IF I'VE BLUNTED MY EDGE

IF I’VE BLUNTED MY EDGE

 

If I’ve blunted my edge over the years like the moon

I want you to consider the fact

deep inside yourself

where the ocean hides its harvests,

it’s from use, not corrosion,

and feel how indifferently the moon

draws its blade across your jugular

like any other horizon on earth.

And if you look openly into my eyes

you’ll see that they’re just holes

I’ve cut in space

I’ve pulled down

like a balaklava over my head

to disguise how shy I am on camera

when I’m trying to look my best

at cosmic events.

And you can see in the beatings

that I’ve taken, in the craters of my eyes

and in the ageless fangs of the mountains

I’ve bared at the stars, in my scars

and in the way I voice my shadows like sails

off your unguarded coasts,

that’s it’s been ages 

since I sheathed my skull like a sword

in the scabbard of a permanent eclipse.

But the sap hasn’t run from your weapons yet

like the lost seas of the moon

and your lighthouses haven’t learned

to find their own way in the dark

when they realize

that enlightenment

like peace, or a star,

or a storm,

water, wind or a woman

is not indelible.

You may be a vigorous night

around your own campfires

laid out like a campaign of constellations

but you don’t have the hinges

to embrace both sides,

to wear the two faces 

of the same war at once

as if they were your own eyes.

The moon sharpens its sword

on the skull of the stone

that bled like hot metal

to pour it out demonically

like the souls of a thousand lethal snakes

that boiled away her oceans

like eyes of dry ice in space

and holds it up against the darkness

and runs your tongue along the edge

to test how it cuts the breeze

like lightning forks a tree

that went witching for fire.

There. You see? Now

that your head’s off

there’s a gap in your ranks

that I could drive a world through

you never knew existed

until it killed you into life.

Now what’s to win,

what’s to lose

when ultimate victory

celebrates the wounds of its own defeat

like a tree lets go of its leaves in the fall

or the moon embeds itself

like a blade of wisdom

in the eyes of a snake

that sheds its scales like blossoms?

 

PATRICK WHITE