THE PAINTING FINISHED

THE PAINTING FINISHED

for Sally

The painting finished, I sit at my desk

and go on painting windows and computer screens.

My body is grateful and my heart a submarine.

I don’t know if I expressed what I meant to mean

but there it is and that’s an end of it for the night.

Time now to rely on my resident metaphors.

Stop looking at things that flower in space like stars

and coercing the light into compliance.

Sit in my apartment and watch the weave of the rain

unravelling the loom of the window in tears.

Feel like a seance trying to talk to an exorcism

when I address myself in my solitude

at cruising altitude over the sirens and car horns,

the wailing of long distance freight trains

like graffiti art shows on the road all the way

from North Carolina, the land of talented spray bombs,

and the gleeful shrieking of a gaggle of girls

as shrill as apostate nuns of narcissi in the rain

that have just broken their vow of silence

and are making up for lost time impishly.

Relatively serene, the composure of chaos,

I let the starmud settle in the puddle

until my mind becomes as clear as

a refracting telescope without chromatic aberration.

And then you show up in a blur of stars

like the Andromeda galaxy,

a smudge of shining, a gust of wavelengths

and what had been unfocused in me,

like the cosmic background hiss

when I’m sitting here like this,

the afterbirth of a man wondering

where the rest of me is, and suddenly

I’m whole and focused again on an old wound

I had thought was scarred over forever

some time ago by the moon

that keeps re-opening every spring like a rose

as I realize that love isn’t done with me yet.

And I say to myself, here comes the mystery again,

the fire, the desire, the moon with its black pearl

and its white, its eclipse and its harvest,

and the one blue one that’s too shy to come into the light,

but everyone sings and dances under just the same,

the harvest in and the labour done.

With love. That valley of a word that can wound mountains

when they get lost in it, as their lifestreams bleed out

like gold from the undiscovered ore of their darkness,

and they become snowmen riding their own melting like glaciers.

Love when it isn’t just a sound beavers make

when they slap their tails on the water like a warning

there are wolves around. And everyone takes a nose-dive

and heads for the lodge like Montezuma’s capitol in the middle of a lake.

Love. That ghost of an abstraction that holds everyone in its wake

like a symphony of seagulls at the stern of a moonboat

navigating waterways through the mountains of the moon

like a muse or a voice coach, or a lapwing with a broken rudder.

Imagine that. A word so mute it doesn’t have any senses of its own,

and yet it can enflame even an old growth forest with desire.

And I’ve had banshees wailing, and ravens saying nevermore

at my window before, and felt every beat of my heart

like the dull thud of small birds who mistook

the mirage of the sky in the window for the real thing

and thought even in the body of a swallow, what immensites

are contained within such a tiny locket of a heart

barely the size of a raspberry, if that, and yet

this small thing could ride out a hurricane if it had to,

and not even a Boeing 767 can do that.

And I buried it in my heart with reverence

like an obsidian Clovis-point arrowhead.

Love is the third wing on a bird, the third edge on a sword

of Damascene steel forged and folded like the first crescent

of a metal from the ore of love-struck moonrocks

to kill you deeper into the rapture of life

like a loveletter you weren’t expecting.

Engendered from two extremes, love’s the intensity

in the middle, the rebel of a third eye between

and slightly above the other two, like a star

you’re trying to point out to the child within you.

And then someone comes along out of the anthracite blue

of a spring night like a comet

out of the black halo around the sun,

you can identify with as a radiant omen of things to come.

And you can’t believe it, it’s inconceivable

given the badlands you’ve just cowboyed your way through

like a dinosaur on its own waiting for the sign of a meteor

heading toward its extinction like a prophetic skull.

And then comes love with its starmaps

like this last-minute change of flightplan

and you’re a warm-blooded mammal again

and all your scales turn into the feathers of songbirds

waiting for the return of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent,

in which is conjoined the highest and the lowest

in a godhead of opposites that can’t be explained

any more than desire can explain

why it’s a soggy matchbook in the rain one moment

and the next it breaks into flame like a poppy with big dreams.

And just look at me now, sitting here like a Zen monk

in the pagoda of a pine-cone germinating

a whole new wilderness to explore

out of the seed thoughts under my half closed eyelids

sprouting in fire and putting down roots in the rain at the same time.

Love’s doing it to me again, and the mirrors

are beginning to thaw like Mayan observatories

as they open their eyelids at the first sign of a star

to make contact with them like astronomers who’ve

been buried in the mines of their prophecies

and cosmological calendrical theories for lightyears now.

And suddenly the urge to jump zodiacs like orbitals

comes upon me like a homeless photon of insight

on the threshold of a whole new house of life

it’s attracted to like a lost starless stranger

to a porchlight in the distance

in the shadows of the mountains of the moon

And when I’m in love I smile like the white

but in my heart I’m the black Taj Mahal reflected

in pool of liquid moonlight. Everything is

mystical and intense, full of wonderment

in the smallest details, in the cosmic uniqueness

of every event, however seemingly insignificant

and raises the trivial out of the dirt

into the stardust of the universally sublime,

and even the antheap of day to day life

gets turned into a shrine I lay poems on the stairs of

in the name of love, where yesterday I lay like an orphan

on the steps of a halfway house to heaven and back.

Love. That can turn your head and your vision of life

from a computer screen into an Arizona moonrise

of a woman in the Sonora desert, a siren in the sands

of an hourglass full of stars that pay no attention to time,

and me an old sailor on a ghostship who should know better

drunk on the delirium of the song she’s singing to me

like a seance to summon me back to the living

and my whole life flashing before my eyes as they drown

in the wellsprings of hers, like a poet in the tears of a muse.

Love and the lack thereof taught me a long time ago

there are dark jewels in the ashes, and secret sorrows

in the crowns of life, and mystic terrors in every piece

of the broken mirrors and exalted chandeliers of love

that reflect the radiance of the Beloved

after a storm has passed over the distant hills

in every drop of rain that hangs

like the sun and the moon and the Pleiades from her earlobes,

as if they were the personal Faberge jewellers of her light

or as Elizabeth the First said ascending the throne

at the beginning of her reign, thanking her god,

this is your doing and it is marvellous in our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE