YOU CAN CALL IT AN EMOTIONAL LIFE
You can call it an emotional life
but all you’re trying to be
is someone else’s weather.
Right candle. Wrong flame.
You want to blow their clouds away
and reorganize their hurricanes
like daisy chains to make it all better.
You can come on like a Gulf Stream
getting warmer and wetter
as you approach these continental coasts,
but I’m an older ice-age
than you are a spring thaw
and irrepressibly colder than you are hot.
And it’s not much of a planet
that hasn’t got deserts on it
no one can survive.
Your body is full of grace
and there are wings for the serpent
who drinks from your well,
and all over the moon
aromatic fires flower in your oases
as if the night were a season of its own.
But I can remember when the sphinx could cry
and if you were to know me
as truly as you say you do
you’d know why.
PATRICK WHITE
