LOVE'S AN ABSTRACT LIE

LOVE’S AN ABSTRACT LIE

 

Love’s an abstract lie

when it never touches anything,

when it’s a light that never opens anything

when there’s no oxygen in what it breathes

though it fires up like an inert gas

missing all the l’s in the signs above

the Taj Mahal motels,

when there’s no braille or lightning or dice

in its fingertips to read the constellations

tatooed on your skin like the lost gospels

of the gnostic fireflies.

Love’s a hungry ghost

clinging to a blade of grass in the dawn

that returns it to the dead letter bin of the grave

like an afterlife that’s doomed to live on nothing

when the six senses stand by the doorway

of the excruciating mystery

with their hats in their hands 

like hosts lacking bread and guests for a feast.

Love’s the erosive life of water

that’s never been turned into wine

when it’s only a mirage at your lips

a wishing well on the moon

that’s never been raised like a goblet

to anyone’s lips

as if they were about to drink

at the last supper in an upper room

long and hard out of their own skull

until heaven and hell were full to overflowing

in every drop of being that went down.

Love’s a rain that’s never tasted flowers

a fountain mouth full of drowned bees

a sea without wind waves or weather

when love runs aground

like the moon on its own coral

and its chronic longing isn’t enough of a tide

to lift it off

and polyp by polyp it dies

like an empty lifeboat

that never braved anyone to get in.

Love’s only ever a one-winged sunset

disappearing into its own afterglow

like a homing crow

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

to the nether side of here

like a star perpetually at nadir

when there’s no dawn

to feather the morning with light and birdsong

caught in the curtains of gratified desire

after spending all night mending chimneys with fire.

Love douses the torches it lit

to go looking for you down by the river.

Love would rather extinguish all those stars in its eyes

that danced like fire on the water awhile

like lightning and fireflies

then let the abstract purity

of the unseeking mirror

blow them out

to see better in the dark that it’s alone.

Love scars its skin like hieroglyphics on the moon

without ever having been wounded

or mended by an atmosphere

that could heal the wind

its mountains tore open like loveletters

to see if they knew how to bleed

like silver from the urn of the ore

or if they just paid lip-service

to the inkwell of another uninpsired eclipse.

Love isn’t a sure-footed mountain-goat

righteously walking the high paths

in a penitential hair shirt

without balls and horns.

Love isn’t a moon without thorns.

Love slips.

Love avalanches down into its own valleys

to wipe out the road between the mountain and the river

so it can follow its own lifeline to the life-giving delta

where the deserts can greet the sea

like lighthouses seagulls and ships

without heeding their own warnings to stay clear,

without being mapped like another crack in the mirror

of a one-eyed telescope in the hands of a blind-sided seer

trying to keep the night from getting in.

The orchid of sex might bloom

in the shadow of an outhouse,

nirvana in samsara

salvation through sin

the cure in the heart of the disease,

and the night lily of enlightenment

array its radiance in a swamp,

but love knows so much more

than flesh and thought

what the bodymind is

it doesn’t sever the root from the flower,

it doesn’t elevate the one 

and diminish the other

as the higher and lower power.

Love transforms.

Love expresses itself creatively.

Love is the changelessness of change.

Love isn’t the whore of eternity.

Love doesn’t turn the hour of the virgin out on the streets

to make a living between the sheets.

Love is all time.

Love is all space

like two eyes in the same face

but one seeing

one being

one embrace

of the singularity of the view

that knows one solitude

is closer to the truth than two.

 

PATRICK WHITE