O LADY WHAT WOULD IT TAKE

O LADY WHAT WOULD IT TAKE

O Lady what would it take to get you to believe

I’d say almost anything to get into your pants

those lips those eyes those hips those thighs

those breasts like new snow on the mountain slopes

and that marachino cherry ass of yours

so self-possessed that it never leaves anyone in any doubt

when it leaves the room

who’s sitting on top of things

and what someone with a business sense for beauty

looks like when she’s got her shit together.

O Lady you’d know right away

if I weren’t willing to lie to you,

mythically inflate the truth,

bend space into gravitational eyes,

turn my black holes into wishing wells

and release thousands of fireflies like political prisoners

to convince you of how sincere I am

you should have a national anthem of your own

I would be far more culpable in your eyes

of being a dull boy as my mother used to call me

whenever I asked her to explain something

that everyone understood

couldn’t be put into words

like a feel for life

that touched its black and whites lightly

like the music at your fingertips

that never needed to consult the truth

like a voice coach

to hit those high notes an octave of silence

higher and lower than the stars in its throat

nesting like birds in the chimney.

Paddy, she’d say, don’t be a dull boy

and I could almost taste what she meant.

So if my tongue doesn’t stick to the truth like flypaper

blame it on my mother.

I’m just trying to be kind to butterflies

when I bait the traplines of the truth

with the third eyes of sapphire dreamcatchers

I hung over the dowdy windows of the sky

like thirteen houses of a whole new zodiac

you can firewalk through like the moon

without burning your delicate blue feet

with their morning glory skin on the stars.

O lady what would it take to get you to believe

that just because I add a little mystic charisma to the mix

and sugar coat my tongue with fireflies

and the pollen of wild irises

just to add a little lustre to the honey

I’m not just another witchdoctor in a trance of tinfoil

casting for mermaids on the moon like Captain Hook.

What an offence to a work of genius

if the truth just stood there like a mediocrity

without any superlatives in its vocabulary

to go any deeper into the inner vision of the artist

who mastered his solitude

by painting you in the flesh

than to put it under a microscope and say

at least he got the eyes right.

Why blight a ripe tomato in the sun

with forebodings of the obvious

when its skin is as smooth and spotless as yours?

If I take down the rotten curtains

of an abandoned one room school house

like spider webs from an obsolete star map

and replace them with the veils of the Queen of Heaven

and the cool mulberry silks of the aurora borealis

that whisper like ancient wavelengths of night

whenever the wind blows through them

like an eerie lyric of longing and light,

I’m not mixing rainbows and oil slicks

to artificially purple the truth with wild grapes

to take the spit and vinegar out of it.

I’m not washing the windows in wine

just to dazzle the sky with my polish.

Who approaches any ideal of beauty and lust

like a cleaning rag

and asks it to wipe its make-up off

as if somehow holding up a face like yours to a mirror

were a way of lying to it?

Flowers aren’t afraid of colourful metaphors

and the truth isn’t always a Protestant.

Sometimes it’s an apostate pagan behind a mask

that rains on it own ghost dance

like a watercolour at dawn.

O Lady what’s it going to take to get you to believe

that when the moon breaks through the crowns

of the ironwood trees like the white goddess

undoing her bodice in the sacred groves

where she goes to renew her virginity

among the unicorns dipping their horns

in their own toxicity

like a taste of their own medicine

to temper the heat of the waters

before she gets in

the nightbird on her cold shoulder

isn’t bearing false witness because it sings.

What shepherd moon of your beauty born so lowly

that he would approach

the lapis lazuli Bull gates

of the Whore of Babylon in prose?

Who talks to the moon

as if they were grazing a herd of goats in the Colosseum

when they know she’s listening for wolves in the wild

that know how to howl like unrequited lunatics

for the muse of the madness that inspires them

to go crazy under her window?

Would it be anymore plausible

if I showed up every moon rise

with a choir of frenzied Luna moths

flapping their wings against the bug screen

like castanets in the hands of wallflowers

looking for someone to dance with

to laud your candlepower

like a Byzantine scholar

with a vocabulary of mechanical birds

who can’t wait to get into you

like a third-degree burn

in the urns of the ashes of the truth?

O Lady what would it take to get you to believe

that there are some rare moments in life

when the truth can’t be expressed

by a middling ghost writer with a pen in his hand

fiddling for the main theme of a journalistic novel

to record his encounter with epiphanous beauty

like an interview with the ocean

he swallowed hook line and sinker

from the dry fountain mouths

of credibly quotable unnamed sources?

Sometimes it takes a poetic heretic

half out of his mind with desire

to step over the line

out of sync with the choir

and drag his own stake to the fire

to do it the justice it deserves.

PATRICK WHITE