MYSTIC REGENCY

Blue hole in a swarm of afflicting emotion,

I cannibalize my own event horizons,

to turn off the glare of the lifelight

that boils my brain in delusional bleaches

that present themselves as the truth.

I have known nothing

but the fragility of a tolerable hell since I was born

so I am not fooled into believing

anyone stands on more than quicksand.

And yes, there are women and stars and flowers,

orchids in the shadow of an outhouse,

eclipses that draw the veils

off faces and hearts like shadows and eras,

gold in the bones of extraordinary people

who move like swans across the mind

easy in the grace and dignity of their excellence,

and sometimes, for brief islands of serenity

I am one of those, but only briefly

and only long enough for me to disallow myself

the luxury of thinking I’ve arrived anywhere.

If fireflies were once

the souls of unbaptized children, still-borns and embryos

flirting with the night for salvation, now

they’re the unbound abacus of joy

that has lost count of the days and nights

I’ve stood by myself before a winter window

and looked out into the darkness

and wondered if I am

what I seem to myself

or some other man

I’ve been looking for all these years

better than I am, more courageous,

able to absorb the bitter light

and sweeten it like wine. I can endure

the miseries and sorrows, I can act

when there is call to act, and I can see

into the dark corners

where the spiders age their poisons without malice,

and I can be a tree in the morning

just before moonset, and hear in every bird

the lonely bell of blood that rings like time

advancing the night with departure;

and feel the incredible onceness of being alive,

the igneous beauty of the black virgin

buried in the wound of my own mortality,

and the terrible longing that arises and wants her forever

knowing she’s unattainable and yet prefers this folly

over every other delirium of desire,

certain only of my own demise in the attempt

and the fanatical universe that decrees it

as if it were heresy to try,

but never, never in those depths

have I ever understood so much

as a hair on her head, not even

an eyelash of insight to show for all my agony, not

a word from her lips

for all that I have sung and seen of her,

that wasn’t a falling rose-petal, a kiss upon the skull

that gapes at her feet

like the cold stone

of a full October moon rising over

the lean fields, the empty silos

of my devoted desolation like a crown.

PATRICK WHITE