AND IT SHALL NO MORE BE GIVEN TO ME

AND IT SHALL NO MORE BE GIVEN TO ME

And it shall no more be given to me

than it is to another to understand you if I could

or you, for that matter, shining above the dark wood

as if it didn’t matter where your light fell or upon whom.

And who could not say your aloofness was not a right?

But there’s nothing more ridiculous than a spurned heart.

I was a flower for a moment, now I’m a red toadstool

spinning around as I did as a kid with nothing to do

but endure a long, hot afternoon on my own

in a nineteen fifties restaurant with a broken jukebox

and where there was a prayer rug rumoured to fly

now there’s just blind linoleum and a repetitive lie

I repeat like a mantra to keep the obvious away.

There is within me, who knows where it came from,

a laboratory of largess that’s always working overtime

to cure what ails love in myself and others.

As if we were the devoted apostates of an estranged emotion

that didn’t quite know what to do with our devotion.

You can try to drink an ocean in a single gulp

to keep your mirage from evaporating in the desert,

but you’ll only end up just as thirsty and hallucinatory

as you were before, as the goats try to avoid the scorpions.

Or you can pretend you don’t care, and wear

sandpaper for skin, and be as callous to your heart

as you are a can you’re kicking down the road

so you don’t get hurt trying to heal again.

Each votive candle of a woman who lit up for you,

an exotic reference to a different fragrance of pain

so they’re always the orchid in the shadows of cool moonlight

and you’re always a bouquet of dandelions in a funeral home.

Of late, I’ve been trying to chip the coral away

from a lot of sunken masts I used to tie myself to

just to listen deliriously to the sirens on the rocks.

I revelled in the mystery of their wounded music

but my lifeboat always seemed to splinter

like a Spanish guitar on the head of my gravestone.

Flashbacks of your lives and loves, those soft razors

can be harder sometimes than a school of hard knocks.

Cynic, or sucker alike, neither bask in diamonds

and whether you take it like a man or a star-nosed mole

everybody bleeds like a rose on a ladder of thorns.

Love is the colour of life, tender, garish, or obscene,

not some variant of green camouflage, or logo red,

not some bituminous conversion to Mars black,

not like any rainbow you’ve ever seen, not

an albino chameleon, but more vivid than the eyes

are able to see, like the bee paths on certain wildflowers.

And though I might be underwhelmed by how

drab and vapid it seems these days, I remember gold,

I remember silver, I remember the poppies imploding

like red giants and scarlet nebula in the starfields

and I still adorn love like Corona Borealis with Celtic gems.

And though my dragons are masters of myriad stratagems

I never try to impress a woman by forging swords like words

in the dynastic fires of my mouth but diversify

my volcanic energies into making habitable islands in a dream

and chandeliers of fireflies scattered all over the starmap.

I don’t turn eyes into windows in a blast furnace

or blow a lot of glass bubbles into a multiverse

of Japanese floats holding up their fishing nets

like the M-theory of the latest myth of origin.

And where it ends, is exactly where it begins

over and over and over again endlessly like the wind

raising waves on a mirror where many have drowned

in the bliss of listening to their own awareness

as if they cast a spell upon themselves they couldn’t break.

PATRICK WHITE