LOVE COMES IN UNASKED LIKE A FLASHFOOD
Love comes in unasked
like a flashflood to a dry creekbed and suddenly there are toads that
have slept for seven years, raising their randy voices to the stars
like bass clefs of the earthbound who’ve just discovered water on
the moon. Crazy dream with first violins that bloom like wild
columbine. Magnetic tangerine with sunspots. Encyclopedia of
prophetic birthmarks. Every blink of the eye yarrow sticks thrown
down to read the Book of Changes. Reluctant fireflies appear after
the sword dance of the lightning to gentle its fear of the dark with
nightlights in the long shadow-filled halls of the heart. You taste
the wine. It gets drunk on you. Someone lays cool herbs that shine
from the inside out like albino fish in the sunless depths of a long
eclipse, and you wake up out of your coma of normalcy, and it’s not
the same planet that left you to die by the side of the road. There
are wiverns singing in the locust trees and thorns that had lodged in
your heart like the last crescents of the moon it was easier to leave
in than it was to pull out, are dipping themselves in the inkwell of
a rose like arrows dipped in the antidotes of loveletters with no
known cure. Suddenly you’re a junkie and someone mails you the key
to the medicine-chest of the Amazon like love potion number nine. And
you come to love the sword like the wound between you and your
beloved because when you lie down with the dead and you’ve broken
your blade, your vow, your taboo, like a threshold that is more
obeyed in the crossing of it than standing in the doorway, because
love is inspiration and inspiration abhors obedience the way nature
despises a vacuum, when you get up, everyone wakes up with you with
the taste of a dream in their mouth they didn’t think to have this
side of the grave again. Golden apples from the orchards of the
western Hesperides. Candles in vulnerable corners, braver than stars,
tilting at black holes in the center of galactic windmills.
Waterclocks going over the falls in intimate kayaks like splinters
washed out of your eyes in the tears you shed by yourself in the back
yard in front of the grape hyacinth under the black walnut that has
kept the abandoned garden hanging on under its wing for years. And
you confess quietly under your breath, because you are you and
everyone, how hard it is to believe something true and terrifying as
love for the moment, when your longing takes its tail in its mouth,
and the circle remains unbroken for eternity become palpable as flesh
and blood, and dares you to risk being happy, or deepen your death
with cowardice and regret you didn’t jump toward paradise in a
windfall of singing apples at sunset.
Carding the snow out of
your hair as if you were dying it over a sink in front of a mirror,
you apologize for coming over this late, but you just couldn’t wait
to confide in somebody, you were in love with a younger man and it
made you feel like a queen cobra that’s having an affair with a
flute player that makes all the right moves and isn’t afraid to
kiss Medusa on the lips. And for the first time in a long time it’s
easier to hold back your toxins than it is your tears. To wear that
old boa of swans’ feathers you’ve kept in the closet since you
gave up stripping in vaudeville and started wearing scales with low
heels to maintain your sense of balance in an afterlife beyond
theatre. And you’re afraid to make a fool of yourself like a
graverobber breaking in to a cradle to steal the golden death mask
from the face of the living. And you say you’ve aged. You’re not
a raving beauty anymore. There’s more ore than diamonds in the
mine. What do I think of the colour of your lipstick? Too timid? Or
does it make you look like an emergency exit in a conflagration of
poppies that are trying too hard to keep the fire alive? You can
remember when your flesh was as tight as a plum, but now you say it
sags like a used condom, a prune, the flag of a dead daylily at
halfmast, someone taking down the sunset at the end of summer like a
sail that’s finally reached port like an empty lifeboat that had to
throw everything in loved overboard along the way to nowhere. And I
notice you’re smiling a little wider and more often than you used
to like the chrome bumper of a curvy fifties cadillac gleaming in a
showcase window. And it’s disarming and cute and strangely charming
to see the old snakepit you used to say you were, growing girlish
about your hairdo, to see Medusa rooting flowers in her locks, trying
to look wilder than the zoo you’ve kept yourself in for the last
fifteen years. And you ask me, and I can see the tenderness and
vulnerability of the question in your eyes and the anticipated answer
you fear like a truth that bruises and bullies your lies. Am I
beautiful? And I say, lowering my voice to the whisper of a sacred
syllable that makes all the difference between life and death. Yes.
You are beautiful. And if it’s the end of summer for you, though no
season is younger or older than another, and each of us have to taste
death at least once a day to know what hour it is, I say not all the
flowers bloom at once, and those that bloom last are more beautiful
in our eyes because they don’t hold back. They give it all they
have to give. They don’t throw themselves like morning doves and
loveletters into the fires of autumn as if the moon rising among the
delirious willows had turned its head away from their beauty, its ear
from their lyrics, like the urn of a skull full of ashes. Lady, put
your make up on like Babylon, deadly nightshade or the lapis lazuli
of the guardian bulls of the sacred gate into the daughters of night
dancing like tendrils at an occult initiation into the sorcery of
veils. Take that hourglass off your back, and cast your nets wide as
the dreamcatchers and constellations of a starmap like the blueprint
of a black Taj Mahal deeper than night in the esoteric teachings of
the undeniably sensual. Both sides of the moon. You say they’re
wrinkles, hieroglyphs in a dry irrigation ditch that used to be the
Nile, but I see the deltas of a myriad rivers flowing into the mystic
night seas of your deliriously enlightened eyes. And that cold stone
of a moon you rolled over your tomb in a borrowed grave, now a giddy
pin ball bouncing off the stars, as bells and whistles go off in a
riot of lights, and you’re laying your soul out like dresses across
the bed, not knowing which of them to wear. Wear the one that makes
you feel like a snake shedding your skin as if the moon were renewing
her virginity in the grave of her lover when the candles close their
petals for the night. Remember that pole dancer that could once wrap
her body around the winged axis of the earth like a snake that could
heal or hurt? Have you made caged birds of all that passion and
power? Are you still the sibyl of that coven of doves that used to
rise up to the stars like ashes out that fire you danced around naked
in the wilderness? Have you stepped down like the goddess of an
abandoned temple, afraid of letting love lay its tribute on your
stairs? And no, your ass doesn’t look like the rump of a galleon in
the Spanish Armada. You’re still a sloop of a woman. You’re still
an English fire boat with the figure of a mermaid that can lure an
invasion fleet up on to the rocks anytime she wants. And if you’re
afraid to be wicked in the name of delight, what are you evil in the
name of, if it isn’t love?
PATRICK WHITE
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