AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

AND WHO CONSIDERS THE BATS

And who considers the bats

smoked out of hotel attics

with cedar boughs and burning buckets

so much like the poor; how

they move from house to house

like shoes in a second hand store,

diasporas of worn leather, well-heeled

by the walking of others,

their spinal cords unlaced

and their tongues torn out like wings?

If your heart is still a sapphire

in the orbit of a wedding ring

around a black hole

brighter than the light, if

your wounds give up their dead at night

to crawl into bed with you

like moons around a fractured planet,

afraid of intimate strangers,

and a sorrow you once met on a blind date

still puts bouquets of flashlights on your grave,

you will notice such things:

mothers abandoned like winter wheelbarrows,

tripedal dogs who were third

on the burnt matchsticks of their limbs,

the bruised violins of teen-age girls

whose tears fall like lost earrings,

old men with the courage of bridges

shaking like ladders of bone

at the crooked rungs of schoolyard crosswalks.

If your blood is a sullen radiance

that didn’t make the charts, a ribbon

in the hair of a black comet

that passes like midnight at noon,

and your mind is a star

that’s turned its blazing down

to be softened by life and if

you’re still greeted like an affectionate defeat

in the thirteenth house of candles

condemned by the fire marshals

of a safety-minded zodiac

armed with alarms and emergency exits,

then your heart is probably tender and good,

a mushroom with gills, a loaf of bread

that rises from the spores and yeasts

of the kinder ovens and quiet shrines

that bell your best emotions; and you notice things

that few but the broken can cherish,

charmed and enchanted things

in the lost and found of the sea

that no one ever claims, lives

that went to the wrong address

and wound up in the dead letter bin, bent pins

in the crack of the floor

that once put galaxies on the map,

the dolls of aging prostitutes

with chipped marbles for eyes

propped up like scars and childhood choirs

on the bestial floor of the bed. You notice

the rose arbors and overgrown bowers

that look up like old ladies with garden trowels

whenever you pass the mountainous gaps

of the missing pickets on the gate.

And because you are wide with empathy,

your heart an open life-boat,

you can feel the insulted shadows

of the dejected lovers

toying with each other

like the posthumous menus

of the things that they’ll leave on their plate;

you can hear the lyric in the leftovers

and thumbing the edge

of their sharp good-bye, relate.

And only those who have been cut like a lemon

into a rosette of bitter windowpanes

can know the loneliness of buttons

that bloom like carefully guarded flowers

on the shirt of stinging nettles

wearing the overdressed loser in the corner.

And if not for the nights alone

in a labyrinth of cheap apartments,

when you slept skinless in a swarm of blackflies

that bit like thought,

your body smeared with berries of blood

and your mind radically dwarfed

by the rumours of small exterminations; if not

for the empty cartridge shells of lipstick

you wasted on your suicide,

shooting at a face in the mirror

that dodged better than you aimed,

how could you now decipher

the cuneiform of razorblades

scored like a tragic journal

in the wet clay

of the junkie beauty queen’s thighs; how

could you ever lament

the lucky charms that have fallen

from the stigmata of her bracelets?

PATRICK WHITE