AN ABSTRACT SENSE OF BEAUTY
An abstract sense of beauty
is the secret wish of a closet gelding.
There’s nothing abstract about it when it passes
and a rose doesn’t come with its own fingertips.
It isn’t a theory that’s pressed to your lips.
The senses are always autobiographical.
There’s nothing numerical about a woman’s hips
and no wine in the grapes of the cosines
that touch her skin like tangents
or the sick fingers
of great stupid lumbering books
bellowing on like dying dinosaurs about S-curves.
In the war between line and colour
heart and mind
mammal and lizard
skin and idea
sex and death
put your money down on cadmium red.
Wild poppies spread like fire through your head
and even if you’re ashes in the locket of an urn
doesn’t mean you’re dead
doesn’t mean the phoenix has forgotten how to burn
or that ashes are anymore absolute
than good weather that’s taken a bad turn.
Let reason mark the passage of time
like an abstract season with a shady sundial
timing the geese as they return
overhead at night in the spring
like breads on the rosaries of the dead.
It’s your ears that receive the greeting first
not your head
and your eyes that search the darkness in vain
like midnight at noon for signs
and your skin that maps the places they’ve been
like stars at your fingertips
and your tongue that tastes
new water walking on the cool night air
like a ghost returning to an unburied bone
or the moon when it draws its reflection out
like a sword from stone
and magic adumbrates design.
If you think of your senses
as five windows on the world
an apparition of ideas peers through
like the face of longing caught in the curtains
and you feel your blood turn to glass
in a botched attempt
to clarify your rubies into diamonds
and burn like ice in your translucency
wash yourself clean of yourself
like an Arctic thaw
and catching up like river to its long delinquency
throw a stone through your cataracts on the inside
and see for yourself
the true colour of thought isn’t clarity
it’s as lilac as Mercury
in a Piscean sunset in spring
when shy violets bloom like bruises through the snow
and reason is green with envy
it isn’t wearing
Joseph’s coat
like a rainbow
at the bottom of a dry well.
The abstract lyric
of the god caught in the machine
like a spider tangling kites in its own ideas
is the swansong
of the emotional hysterics
of a bird caught in a dark chimney
thick with the moody creosote
of insufficient fires.
And long before God said
let there be light
or in the beginning was the word
red was already a fossil of the night
embedded in a chameleon’s memory
that burned like maples
in the Gatineau hills in the fall
before abstract beauty
began showing up at its own funeral
like a face without eyes
that missed the blue of the flowers
it pissed out like April showers in a mirror
all over the vertical feet of its own conceit
as the ears of the hydra-headed hollyhocks
listened discretely from their watchtowers
for the tiny hooves of purple rain on tin
to begin jamming
like the sunburst of a classical tintinabulum
with the electric blue riffs of an unrehearsed first violin.
PATRICK WHITE
