THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

THE EUPHORIC HIGHS

The euphoric highs,

the terrifying ecstasies

don’t last too long

so why ride the comet out to the end

without reading your own doom

in what comets portend

when there’s a third extreme you’ve overlooked

in the middle

that is born of the other two?

That’s why your words

don’t have three wings

and when you’re all dolled up

like the suns’s puppet

you’re still just a snowball on strings.

And hypocrite that I am,

I love the way you can turn your heart

into a nightclub for demons on shoreleave

from an ocean of shit,

the anti-madonna

of an older religion than light

that binds the serpent to its charms

by out-tempting the apple of knowledge

with the more alluring urgencies

of a woman rebooting her flesh

before the begetting of forms.

I’m as beguiled as any of your tides

by your ebbing and flowing

and there’s no end

to the simulacra of the moon

where I have lived too long alone

like an island in the sea of shadows

waiting for your return

without believing it was possible.

Eventually everyone’s an ocean

that can’t endure its own weather

and disappointed in gravity

wanders off into space,

scars of water among stars.

Now it’s one of my strangest graces

to cry over the slightest thing

without warning

whether the bell of a sorrow

too heavy for anyone to lift,

or any human excellence

that transcends understanding.

Some people follow them like blood

and some people cut across them like veins

but the road I’m on

is as wide as it is long

and it hasn’t gone anywhere for years

but I don’t let my homelessness

exaggerate the importance

of making it back to my own heart

because if there were any love there in the first place

things are best left to do that on their own.

PATRICK WHITE