AND THERE'S A BITTERNESS IN THE LIGHT

AND THERE’S A BITTERNESS IN THE LIGHT

And there’s a bitterness in the light that fails me this morning

like a new nail bowing to the hand it could not penetrate,

the enforced humility of tempered steel

hissing in my blood like an iron serpent, the old folio

of an undiscovered sorrow

folding the edge of a secret sword day after day

into an implacable edge so exquisitely refined and lethal

even the slightest eyelid of the cherry tree is cleft

and even space is bleeding, the sky sheered

on the electric keeness of its honed horizon. Maybe

the only mercy is in a quick kill, the jugular slashed

and the startled elixirs of life released like poppies and roses

to find their own way home among the weary refugees,

their lives slumped like corpses and pillars of smoke

across the yokes of their hill-born shoulders,

and maybe there are underground shadows somewhere,

a habit of haggard roots holding out like fire

against the odds of ever recovering my heart

like a feather in an oilslick from the dark offices of its toxic occupiers,

the long stairwells down to its private deflation,

the lachrymose rubber of a punctured tire,

the parachutes of the daylilies wattled like soggy trumpets.

And I want to cry, I’m nudged to tears

by the wet noses of the gathering wolves,

the sympathetic carbons who sense my desolation as their own

in a ruined wilderness of snarling rosaries

cutting to the quick of their prayers like chainsaws;

but no grief rises from her bath, or virginity renewed

that isn’t a figure of tar, salt, wax, glass, vinegar and acid,

her berries boiled in the poison of red army ants,

and a blindfold of nettles across her eyes, and every word

that comes from her mouth, a mass grave

of contagious swans wintering under an ode of lime

to contain the infection, the caustic snowfall of a blithe extinction.

And I want to cry for the unknown beauty of a ravaged queen,

violet monsoons of tropical tears as long as anacondas,

tears from wells that have been boarded up for years

behind deserted farmhouses

left like a last assurance of return

to a nervous levy of family graves; old canning jars

encrusted with flies and bees; I want to cry

for afflictions that have gnawed

at the decaying orbits of the moon for eras of untold longing,

sit down on the ground, my face in the coffin of my hands

and weep the violent cocoon of the grey storm away

that cauterizes my wings with blisters of mutant lightning

that burn like salt in the shadow of a whip

thrashing over old burial grounds,

a severed powerline in an epileptic fit, my tongue

seized and swallowed like the struggling toad in my throat

that kicks like a baby against the walls of its womb.

I need time, I need space, I need money, light and liars

with morning hands and ample breasts, with thighs

that open like gates at the sound of my voice,

and the lips of enraptured cherries running down my chest,

and norms of oblivion to refute my wanderlust;

and I want somebody to take the straightrazor

out of the hands of the psychotic clock that keeps

nicking and and slashing its way around the sun;

I need somebody to convince me my life

is not a corruption of the original text I was bound to live,

that I’m not smouldering with the weeds

in a heap of rotten planks

stripped from the vertebrae of genetically dangerous stairs;

that my life and my love and my work

are not the smashed empties of last night’s ecstasy

fallen from their nests in the morning

disgusted with their inability to fly,

wingless in a sickening syrup of yellow eyes.

PATRICK WHITE