LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

LET THE MUD SETTLE IN THE PUDDLE

Let the mud settle in the puddle

if you want to clarify the sky you’re walking on,

the stars underfoot, and the clouds.

If you want to see your face as it is,

the front door that everyone recognizes as their own

after they’ve washed off the clowns,

if you want to return to yourself,

not as an address

but as home,

stop trembling like a witching wand

that’s just discovered an unknown sea,

stop throwing your bones around

like a prophetic skeleton

your grammar’s too bad to read,

like birds against the window

or stones skipping out over a mirror

if you want to part the waters like curtains

to see who drowned

when you flashed before your eyes

like the afterlife of Egypt

running the promised land down in the desert.

Love like life may be just a matter

of learning to keep your word to a liar

as most decent people bleed to believe

on the rock of their faith,

but I have passed through the belly

of the serpent crescents of the moon

uncoiling like a ram’s horns,

and endured the acids of this long, dark ordeal

in order to coax the pearls

of my transformative delusions of human divinity

like waterlilies out of the snake shit.

Graffitti under the bridge in ancient hieroglyphics,

I lost the Rosetta stone of my voice in the desert

lives ago that I relinquished like a language in your name,

because you were the most ferocious hunger

to ever consume me,

and even now

in the ashbucket of my heart beside the stove,

this chafing of flame like the wings of a distant phoenix.

Now the prophets play more among themselves

and it’s anyone’s guess who’s left

to bless the horns and haloes

of the knocked-up moon

in all these cradles in the treetops

but all night long I hear them fall like apples.

Do I remember you? You were a scalpel of lightning

that shredded me like the secrets of an abandoned embassy

and there weren’t enough stars in the sky

to cauterize the open wound

or urge my blood to clot like rubies

and I’ve been pouring out of myself like this ever since

astonished by the courage of the light

still streaming through the available dimension of your ageless abyss

as if I had a future.

PATRICK WHITE