HOW RARE THAT ANYONE

How rare that anyone prefers the real,

fire that can drown, water that burns;

the whole of the night sky

form-fitted to your face like a skin

of translucent cellophane

that takes your breath away.

My heart marches like a little drum in a vast darkness

toward a war

it is important not to win.

The stars are strewn like white sweet clover

along the roads of brave men in masks,

but the true holy wars are faceless

and the martyrs always die alone

like leaves without names,

like a species that went extinct

before it was discovered

to be the only known antidote

to terminal literalism.

Follow your thoughts far enough into delusion

and they’ll fray like ropes,

like the deltas of ancient rivers,

like the burning bushes of evolution

under the mammary bell-curves

of thermophilic bacteria,

the voice of God, denuded of its mystery,

the magmatic venting

of a deep sea fumarole.

The fools enthrone themselves like rivers

in a palace of salt in a desert

that withers like lightning in the root,

but the wise know they play with their lives

long into the late afternoon

like toys that don’t belong to them

and will be taken back

by the lengthening hands of the shadows

that approach us like slow dreams.

And what’s the body if not

a bag-pipe full of water

leaking out of itself like the highland lament

of a widow in the rain?

Flesh rises and falls

like the curtain on a bad play

as one by one time ushers

friends, lovers, family out of the audience

until not even the echoes are listening.

Most die like the understudies of stars

that never made an appearance;

darkness falling like the eyelid of a stage

booked for a dress rehearsal of ghosts.

We’re the flame of a little flower

marqueed for the blink of a lightbulb

in the nightclubs of the stars

that go out like fireflies in our tears.

And the mystics wait like massive coronaries

in intensive care

for God to come like a heart donor

only to find she was the wrong blood type,

and the scholars study themselves to death like desks,

and the teachers espouse

their ignorance with authority,

and the lovers get drunk on the blood of snakes

to hallucinate roses and wine,

and most of the poets

desert their own shadows like blossoms

somewhere along the vine

to crush their eyes like emeralds

against the anvil of their palettes,

their mouths the skeletal hulls

of overturned lifeboats

that threw their words overboard like passengers

to save themselves,

desperately hoping

a village of magic lanterns

would run down to the shore in a storm

to salvage savage little me.

Everyone licks the empty, lustrous stone,

the simulacrum of love,

for a taste of life,

but who can draw their tongue out like a sword

from the ore of the dragon

that keeps them from the secret

of what they are?

Who can hear what the nightbird isn’t singing?

Little doors, little windows,

gulfstreams of weeping glass,

when will you ever learn

to sail your own eyes

over the edge of the known world,

transcending all your stars

like starmaps configured

by a random throw of the dice

pocked with shallow graves

like the fangs of a blind snake

that swallowed you in utero,

mistaking your cubist cornerstones

for the cosmic egg?

How else can you hope

to turn your scales into feathers,

stop crawling like a ripple of blood on its belly

to die like another ladder of bone

that couldn’t right itself

like the mast of a waking dragon

in this desert of shapeshifting winds

to climb up to the urgent beds of the rain?

And how rare to meet anyone

this deep into the silence

with the spine

to play the harp of their own lightning,

whose life isn’t the voice of a barnyard bird

they put up against their heads like a wishbone

and pull like a trigger.

PATRICK WHITE