a grail of the sea
that is its infinite portion of eternity into
the undulant shadows and shafts of pierced lunations
that seek you out like the fire-wishs of the sexual eels that come
in wavelengths of inspiration, the banner and pulse of the serpent tongue
that seizes and shocks and caresses the brothels and the nunneries of your blood
into the mysterious opalescence of the pilgrim chandeliers and drifting jellyfish
that rinse their hair out like waterfalls in the willows of in your poems.
We do talk about being clear, about disobedience, trouble, and paint,
and what goes on in the parking lots of the late night pharmacies
lit up like electric lotuses in the flesh of the asphalt saints,
and I suspect you’re a sphinx in a robe of hierogylphic scars
carved by the rain ten thousand years ago when the desert
was an abacus and journal of grass, not an hourglass of sand,
and you’re probably braver than a junkie’s t.v., and when,
since I’ve opened up like an observatory
with a reflecting telescope on a clockdriven equatorial mount
to track the small planet in transit
across the black cherry of your pupil like a snail or a tear
haloed in the copper moondog of your iris
bordered by the damp carbons of your eyelashes
that stand like burnt trees along the salt shores
of the negative white of the time-exposed picture of the night sky
you’ve posted on your website like an eye through a keyhole,
have I ever thought you were not beautiful and dangerous?
You’re one of Bailey’s beads gleaming through the valleys
of the mountains in a full eclipse of the moon
being swallowed by the dragon that brings the rain
like the embryonic whisper of the black songbird in the cosmic glain.
That’s how lizards learned to cry, and the raptors
yearned long enough for herons, as I do for you
across seventy-five million years of poetic nightshales
laced with fossils, preening my cold-blooded keyboard of scales
into feathers of fire hurled like a choir of kamikazes into a maze of light.
It’s not hard from here to give you breasts and hips and cheeks and lips
and transfuse passionate poppies and volcanic plasma
from the chrome coatrack of the saline drip on your dreamside
into the vagrant bloodstream of a gazelle and a panther
lying down together in the form of a woman with Africa between her legs.
And I can feel your hands, too, slowly turning and shaping space on your wheel,
trying to decide whether I’m a vase or an urn, a wine goblet or an ashtray
you made at summer camp from a brain-sized lump of leftover clay;
or something you’re going to cook in the kiln of your agitated hive
after an audience with the queen in the catacombs of her hexagonal honey,
or a new Adam come in the red ochre of a warning dawn with extra ribs,
all puns, taboos, blessings, curses, alpha-chimps, cosmic apes, anacondas
and apostate madonnas that go by the name of Eve or Lilith
gathering under the laden boughs of the one forbidden thing,
the small, ripe, pleading planet cratered by their teeth
into an astronomical impact of ontological proportions, intended.
No sleep last night, my mind the lead half-life of distempered uranium,
until the birds began tuning up like the fan-belt of a dying alternator,
the sky a bleached lapis luzuli freaked with fusions of white gold
I managed to pan from the starstream of a little poetic alchemy,
with your heart standing in as the understudy of the black rose no one’s ever seen
and this morning, after walking out to greet you like the sun
three hours later in British Columbia, sine occasu,
among rappers and poets, ex-hookers and grocery clerks
who are sometimes truly my friends without trying too hard,
so that I am ambidextrously alone trying to juggle Venus and Mars
and dropping asteroids all over the studio floor like nuggets of mean kryptonite
this ghetto of insistent superheroes picks up and throws back at me
like deluded sparrows and sinless stones
through my magadelenic, stained-glass window
where the swan’s on the water like an ocean-liner and an ice-berg
trying to airlift all my panicked passengers from the deck with dragonflies,
I managed to find enough exits to advance this entrance to you.
And I don’t know if I should be afraid of myself or you
or the visionary cult of the computer, or if
this grammar of wizards is just me speaking in tongues again
to the orchids blooming in the shadows of the tower of Babel
holding out the hanging gardens of Babylon to you as a polygot bouquet of time
to express the oxymoronic turmoil of my lust and my love and affection,
as I try to winnow the tares from the wheat without waking the poppies
that are walking me through this dream of you as a beautiful crime
I keep committing over and over again on this poetic hotline
in a rush of cool bliss that would give even a dead Buddha reason to rise,
but, lady, there it is. I want to be the black mandala in the shrine of your eyes,
the ghost-fire in the spirit’s lost and found, the wounded, white stag
healing softly among the haunted herbs
and lavish silence of the mystic verbs
in your sacred burial ground.
PATRICK WHITE
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