O BABY

O BABY

O baby, you’re an upper middle-aged man’s Disneyland sexually

and I appreciate the cleavage

and the tight jeans that look like

they were sculpted by Praxiteles

putting flesh back on a wishbone

to break it with his pinky finger

and his eyes shut

to ask for dark rapturous relations with the sea

when you put it up to your ear

like the vulva of a fortune-cookie to listen

to the mermaids whispering specifically to you.

Older, you grow more circumspect

like the rings in the heartwood

of a second growth forest

and more than fire

you begin to fear the women

who smile like chainsaws with lipstick on.

Especially when they’re as deliberately

dependent as you are

like a third world country

opening an embassy in a shopping mall.

The wolf hasn’t forgotten how to howl at the moon

but it’s been shot at enough times

by the sheep-herders in the valleys

to know enough to stay above the timberline

with its tail between its legs

like a broken pine bough

and its ears pricked like needles

for the posses of little Bo Peep

with automatic rifles and wolfhound helicopters

that make a sport of running it to ground

until its heart explodes.

Older and more autumnally wary

of your appetites growing more ferocious

as you sense the cold coming on,

like smoke from a distant fire

you begin to think

people fuss too much over the spring

and give more weight to the blossom

than they do the fruit,

more substance to the desire for union

than the solid yokes

that can grow from fragile wishbones

like two sides of the river

paper-clipped like a bridge

across a wound that never stops flowing.

Heinrich Heine said that young women

were oceans of commotion

when he’d drowned enough to know

the moon isn’t as romantic in Atlantis

as it is to the pearl divers

who hold their breath on shore

to see who survived the shipwreck

of the lunar landing module

that settled in the dead seabed

of Mare Tranquillitatis,

trying hard not to red flag its footprints

as if they could still mean anything anymore

to anyone into space exploration

and making first contact with the Selenites.

And yet you can still have sensible shoes on

and walk dangerous roads

you hoped a change of footware

would help you avoid

when your wanderlust

set out before you barefoot

on an easy starwalk along the Via Galactica

not caring whether

it’s a short cut through hell or not

or the long way home

through some kind of hot paradise

making apple sauce of the windfalls of Eden

because when it comes down to lust or love

virtue and vice are even Steven.

PATRICK WHITE