THE GHOST OF A COMET

The ghost of a comet screams across the sky like the old groan of a planet that once was, and I can see in a flash, the pivot of prophecy and the dark gate that waits like a nightbird for the moon to rise, that it might grapple the prize in its eyes with its talons. Times when I’m probably mad, I see the clearest. I am what the vision sees, what the portrait acquainted with me, paints me to be. Maybe the underside of the moon’s reflection whispers to the dark side that’s never known water, that all things are fluidly free, and the black face with the stars burnt into it, tries to imagine the radiance of her eyes on the flowing. And needs me to tell her. Who knows? Maybe there’s a purpose to the things that haven’t happened yet, a trim, no-nonsense necessity that will expose the unsuspected dream grammar that is muddled in the shadows of the powers of Babel today, but now it’s everything a voice can do to make an appearance among the daffodils, the microphones, the stoned windowsills of incoherence. Here is my heart. See how it hurts? See there behind the burning bush, the cat that hunts it like a robin? It’s not much different from yours, all feathers and flames. Sometimes it grows scales like a snake and thinks it’s a knight on a holy quest for the grail, and there have been times, powerful but few, when it’s worn nightskies for wings and risen like a dragon from its waterlair to swallow the moon whole like the eclipse of an egg. It asks when it’s tempted to beg, but it doesn’t piss down its own leg, trying to lure a fire-hydrant to a dog. I’ve lost track of how many Circes have transformed the hog back into a man, to wander from catastrophe to catastrophe, until I don’t know if I’m Moses washed up on an island, or Odysseus murdered on the threshold of the Promised Land. But I recognize the snake, Nehushtan. And there are arrows strung to the bow of my voice that will outwit the axes like wood, because it’s the dead tree that shafts the moon, and the live ones that swan on the block like evergreens. Though it would be hallucinating to know what that means, still, you can feel it, you can open the eyes in your blood and reveal it to the sky of why like a constellation you had up your sleeve to trump the blind. And don’t tell me we’re not of the same mind; I know what you leave out, what you leave behind every time you move in the middle of the night from one plight to the next, as if you weren’t so much impoverished as hexed. I know what you curse and bless and how you always conceal the truth as if it were something you had to confess. I’m freaked like the gold wiring in your irises to the same seeing, and the solitude speaks of rain to the wind swinging on the same unlatched gate. We may lie under bullet-proof glass in state alone, but we’re fools together in the backfire of the comic prop that knocks us off our feet under the big top. And it’s got to mean the same to you that I’m getting tired of running at a snap of the shadow of the riding crop that drives me through my paces like the same mask of blood behind a thousand painted faces. A peacock on a trapeze is not a comet no matter how many eyes are fixed upon it. So I walk with you through the parting sea of white sweet clover down the same backwoods, pot-holed road, as if we had left Egypt behind us like an underfunded project of the body to preserve itself. And it’s of no importance who’s leading who out of what because when God talks to herself in the ashes of an old fire, recalling some part of herself like a poem inspired by now, she’s never directive, sowing the wind to find its own way to guide the seed of what she has to say to a face where it might flower, every flame of her arousal, a memory and a mirror, this endless bouquet of comets she keeps throwing to the bridesmaid stars, to give herself away, espousal after espousal, at the end of every play.

PATRICK WHITE