THE MOON SMEARS ITS WAY

The moon smears it way over the windowpane like a garden snail, or a human heart, and I’m weary of wiping it off the cold glass, hoping to achieve a more suggestive nocturne. And there are rusty cans of old brushes, everyone of which eventually went mad and deaf trying to conduct the picture-music that composed them and the painter. What a ride, this long wave of a life that bears itself like a bottle without a message across the night sea, hoping some island that knows how to read might stoop to pick it up. If I mean anything I mean the sea. And it’s not hard, for all that I’ve kept in the depths, to see right through me. A single drop, if your eyes aren’t clouded by the cataracts of your thought, and you have it all. You can taste the wind and the sun and the stars in me, and if you were to take my pulse like a tide, to prove I’m still alive, it’s always the moon. But tonight, ill, and in the dark alone, bored with my age, and smouldering like a tiger in a cage, all stripes and bars, I wing the cold stone of the moon out over the idling water to see if I can make it skip three times before it sinks. And I really don’t care what anyone’s indifference thinks, I’m not there; you’re not here, and the lies you told roar like an ocean in your ear when I interrogate your shells to determine if the silence is indictable. Sick of understanding, sick of the excuses and the gates I have to make up to remain open to you, sick of my blood being mistaken for an oilspill and the eyepatches and eclipses my poems must wear to walk in your light on the bright side. I thought you were a bride of fire; I thought you were the night incarnate in a woman, and everything you wrote to me you meant. Silly in a man my age to expect Venus to step out of the airy froth of the seafoam like a gown at her feet, when all you were doing was just cooking wieners on a beach, impaling them on a pen, and thrusting them into the contorted driftwood of your sexual heat. Amen, or better yet, absitomen: may no evil come of my words, as I seep back into the undertow of the sky that sprawled across your shore, leaving an archive of stars in its wake that haven’t been seen since love did a double-take and sloughed the moon like a condom on a snake. Don’t be angry, don’t be bitter, you say, and prolong the infraction. You know what you’re doing and not doing and why. Did you forget to water the lie? Why should you be crazy, and I wear the straitjacket? Absence. Silence. Doubt. Houdini’s already got one his arms out, a breached baby twisting out of the womb. And if my heart once went off like a fire alarm in a pyramid, now it ticks like a clock in a tomb, wired to an afterlife that goes boom. What do you say to yourself, after what you’ve said to me? Do you take my books down from the shelf when it’s raining, and there’s nothing on T.V., and page the passion casually? Do you read the poems I wrote you in blood and love and fire and tears, believing you might be the labial m between creation and cremation that I’ve shaped my upheaval to like a muse for years, knowing the hoax was all on me? And that was okay, because of the eloquence of the illusion when no one knew what else to say. If I were the clown, then you were the solitary flower of his gushing bouquet, and it really doesn’t matter whose eye was ambushed by the water or feigned a painted tear; it was enough to put the fire out. It was enough to leave me here like an isolated wave trying to shoulder a scuttled lifeboat on the pitted moon back to the coast of an absent sea. How like a skull without eyes it all seems, and then to discover, even dead, that you can’t shake off the bad dreams, that these long shadows that flow out of me like the lifeblood of a mountain, or a slashed wrist, are not streams, but the ghosts of an ocean no one can save, wave after wave, returning, as always, too late to the grave. And that leaves me nothing but space, nothing but time, to converse with faceless voices in the emptiness, like echoes in a dry well that repeat whatever I tell myself to haul myself up out of the abyss like an eyelid of water and see that if there was ever a message in a bottle, it washed up in a rave of poetry, tides and tides ago, the foment of a moment, and broke like prophecy against the seawalls of Atlantis.

PATRICK WHITE