COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

COSMOLOGIST WITH TWEEZERS

Palace after palace of blood I feed my idiot heart

to the fish and the cannibal stars

from a barge of funeral swans sullen as books.

I told myself not to look for this death when I dropped it

the day I was born, to leave it lie in the violent grass,

a key to a door that doesn’t exist yet,

an insect crushed between the pages of the sky

that reads like the failing eyes of an ancient astronomer

compiling an expanded preface

to an encyclopedic suicide note. O I can say anything

when the mirror is having an affair

with the moon’s oceanic face.

I can put lipstick on the corpse of a rose

and die for the whole cemetery like a callous messiah

sick of being resurrected at the take-out window.

My love forsaken, a beggar reaching into a serpent’s nest

for an egg that longs to be turned

like the handle to a door

that might be a way out, I consult

the crazy wisdom of the crows,

and a sage of the black night

to find my way back to a grave

that has not forgotten the taste of the dream

that was blood and wine and light.

This is a shabby afterlife, an unworthy war of mistakes,

where the orchids are raped on their wedding nights

and a peace treaty is chalk on the sidewalk

around a murdered mailman.

It would be a lie to say I wasn’t wounded,

it would be a falsehood to say I was.

This pain is the blundering apprentice of a mystic knife.

This agony is stupid and futile and vain, this sorrow

a brothel of homesick nuns.

I give my tears the address

of a man I know in Boston, a bibliophile

who might take them in as a first edition

of a bride who was published posthumously.

I give my heart like a fire-alarm to two women

waiting by the bus.

My skull begs for campaign funds

to run as an alternative planet

to the one I’m walking on,

but the terrorist behind the door

with his redressals and reforms, his ancient future

strapped to his waist like a broken promise

has already ruined my vote

by killing off the candidate.

I confess to a puppet government

with the decrescent sickle of the moon at my jugular vein

that I have always been, even in eclipse,

an avid fan of significant absurdities.

They accuse me of consorting with swans

and I give up smoking

in front of a firing squad.

The sun comes up like an afterthought, an iron rose

or a bullet hole through the troubled forehead of dawn.

Is there no end to the wonders of God?

cries a highschool prophet on a diving board

while his seeing-eye dog runs off

with a shoeful of massacred dice.

And this is the meaning of life,

and this is the meaning of life,

chants the scorned heart

pulling stitches out of a scar,

a cosmologist with tweezers

who bleeds to death

every time he opens his mouth to heal.

PATRICK WHITE