IT’S A GESTURE OF THE HEART
It’s a gesture of the heart
that no one can explain
that lays its words down like cool
herbs
gathered on the moon
to silver someone else’s pain.
We lie down in the same wound
like two stones in the same river
that might make it to the other side
without drowning in the stream
and I speak to you of shores you can
reach if you try
and you add yourself like a drop of
water to a shoreless sea, and cry.
And for a moment you are the devastated
solitude
of a runaway in the rain
who can’t abide the stranger she’s
become
as a lipstick butterfly emerges
from the shell-casing chrysalis of your
rage
and you put your lips on like wings.
You’re a princess with a white flag
approaching the ashes of a dragon
who sleeps in his own fires
to wake him up from his dream of water
and negotiate a rescue now
if only I’ll concede to show you how.
You want me to respect you because
you’re dangerous.
You want to ensnare me
in the white voodoo you’re practising
on the dark side of the moon,
you believe in my eyes
and want me to see something
you’ve never shown anyone before
because a window’s as good as a door
to a thief
and you know we have neither in this
homelessness
that shelters our grief like dark
matter in space
or the far side of a face
we refuse to acknowledge is ours.
I can feel your powers
chafing their scales in the snakepit
like straitjackets they’re urgently
trying to slough off
like the old skins of a hand-me-down
moon
that don’t quite fit the new one
right.
One fang, stars; the other, a starless
night,
you know how to open things with a
smile
and strike like a gate
should anyone walk between your
crescents
like a terrorist with carry-on luggage
who doesn’t dream he’s been
detected
as you recoil like a theme to make your
point.
It would be easier to tinker with the
genes
of the ancient ancestors of a life
before sin
than not to want to sleep with you
like a thorn under the skin of your
rose,
than not to want to be your bay for the
night
and tell you everything’s going to be
all right
and mean it and drown the world like a
torch or a dragon
in the intimacy of our most urgent
delusions.
And even if I didn’t put a match to
the candles
they would still ignite
and a black sun would rise at midnight
and let the stars and flowers decide
for themselves
whether they wanted to open in its
light or not,
and for awhile, deep underground,
there’d be laughter in a coffin
as we posted dirty notes on our
headstones
like shocking love poems
that just rolled off the tip of our
tongues
like drops of water charged with stars
and snakefire
humming down our spines
like the deathbed hymns of the hydro
lines
when they break the news to God.
PATRICK WHITE
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