TOO FAR FROM SORROW AND TEARS

TOO FAR FROM SORROW AND TEARS

Too far from sorrow and tears, and the terrors,

old blood on the blade of the moon, and the faces I wore

too long in the sun, my eyes peeling like paint,

and even the shadows of the bridal cherry the dull afterword

of a book that’s done its laundry, and all the crimes

that outran their statues and imitations, fossil fingerprints

that laid down their own tracks against the law

with ladders and portable crosswalks, buried

in unsanctified ground with question-marks for gravestones,

decapitated hangers, my heart rudders in the shadows

of the mindstream just enough to counter the flow

without moving, a fish in the tiger-stripes

of the river-reeds just below the drunks on the fieldstone bridge.

Maybe the gravestones will turn into hooks

and a corpse will catch me napping in the shadows,

take possession of my soul and show me where I belong

on an outdated starmap or some water sylph

come floating downriver with a lily in her teeth

and touch up my portrait with a glaze of emerald eyes.

And it’s okay to be this nullity for the moment,

I tell myself, guilty because there’s nothing leaflike

about being a deflated life raft in the spring, because

I am not tormented by money or women or poetry

or crazed by the ions of a gathering storm

and I couldn’t care less if the ashtrays are published or not.

If there’s a theme to the morning I should have sought,

some emptiness or meaning lost in the grass

like an engagement ring in search of a virgin whore,

or a metaphysical wallet that can prove that it exists

I have not found it. All I know is

the first ant of insight just crawled under the door

like a comma with feelers, or a mad composer with two batons,

a tiny eighth note, blacker than anthracite,

looking for inspiration in the eye of a dead guitar,

and it’s beginning to rain, one blue tear after another,

the cachet of a soft violet lament that smells of lilacs,

a moist breathing on the nape of the neck, the kiss of a ghost

that feels like cool cherries, a shudder of light

down the spine of a lightning rod on red alert.

And the wind begins to play the sheet music of the trees on sight,

and crystal chandeliers of elegant water

fall from the lobes of the clouds

and shatter into fangs of glass

like the brittle constellations of last night

that no one was ever born under,

and off in the distance, from a fury of torn shrouds,

a rolling kettle-drum of sesquipedalian thunder

as another recusant kneels before the guillotine

of a raving maniac, unrepentant of his place

in the thirteenth house of an underground zodiac,

and I remember all the things I’ve ever died for.

PATRICK WHITE