O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O MY MOTHER, O MY FATHER

O my mother, O my father,

I stand at this Y in the road,

the hybrid son of an angel and a demon,

two halves of the same chromosome

splitting like the left side of my brain

as a squad car took, you, my father, to jail,

and you, my mother, my right half,

were rushed in an ambulance,

a bruised and battered rose to emergency

as if you’d just barely survived

a hailstorm of meters intent

on making your species extinct.

And it was hard to tell if flesh of my flesh

blood of my blood meant the same as

flesh upon flesh with a dull thud

upon the untempered anvil of a child’s heart,

or not. So is it any wonder

when you split the atom that day between you

like Charles Manson and Mother Theresa

and our nuclear family turned out to be

despite Leucippus and Democritus,

fissile material in a radioactive meltdown,

wholly divisible into the infinite wavelengths

that weep like shattered mirrors

with splinters of stars in their eyes

for things they wished they’d never seen.

So is it any wonder I’ve been

this photon in exile ever since,

this candle that got knocked off the balcony

like a potted geranium of blood

where Romeo declared his love of Juliet

out into this storm that’s been trying

to blow me out ever since in the pelting rain?

I’ve hung onto to that flame

like the rag of fire I was swaddled in

as my natural birthright ever since

like a withered leaf on a maple tree

in the dead of a bird-killing winter.

Strange, isn’t it, when a circus

comes to your homelessness

to put up tents where surrealistic clowns

laugh at a childhood in distress

as if it were some kind of joke

you weren’t let in on?

And I doubt at this late date

I’ll ever know what to make of it

whenever it stares me straight in the heart

and I’m brutally clear enough

not to let my vision of it be smudged

by either hatred or compassion

or the chromatic aberration

of peripheral ideals drowning in wishing wells

like flies in a toilet bowl

love’s too dainty to rescue

and the saints are too lazy to save.

Is it any wonder then O my mother, O my father

that I have become this silver-tongued

shape-shifting snake with

a graceful way of twisting things

and haut-couture tattoos on my back

I earned in a radioactive snake-pit

of high-maintenance wavelengths?

That my tongue should be as forked

as three-tined lightning in the mouth

of Hermes the Thrice-Blessed

bearing alphabets to expectant mothers

in a crane-bag of occult grammars,

prophetic as a witching wand

looking for water on the moon,

a split hair, the sacred meeting place

where rivers were enjoined

like bloodstreams of native tribes

to sit around the same council fire

and share the same heart.

That it’s a slingshot that can slay Goliath

square in the third eye from anywhere.

Two roads that diverged in a yellow wood

and I took neither one.

The split ends of one strong rope of a language

that was frayed into two

like a Manichean conception of good and evil

or the wishbone of a broken filament,

the death of a nanocosmic chandelier

that sings like tiny birds in the morning

when you shake it close to your ear

like a seashell or a crystal skull

to see if it’s still alive or not?

Blue Flower. Black Dog.

Chicory. A junkyard wolf.

Not two. Not two. Not two.

And I tell myself the brightest lights

like dreams and wine and stars

are all seasoned by the dark.

What else can I do

what else can I say to myself

to heal the wounded myth of origins

I received from you, O my mother,

O my father, but lie down like a bridge

by the edge of a river of stars,

a bridge of scars

with only one bank, one foot,

one overturned lifeboat,

one pillar of quicksand to stand on,

the sound of one hand clapping

like applause when no one’s listening

that I’ve made it this far

like the apostate of the raging heresy

that’s gone on bleeding ever since

however much holy oil I spread

on the head of the crucified dove

nailed by a slingshot when the T of the cross

where my father’s loins hung

like two thieves either side of him

like the unblessed soil

of the ground he walked on

and the people he crushed underfoot

like the cosmic eggs of the skylarks

as if they were nothing but skulls on the moon

one thumb up and one thumb down

like the torches in the hands of the dadaphors

celebrating the Roman New Year,

one thief cursed, and the other

yet to be forgiven. Changed one day

for reasons that are well beyond me

and I intend to keep that way

to the Y of my mother’s delta

that flooded like the Nile

every day of my heretical childhood

with tears, the silt of stars, the dust

of unfinished pyramids

that kept us nourished through

those long lonely nights of famine

we ate bitter bread together

and cracked burnt bones

like koans and fortune-cookies

around the kitchen table

to get at the hot marrow of the matter

without burning our fingers and mouths

as we stared for hours

at the patterns on the worn linoleum

without saying a word

as if we were Neanderthals

who’d just stumbled upon a secret cave

of sacred Cro Magnon finger paintings of us.

Back in those days, back in those nights,

when it all seemed so natural back then

before we lost our innocence to comparison,

to have been littered by a Roman wolf-mother

who had driven my father

like a jackal in a lion’s hide

with the soul of a scavenger

off what remained

of the carcass of her marriage

to feed her young

and keep them from being eaten

by the likes of him or any other man

for that matter, in her eyes,

though I remember how

it used to terrify me

in a cold sweat for sleepless starless hours

of living a waking nightmare in bed

after all the lights had gone out

that one day I would have to betray her

like her son, Judas,

with thirty moons of silver in my hand,

by telling her against my will

that I was becoming one.

I was becoming a man

and there was nothing I could do about it

except drive myself away from the pride

not knowing in my heart of hearts

whether I was a lion in the wilderness

or a scapegoat that had just cleansed

the sins of the tribes

as if they were my own to bear

for the rest of my life

like a debt to you, O my mother,

my beautiful, savage,

pagan godsend of a mother,

with the soul of a moonrise

and the heart of a gypsy artist in partial eclipse

and your crescents withdrawn like claws

and no blood on the thorns of your rose

when we were happy together, remember,

like weeds in a field, like night birds

that were going to risk the winter

in a tree full of September apples

as ripe as Queensland sunsets

you used to tell us about like passions flowers

that were your version of paradise

you wanted to get back to one day

like all those blue luggage trunks

you kept waiting in the basement like arks

if you could when the wind and the stars,

and the forty days, and the forty nights

were blowing from the right quarter

like a wharf that gave suck

to the comings and goings of the lifeboats

she nursed into life at sea

without ever going anywhere herself.

O my mother, precisely because

you’d never ask, and never did,

what can the son of bright vacancy

say to the mother of dark abundance except

I am a debt I’ll never be able to repay you

regardless of what the bloodbanks say,

I am the lion sacrifice on the lunar altar

of the black lamb of the new moon

that opened my third eye

at a coven of gypsy witches

dancing around the fire

like a zodiac of mystic eclipses

far into the wee hours

of my afterlife in this wilderness

of broken vows and stained-glass windows.

And, O my mother, you must know,

before your green eyes

burn like the salt of the earth

in the distant fires of autumn,

before you die, before I do,

before the rose of your life

you turned into a tent and a fire

that sheltered me under

your eyelids, your wings,

goes out when the wind

upends this hourglass world

like a blossom in a mirage of shifting sands.

Before the landlord comes with the sheriff

to serve our final eviction notice,

I sweep your threshold of thorns,

I sweep the wasps like cinders

from the eyes of your fountains

in tears as deep as watersheds.

Because I am so afraid of losing you,

because any word could be our last,

because every word I say to you

seems like an empty lifeboat

drifting across the moon like a cloud

or a lost nightbird in a storm of sorrow,

and all I can think to do to make

what I can’t make up to you,

is to become a small boy again,

a thief of flowers who used to steal

from orchards, telelphone booths,

and the backyard starfields

of the abandoned houses of the zodiac

to have something to bring home to you

like Evening in Paris perfume

on your birthday at the winter solstice

when the days began to get longer and warmer

and every bead on your rosary

of habitable planets in orbit, each,

one of the ninety-nine names of God

and one unknown secret she keeps to herself

so the light won’t get tongue-tied

trying to say it out loud,

tilted toward the sun at apogee

as only a mother can do

letting the light in through

a crack in our bedroom doors

like a moonrise at midnight

to see if we were all right.

All I can do, and it’s only

a metaphoric gesture of the love

I bear for you like a bucket of water

a wishing well once gave birth to in the desert,

is strew your path with fireflies,

with desert stars, with passion flowers,

with humming birds and honey bees

in the wild bougainvillea of Queensland,

and an easel in Eden to paint them with

and Scotch thistles with no thorns for brushes

and caterpillars of oil paint in tubes

that will turn into butterflies at sunrise

when the southern stars and the fireflies

get the light just right,

and any one of which,

their shining sitting to have

their portrait done in the living likeness

of the starmap I’ve will always see

in your green, green eyes

as life-giving as the moon

in the sentient corals

of this vast nightsea

and the way home for all of us

when the prodigal son returns

like a boy riding a dolphin of stars

through the wavelengths

of the lightyears to come

through both hemispheres

of my heart and mind,

through the northern eclipse of you

O my father, and you, O my mother

who shone even at midnight in the southern

and kept us all together even in our absence

like a weld along the equator

that scarred the wound of the beginning over

with herb gardens you gathered

from the mother-tongue of your heart

that have gone on blooming ever since

well beyond any fence

in any universe of inconceivable existence

that could keep a good thief of flowers out.

PATRICK WHITE