I TOOK MY DEATH MASK OFF FOR YOU

I TOOK MY DEATHMASK OFF FOR YOU

I took my deathmask off for you

to show you the naked absence

behind the past of everything I’ve ever been.

Real, you said, and meant something squalid.

And I autographed your holy book

with green ink the same colour as your eyes

with a fountain pen that didn’t

step into the same poem twice.

Let’s be real, you said, but you meant solid,

so we pushed your single bed

over by a window full of stars

and pulled the blind down on enlightenment,

cataracts in the eye, flowers in the sky,

and made love to the picture-music of a candle,

jealous of my gold-nibbed fountain pen

trying to prove it had a voice of its own

and could bleed as easily I could over nothing.

And I remember how you liked to sing to me

with that old cat-scratched guitar

you kept in the corner like an emergency lifeboat.

And I’d listen like a lighthouse

just to bug the candle

for being so competitive

any gust of stars could blow it away in jest.

And I heard the music of shy spiders

spinning the lyrics of their silken sorrows

on the looms of their guitars like webs.

And you could tell by the way I looked at you,

I wanted you to take off your veils and dreamcatchers,

that serpentine boa of apricot orchards

feathered between your breasts, get naked again

and go swimming with me

like two dolphins on the moon

in your deepest, darkest watersheds

where you weep black pearls

like the broken rosaries of past eclipses

that portended the end of the world

for all those one-eyed lovers as they knew it

who tried to patch the wounded rose

with one of her own petals like a bicycle tire

and blew it big time on the downslope to nowhere.

And if I was autumn

with my whole future behind me

then you were spring

with your past up ahead.

Though we both knew

time was just a rumour

some snakeoil salesman

was trying to spread

like a cure-all for everything.

And there were times when we bumped hearts

like two soft rocks of coal playing with fire

I swear I saw meteroritic nano-diamonds in the sparks

anyone of which could have been the beginning

of a new religion I could have given my soul to

if I wasn’t already the prophetic heretic of one of my own.

And you’d end up burning me at the stake of your guitar

for breathing life back into the dead words

that expire like caged birds

in the chimneys and lockets,

of your spiritual metaphors,

new lamps for old, new wine

for the old wine-skins of the new moon.

I never wanted to see Mary Magdalene

stoned among the asteroids

like a sacred whore defamed

by everyone else’s vices

because she dances unashamedly

naked as a snake in the temple of Isis.

Besides, why make confession like graffiti

written on the concrete underside

of realistic overpasses and burning bridges

as an urgent sign of the times

even in these urban shrines of futility

where we speak in forked tongues when we pray

for things we don’t even know if we want,

in pictographic hieroglyphics

for illiterates with dangerous spraybombs

that shake their tails like rattlesnakes

that don’t want to be tread on when they’re empty.

And for those who’ve mastered

the writing on the wall

as if it were their mother tongue,

the ambiguous eloquence

of these blessings and curses,

this Delphic ambivalence of Pythian oracles

split down the middle of what they meant

like the witching wand of a fire serpent

or a tuning fork looking for the G-spot

on the lunar body of a shapely guitar

trembling like a spider in an hourglass

everytime the world gets turned upside down

like moonset in the morning of a mirage.

Why crack another perfectly good mirror

just to hatch another eclipse

out of a cosmic egg

when it’s just as easy

to teach people to see in the dark.

And, besides, you being the singer you were,

I didn’t think a nightbird needed a voice coach

and I’m nothing, if not a man of my word

though I know it sounds

too sophisticated to the foolish,

and to those who know

way more than I care to, absurd.

But I don’t trust any kind of wisdom

that takes its craziness for granted

and starts putting bars on the windows

to keep itself out of the asylum.

This is this. And this is that too.

And whether I’m looking

deeply into stars or fireflies

from either end of the telescope

at a feast of light, or the crumbs

of a dream in the corners of the eyes

of the last famine of seven lean kind,

alone with myself in the night

beauty is always an ocean of bliss

tinctured with a mild antidote of sadness

so this doesn’t overwhelm that

in a delerium of epiphenomenal madness.

I don’t know if you’d call it spiritual or not

but when it comes to divining the undefinable,

I know that similes share a lot more of themselves

with a world that doesn’t cut itself any slack

than metaphors that insist on exacting

false identities from refugees along the road

with whom they have nothing in common

but exile and the longing

of a candle in the window

who doesn’t know who it’s waiting for

to write someone’s name again in fire

like a fountainpen talking to birds

in a dialect of being that’s older than words.

And the Sufis say you begin to take on

the characteristics of anyone

you’ve been around more than forty days.

And we made it a bit further than that.

You so much like the nightsea

of starless rain in me by the time we parted

and me the unpredictable spiritual weather

in the third eye of your emotional hurricane

looking for landfall with ravens and doves

in an exchange of transcontinental loveletters

with black and white feathers.

PATRICK WHITE