JUST BEFORE THE AIR WENT RADIOACTIVE
AGAIN
for Rebekah Genevieve Dolorese Garland
for Rebekah Genevieve Dolorese Garland
Just before the air went
radioactive again, it turned into glass, hot, viscous tears in a
blast furnace. And you were in it, over your head in amber.
Drysophila. Fruit fly. Speedy genes. Be fruitful and multiply. You
were. I know because I’ve been there. The tiniest grain of pollen,
under thousands of years of an ice-age that wasn’t waiting for
spring as you were. What persistence! What a way to hang onto a dream
as it turned to an old religion! Paragon of hope. But all the bees
were out of date. Still no reason to give up. There’s always a lab
somewhere trying to tell what the Druidic sacrifices ate before they
were garotted like criminals in the name of a water sylph. Terrified
honey and trembling corn, afraid they were dying in the name of
nothing. No one to nourish anymore. Gone. Just like that. Can you
believe it? A lover for all seasons. And after all those scenic
calendars you saved like Stonehenge to understand his moodswings, his
deaths and germinations? What a rip. Sometimes the womb dies before
the baby’s born. That happens, too, when you take a gamma ray
hourglass for a lover and raise your own assassin as if the Koran
wasn’t meant to be delivered to you by the angel of light making a
house-call in the middle of the night from seventh heaven. And it was
real. I don’t doubt that. Cogito ergo sum. Only
a fool who’d lost his Cartesian co-ordinates in a game of dice with
God would base his life upon a lottery of thought. Go way, way, way
beyond that until you run out of directions to point anyone in, and
there’s nothing to win or lose, if you really want to see how o.k.
everything is as it is, even when it severs your spinal cord like a
valley through a mountain. I say that. But it isn’t the same as
giving a sunbeam the finger like a positivist with no gear for
reverse.
Of
course, love. Of course, peace. But most people go looking for
happiness as a placebo for inspiration and after a long search, come
home to their own shoes, empty-handed and unlucky in love, only to
find a misfit in their bed that’s stranger than they are. What to
do with a bit of dirt? Turn it in the light like a jewel until your
eyes have pearled it into a moonrise you can believe in for awhile.
Plant a mountainside of sapling crutches in a clear cut old growth
forest, and watch them leaf into trees but leave the fruit where it
lies like pine-cones waiting for fire to open their eyes. Delusion
runs with the in-crowd, but enlightenment’s a loner. Better to be
an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade, than a terrorist trying to
fuse a bomb to a waterclock that never goes off on time, or worse, a
fraud. A Martin Mars water-bomber losing altitude without a
parachute. When the whole is frayed like a shoelace too weak to hang
itself, what’s that, but the strong rope of an ocean unwound into a
million rivers, each a way of life trying not to embarrass their own
fanaticism about the right way for a weathervane to flow like a
rudder through it? Everybody makes the sea these days like a hybrid
mutant of the rivers of Eden, Styx, Lethe, Phlegathon, and the Via
Cloaca of the Romans. Acid rain in their tears and fire-retardants in
their blood. Wildflowers with rusty flames like Indian paintbrush or
hawkweed.
Pain.
O most unavoidable queen of eclipses, just because it’s dark,
doesn’t mean you need corrective lenses. Had an old rugby coach
once who looked at my broken nose and said it doesn’t count until
it hurts. It hurt a lot. We won the game. Funny how childhood
elaborates itself into cosmic fractals out of homely thorns of
misguided advice repeated over and over and over again when you don’t
even know what to say to yourself when you score in your own end zone
by accident. In the crusade between yourself and the world that keeps
moving the goalposts like a running gazelle, the tines of a wishbone
that couldn’t tell the difference, a tuning fork on the same
wavelength as a snake, struggle like a warrior that knows she’s
foredoomed to lose, just for the pure hell of it, no truce, no
quarter, no elegy. No retreat from the gates of heat. I can tell by
the way you grieve, you’ve got it in you, to love someone better
than they deserve, as if you were doing God a favour or something to
make her accept your alibi in lieu of a vow.
Alone.
Cherish your solitude like the rarity of an albino eclipse. Be a new
moon. You’re dark enough for stars, though that doesn’t mean you
have to put your eyes out to see beyond the glaring midways of You
Tube, what shining is without a sales pitch. Or start pleading with a
thief to get him to buy it. Or listen to those self-appointed fools
who say by acclamation, be yourself, as if you’d forgotten what
caste system you were from. Who was the priest. Who was the sudra.
And who among waterlilies in the frog pond of the court was the
princess everybody wanted to dance with the most under the
chandeliers of the Pleiades. Just because you’ve turned to stone,
doesn’t mean you’re Algol, the Medusa’ head in the hand of
Perseus who hid behind his own reflection after he kicked stars in
her eyes like the cinders of black dwarfs he conned the last bit of
light out of without even being a sacred clown. If you ever let
anyone put a saddle on your heart as if it were a white-winged horse
that sprang from the blood of Medusa, just remember, sooner or later
they’re going to think it’s o.k. to use spurs on your eyes like a
starmap trying to get them to glow in the dark.
Rejection.
Exclusion. That dirty syringe that hooks your lifelines to the stars
that gave you a myth of origin you could fly like a kite in a
hurricane. And it was a better story by the time you got to the end
than it promised to be in the beginning. Always is. What does the
green apple have to teach the red? What does the house-dog have to
teach the tigress about being dangerous? And it’s good you can feel
the lack of a body in your bed like the absence of a habitable planet
in intimate detail, the seal of a smile, those eyes that used to
watch you move through the room as if it were flipping the pages of a
magazine they were thinking of subscribing to. Half collector’s
first edition comic book, half Encyclopedia Britannica gone digital.
And your psyche like a starchart and your body like a small candle at
a black mass where you’d just sacrificed everything for the dove
under the eaves of your heart you spared the knife and asked
forgiveness of the gods for keeping it to yourself like a no name
loveletter that began: To Whom It May Concern. Who’s strewing the
rose-petals? Who’s strewing the thorns?
O if
always and only we could stay at the beginning of our hormones and
not project an ending on them because we were expecting one. If only
our epic meteoritic descents didn’t turn into the kissing stones of
a desert religion. If we didn’t circumambulate the mystery like
telescopes and shepherd moons. If we could be incinerated upon
re-entry if we were to get too close to a dominant species that ruled
our hearts like thermophilic bacteria seven kilometers down in a
diamond mine. If we could shine and shine through everything like
fireflies who always know where they are because they make up their
own constellations on the go, and time and space renewed their
virginity like a mirror no one’s ever looked into. And the bird
that built in the willows behind their veils like Isis trying on
trees for concealment, patching a heart together out of spiderwebs
like hummingbirds, didn’t always end up holding it out like the
begging bowl of a street-corner troubadour with the voice of a
pleading muse.
O
if, o if, o if, so much didn’t depend upon nothing. How you
ploughed your eyebrows. Bucolated the comets of hairy stars into
more stylish wavelengths . Dipilated the folding legs of telescopic
tripods. Three days rain in a row. The scarlet letter of your
oleaginous lipstick that put traffic lights and fire hydrants to
shame, falling like a spent cartridge in front of the mirror in the
green room with stagefright you might use it on yourself. And then
the abyss. Yes. The abyss. Too empty even for space to get a
foothold. Nowhere to plant a flag. No one to claim it in the name of
and you the pauper princess thinking of stepping down from the
throne. And the mirrors pick on you for things they can’t reflect,
and there isn’t a window in the house that’s going to stand up
for you and change their point of view. And it’s beyond me what we
fear in here because there’s no sign anywhere that says, No
Trespassing. Trespassers will be shot. Because the abyss is
merciless. No end of it anywhere. Crueller than a black hole eating a
universe. Yet everything intense. Amplified a thousandfold by the
thunder of distant zeroes trampling your heart to death like a
stampede of white buffalo mothers running from the endangered species
list. Look through this window with eyes of stone and the delinquent
in you can break it. Throw the moon through it. And isn’t it
uncanny how the least of details in this space, the jewels that got
swept up in the corner of your eye like dream crumbs you’d pick up
when you found the dust pan, suddenly leap out at you like black
lightning that rips you like heartwood from the roots up, a whole
cosmology in the smell of a t-shirt left behind like a flag of
surrender you didn’t ask for. I first saw it like lipstick on a
piece of kleenex in the kitchen beside a shaving mirror, after my
Spanish-Apache lover left me holding the medicine bag of what was
left of my life for the moment, like a sac full of rattlesnakes
sprouting eyes in an Irish potato famine. Something so small, so
trivial, so untoward, like an arrow that broke off in my heart and me
trying to look for all the reasons I could possibly deserve it, right
down to the kind of flightfeathers she used and the birds she took
them from, and me thinking maybe I shouldn’t have done that ghost
dance on the reservation when the agent said all I was allowed to
listen to was rhythm and blues. Or in case of an emergency, the Day
Glo Abortions. Ain’t easy being a switchblade samurai in the world
with the romantic sensibilities of West Side Story. Me? I became the
warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope and blooded my blade on roses
whose thorns knew what I was up to like a prayerwheel of spurs. And
I introduced Pacific cowboy Zen like a seahorse to the samurai to
take the edge off the soft weapons of the Japanese plum blossoms
falling all around me in self defence. And they haven’t hurt me
since.
And
I know it’s not easy being a lighthouse on the moon beside a
graveyard of shipwrecks that never learned how to listen on your
wavelength about the red shift of farewell. So I send you one of my
favourite star maps with cigarette holes burned in it that will let
you see clearly all the way to the other side of the effervescent
multiverse that’s blowing thornproof bubbles into the abyss like
eyes that don’t need a house to know what they’re the sign of
when there’s lightyears in your tears. And I send you a white
heal-all for a nurse, in case you get seasick in this moonboat of a
poem, and o yes, a spliff with the tendrils of a hookah octopus when
things begin to get nebular enough to shine like the chandelier of
the Pleiades when you go dancing with your eyes.
PATRICK
WHITE
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