DEMONIC SPIRIT AMONG THE NUMB

DEMONIC SPIRIT AMONG THE NUMB

Demonic spirit among the numb,

you here with me again, fire, familiar,

looking for someone among the dead as I am,

blue cyanotic corpse, skull-harp, anyone

who might remember you from years ago

when glass was an ice-age and you wept

like honey in a blast furnace of killer bees?

Redemption or genius? We both agreed.

No one was waiting for us on the other side

with gates and doors, weathervanes and smiles

for the creatures we always wanted to become.

One real tear would have been enough,

but nothing, nihil, nada, nix,

for all those unforgettable moments in hell,

isolation in an abandoned prison

when I was a lighthouse with a shattered eye

and you had no interest in a cell

that wasn’t interested in keeping anyone in.

Guards gone. Angels with flaming swords.

The place was useless. The air agony.

Space twisted into a gravitational eye

that insisted on seeing what it wanted to,

the light imploding back into itself like a heretic

of flowers and stars, trying to get

a good look at us, homeless mutations

chained to the same chromosome for life.

No shepherd moons for us, casting shadows

like dice on conventional equators

that didn’t have the chaos to be a star

and shine by itself alone, take a blue-eyed risk,

white phosphorus, get out of itself somehow,

all those long languishing radio waves

and take a peek through the eye of its own

three hundred year old methane hurricane,

instead of painting carnelian on your forehead

starmud and ashes from the inexhaustible urns

of all those dragons that let the sun down

by offering a library of matchbooks

for elucidation and companionship

and more ghosts than you can throw beans at

to keep them away like a hailstorm of asteroids

shrieking like atmospheres in a burning morgue.

For years I expected you to turn on me

like the flipside of a teaching sword

with the stamina of a forge, and an edge

so clear it would have been inhuman to blunt it

with the mirages of the lies of mercy that spare no one

crossing this desert like a caravan of waterclocks

and I offered you my throat willingly and said

let’s do it in the name of nothing, or, better yet,

let’s dedicate it like a direction for those

who’ll come after us as lost as they are alone.

I’ll be the exiled vagantes at the diamond crossroads

and you be the milestone in the middle of nowhere

that evaporated upon impact like the last of your species.

Yes, and I breathed you in like a nuclear winter

and ever since we’ve been indistinguishable

in the way we’ve climbed our burning ladders

of evolution up out of these august heights of a black hole,

totally siderealized by black matter breaking into light

backstage where nothing but the business of the world

goes on late into the night. One broken heart

after another accusing the finest passion

they’ve ever known in their life of amorous treachery

as if they were the latest recruit in the fraud squad

so they didn’t have to be the victims of the truth.

At least we can look at things like an hourglass

that didn’t quite make it as a telescope

and tell a harmless mirage from a lethal dose of stars.

I can even take pity on you sometimes

when you’re off in your own space like a mirror

trying to picture something of your own

that isn’t a reflection of me on the dark side

of my own eyelids trying to bloom in Braille.

Suicide to sacrifice. It’s a hell of a leap of faith,

and there was no asylum in the abyss to catch you

when you fell from paradise to Pandemonium

and not a single siren went off, and the parachute candled,

and you looked more like a daylily at dusk

than you did a comet that was trying to tell me something.

The messenger got a message. But there was no one

to tell it to. And everything’s been clear ever since.

We can look at the willows down by the lake

and say, o, yes, beautiful, blithe adolescents

lingering in their sorrows like the eyes of young gazelles.

And I can run my tongue along

the first crescent of the envelope of the moon

to blood that sword in sacred syllables of the east

with the power of heart-stopping cobras

in the medicine bags of their fangs

and have everybody ask for an encore

like an unpredictable eclipse at the back

of everyone’s star-struck eyes

through the buffer of a tinted lens darkly.

Indeed, is it not absurdly marvellous in our eyes

that we exist as we do like the longing

of someone who died light years ago,

fire in its own smoke, a poppy in its red cloak,

a star that ate its own ashes, time

with its tail in its mouth about to

swallow itself whole as if it had two heads,

though a single dream were pillow enough for both.

Not two. And the koan is broken.

And you can hear the applause of a single hand

startled into believing we neither know nor don’t know

what we do and we don’t understand.

PATRICK WHITE