I FLESH YOUR SPIRIT OUT IN STARMUD

I FLESH YOUR SPIRIT OUT IN STARMUD

I flesh your spirit out in starmud. No creator.

No created. Between the leaf and the sky

I mix the colour of your eyes on the palette

of a rainbow that let’s the darkness

sit at the same fire it does. Because the spirit is free.

I hang crescent moons from your earlobes.

I release the sacred deltas of small night creeks

into your veins, and talk to deserts on the moon

about the manes of sidereal lions for your hair.

I search the darkening hills at night for a black rose

with eyelids as cool as mushrooms, and lips,

that are more the wings of auguries, birds and bows

disappearing into the distance to imagine you

than they are the words and arrows

of a flightless heart dipped in stars that don’t ignite.

I’m a blind man in a room, painting eyes,

trying to grow flowers out of last year’s fragrances,

interpret every syllable and sacred pixel

of your red ochre glyphs of lipstick

I used to bury myself in when I lived in caves with bears

and rubbed the stuff all over my face

like blood and corn flowers under the hearthstone.

Now I’m a dragon rising from my urn of ashes

like a volcano of serpent-fire out of the chrysalis

of my crystal skull, looking for signs, hints, clues,

any whisper of linear B as to who you are

in the shadows of the sundials of the mountains

you go walking with at night with your dogs.

And the stars you must see in the clear-eyed desert

when the temperature drops and all you’ve got

to keep you warm from the inside out is not

you in my arms, but this small drop of blood

in our chests, this cosmic thermometer of a heart

on the night ward of a perilous greenhouse.

And I went to a cactus with thorns like a voodoo doll

with oracular powers to ask about the shape

of the body I should root you in like an hourglass in sand

and she said to me, a rootless peach tree on the moon.

And ever since, I’ve touched your skin

with eyes at the end of my fingertips

like a new world gnostic gospel for the blind

that can see you in the flesh, naked, sublime

like a desert island it would be worth drowning for

just to be washed up on the curvature of your dunes

like a starfish when the mind comes back to its senses

like the first sign of life on the moon in a long time.

You emerge like wild irises of hydrogen out of

this cloud of unknowing, this cocoon of nebularity

like one star among many in an almost perfect vacuum.

I can see you. I can almost taste you. I can feel

your last lover trying to squeeze into the chrysalis

of the infinite straitjacket of your last exorcism

as if he’d finally run out of dawns as alibis

for why he didn’t want to leave just yet. Who

hasn’t stood in the doorway of Orion

sinking down in the west? For some

the threshold’s the longest part of the journey

and they make a nadir of everything at zenith

by letting their horizons down like a crosswalk

waiting for a change of colour blind traffic lights

that don’t know, for all that Stop. Go. Maybe so.,

anymore about passage than the road does

or a starmap that always certain of where it’s going

but never has a reason why it should

jump the gun like a star and get ahead of its light

like a car on a long dark dusty country road at night,

one headlight out, trying not to hit a doe

in the glare of the sun at midnight

on its way out of town,whether that’s up, down,

or omnidirectionally radiant as the Pleiades in tears.

Drift and mingle, merge, enhance,

dance, glance, shadow and glow,

still more ghost around you than I am a mirror,

I know what it means to be summoned to a seance

and not know what to wear. What lifemask to put on

like a Mason jar full of fireflies trying to decide

what constellation has the fewest short circuits in it

and is the least likely to lead anyone astray

when the lights go on and off like a fickle tranformer

or a Cepheid variable that was just born that way.

And here, now, your ears and your hands, your arms

and bones of your own that don’t owe a thing

to anyone else’s bird cage after the bird has flown.

And now I think I’ve got the eyes just right

but it’s the heart calling its rivers back to it

like the sea I can’t quite find the likeness of

even when I appeal to the most ancient galaxies

in the Hubble mirror for a similitude of love

that might serve as the understudy of a metaphor

in an expanding universe that keeps exceeding

the boundary stones of the stars at zenith

and even the chipped cup of the moon full

and a skull that used to juggle mirrors

like shattered insights into reality for those

so spiritually inclined at harvest time to listen

to the blue moonrise peering through the cedars

like an effulgent pearl of wisdom shedding her skin

like a mystic in rapture on the dark side she keeps to herself.

PATRICK WHITE