BLUE FIRE

Blue fire in your eyes, for years

I’ve watched you smiling everywhere

against the odds

of the secret you carry within you,

the pain you carry within you

like a broken mirror

waiting for the moon to rise

as if you were a thousand lakes, each

waiting for the pearl

that would answer their darkness from within.

I was always afraid of your edges,

the way you pretended

to mistake my face for a mask,

as if I was always up to something,

as if you could hear the whisper

of the assassin behind the door

before anyone else could,

as if your pain had taught you

to be quick and clever,

to double-back like a choir of tigers,

the ghost of a supple cougar,

and ambush the hurt

you were certain would follow

any overture of flowers,

the waterlilies rigged to go off

like dismembering mines,

and the globes of the cherries

that hung like streetlights and chandeliers,

like tears long held back,

covert bruises, and kisses long denied,

small, black, radioactive planets

charred by the wary shadows of Eve.

And I never thought

you could see more in me

than a passing newspaper

hurled at your door

like another bone of the world,

another slug-line, another playbill

sporting the plague-mark

of another macabre extinction.

And you almost convinced me I was,

you were so curt in your convictions,

so ready to diffract the light of the stars,

to bend their shining

into their emission and absorption spectra,

to show under the lens of your polished glass sky

the subtle skeletons of death

that proved their wings were ladders.

It would be obvious

to compare you to a field of burning wheat,

to point to the fish

that rudder like eclipses through your blood

from a safe bridge above your flowing;

and you were right

when you said it would take a long time

before I could write a poem about you:

it’s taken eleven years

of being suddenly startled by your beauty

as you showed up randomly

in the wrack and ruin of here and there

like a wild sunflower

that strangely survived its own innocence

in the ashes of a sacred grove.

I have never not been

shocked to see you

like a window coming around the corner,

like a loaf of gold in a hungry nation,

a star cluster out of the reach

of my autumnal fingertips,

a sky too far for touching,

and the light of the life

that animated your beauty

something clear and vital and lyrical

that exceeded even you,

something that shone out of you

as if the lantern couldn’t see

the shadows that danced in its fire,

what measure of darkness

was stunned by its poppy.

I know beauty well enough

to fear the black fire of its unattainability,

the terrible preludes of possession

that arrive like temporary reprieves

and suicidal postcards,

the brutal bedside confessions

that wire the heart to an electric throne

that dims the lightbulbs with a shudder of night.

And I have preferred my palace of ashes

to the diamond hovels

of impoverished beginnings,

remembering how my scars

turned into an untranslatable alphabet,

every letter the cartouche or coffin

of forgotten royalty

embalmed in the dirty rags of time,

the tars and feathers of farcical birds

trying to hatch pyramids

that crystallized like salt in a desert

after the lifting of veils and rivers and tears.

I have stood like a ghost at the gate

of a house I was born in

and admired the beauty of roses

that went on blooming long after

I had planted them and disappeared

to let them flourish in the rain and the sun.

And I have felt the thorn of moonlight

press into my flesh like a slow fang

charged with a fatal elixir,

cold infernoes of ferocious transformations

and endured my own afterlife

like a road and a wounded wheel

threshold after threshold of black ice

as my heart tried to crawl back to the tide

like an iron crab.

I have cultivated exotic solitudes

that couldn’t say my name

without laughing,

and heard the wind lament

my most cherished intensities.

I am no stranger to death

or the eerie emptiness

of laying myself down on the table

like the only joker in a full house

to ever make a guest appearance.

But I am too stubborn for regrets

or I haven’t been convinced

of their necessity yet,

and why should I belittle

so much joy and excruciation

as the mistakes a river made in its running

as if it could correct its way back to the sea?

Think of it.

All these stars

and not one in the wrong place.

But I grew sick of the useless pain

and the misery and the grief,

the cosmic effort to open a simple seed,

boundary stones hurled at the heart

and the hard bread of broken smiles

and the ghost food of the ego-feasts

that mistake mystic vision for a lighthouse

and run themselves up on the rocks

to be cherished among the wreckage

like emotional salvage;

and I had nothing more to give,

I had nothing more to say or celebrate,

my shadow confessed to an eclipse

it was a loser,

my blood bleached itself white

and packed itself like a fire hose

under a switch and a small glass window that read

in case of emergency, surrender,

and I learned to apologize

for all the wars I’d won,

and finance monuments to my defeat,

depict myself as less than what

I never had a chance to know I was

just to keep the rose

from putting its eyes out

on its own thorns.

And I did a good job of it;

I learned to love unconditionally,

I learned to love without love,

I learned to love without me.

I forgave and understood everything;

I shuddered in pain and understood,

saw how we all die eventually,

how the candles of beauty and truth

in this terminal vastness

are so rare and precious,

even unjustly they should be cherished,

not allowed to go out in the heart

even if death and betrayal took all,

even if every breath of a desolate lover

turned into a knife on the wind, an arrow of spite,

not to let the rage to be done forever with caring,

with hurting, with radioactive solitudes

that tainted the heartwells with vicious reason,

forsake the slightest victory of tenderness,

forgo the least memory

of human intimacy in such an implacable night.

But the darkness forgives no one

and the light is a vicious testament

to how many wounded there are in the world,

how many injured and broken,

torn down like doorways

at the end of a hall no one walks down anymore,

destroyed from within by a dream

that could barely say its name

to anyone who asked why it wept.

So many injured, hurt, condemned

by the silence of forgotten smiles

that have dispersed their seed

in the dusk of a vernal ephemerality

that no more acknowledged their passage

than a broom the destiny of dust.

And there’s a part of me that cares yet,

however many lashes of the mind

assault the heart like an island

with the salt of reason

and a tide of serpents, even now

my eyes crack in the heat

of so much suffering,

so much transformative fire,

the butterfly in the furnace of the dragon’s mouth.

But I had to grow tougher than space to survive,

to teach fire how to walk

on the dead seas of a vast moonscape

pocked with the astronomical impacts

of a childhood I lost like a leaky atmosphere,

I had to convince the world

I was at least as real and irrelevant as it,

that I could breathe in the randomness

the cold drafts of a faceless abyss.

I was a fraud out to prove his own sincerity,

and there are saints that would wince,

ferocious hermits in glass deserts,

hallucinatory purities of nothingness

that would tremble to undergo

the talons of the furies that afflicted me

like barbed stars on a chain

that refused to indulge itself with any key,

any liberation that smacked of peace.

And this is not a confession,

not an accusation or retrospective opprobrium;

nor does the withered branch

cling to the wraith of a blossom

any longer than it takes the frost of an early winter

to melt like an orchard.

I applaud the intensity of my mistakes,

the depths of my madness,

the unsustainable enlightenment of my rage;

how every victory was shadowed

by my own insistent mortality,

the doggish constancy of my own fallibility.

And there were perversities within me,

the dark haloes of my occlusive sanctity

that wanted to lead the night like a willing virgin

through the intimate stations

of the far fields beyond the blazing billboards

that urged a delusional frenzy

to seed her like a blind fish

in the gutted depths of an eyeless normalcy.

I wanted to dare my own horror into submission,

risk without counting

the sugar-coating on the placebo

of my inherited humanity

in the impersonality of the void

that never paid any heed

to the furious courage of my expansive folly.

What nonsense it all seems like now;

the renewable virginity of a junkie

that bled like a candle to shoot the moon

under the tongue of a pointless habit.

Who did I think I was, fool

that I was to believe

all these brutal masks of frost

were only waiting for the sun,

that the collective ashes of the ancient urn-burial

that calls itself society

would rise to the blue phoenix

that woke up drunk in the recovery room

eating its own heart

just to prove it didn’t need one

to remain true to its own transgressions?

In a fever of creation

I enhanced the quality

of human idiocy. An oracle, I revealed

the shallow roots of the sacred fires

and lit my cigarette and warmed my hands

over the eternal flames

that snapped shut

like the eyelids of windproof zippoes.

Like wardens the sun and moon

walked the ramparts above, high-powered rifles,

the heretical compasses of misdirection,

and I saw how even the stars,

the cool rush of the established constellations

were nothing more than the subtle tracks

of a long-term addiction

that could afford its own vice,

random derangement in the name of nothing;

the whole of creation

nothing but a black rock

cooked in a spoon,

the severed filament

of a wingless embryo of night

enthroned in the tomb of a shattered lightbulb.

Ecstasy became the ghoul of a horrid withdrawal

steeled to my isolation

and I reveled in the severities of my spirit,

the hospital furnace of a raging heart

that disposed of my gangrenous body parts,

the febrile infection of the disgusting dream

that cooed like a madame

in the brothel of a ruined magnolia

where I finally lay down with my spirit,

enshrined in the blood and mud and lust

of an incubator in hell

where I was delivered prematurely to the night,

the immaculate conception

of an inspired whore

that didn’t try to reform

the fire in the mirror that burned like a face.

Now no one can recognize me,

and no one can account

for the injudicious happiness

of a condemned soul

that can scatter its ashes

like stars across the sky

for the wind to dance,

a road of ghosts to nowhere.

And the days and the nights

rain and shine, rise and fall,

and blood, and time,

and the curse and the blessing of their carrying forth

into a carrying forth

like the eye of a waterclock,

occur as they occur

without blame or salvation

in a freedom that doesn’t know I’m here

to witness the improbability of their existence,

the improbability of you and I

sitting down on the concrete stair

of the bookstore where you work,

like two thorns removed from our own hearts,

free of the shadowless viper and the black rose

that taught us to bite and swallow

and I swear,

the spontaneous irony of your laughter

was sweeter than water lapping

the startled shores

of two islands on the moon,

both of us joyously distinguished

in a confusion of doves and crows

by what we had denied.

PATRICK WHITE