STARTING TO FEEL

STARTING TO FEEL

Starting to feel marginalized.

Second magnitude star

in the wrong constellation.

I make a lousy footnote, iota subscript

to the main body of the text. So does the sea

and the vast bedazzled panoply of the night sky,

or the moon in the drop of water

that hangs from the heron’s beak.

Splash, and the ripples

of the fish that made the eye

jump back through it, the second seeing

more placid than the first,

the expunged topography of the bed

excessively made to exorcise the imprimatur

of the amorous ghosts of the night before,

all the hills flattened out

like chalk on a blackboard,

and the pillows perfect sacks of equine oats.

If you’re fortunate enough to meet a lamp,

feed it, pour your oil out for the stars,

or if it’s the darkness you prefer

there are bells with black mouths to do the job,

candle-snuffer chimney sweeps who come

like the metal eyelids of overturned spoons

to smother the apricot dream of the flame.

Insecurities. Outcast doorways. The bleeding orphanage

where I grew up with the shadows of renegade castes

pleading for scraps off the plate of fatuous abundance,

the rotten shoelaces of the things that bind the heart,

the well-meaning lies that pour their gravy over the flies.

Shards of the ostrakon, the expurgation,

another invocation to exile

shatter like the petals of clay roses

lacquered and baked in blue-green honey,

enamel auroras, flowing irises, pooling into glacial fixity,

and cataract polar ice-caps blurring the star on the lens,

the sun on the eye of the blackberry, the moon

a widow under the veils of her dead seas

mirrored in the spider-tears of a torn necklace.

All I ever wanted was a moist summer star,

somewhere outside the gates of the Pleiades

where I could grow a few planets

that wouldn’t be trampled

by my neighbour’s horses

and I thought I found

that gypsy joy by the well of your eye,

morning glory binding the bucket to the winch

that spools and unspools like time, like blood,

like the coiled serpent fires of dragons in love,

and I was happy to graze alone on the stargrass

that burned in the twilight pastures

of your furthest fields,

a winged horse in the dusk born

from the blood of decapitated gorgons.

I could wait for the night

to grab the wind by the mane and ride.

I could wait like a boy with a telescope

for your sidereal transits,

feeling as I did the first time I saw Venus,

or the Andromeda galaxy,

or the tiny lilac eyelid of eloquent Mercury

glancing out from under

the roosting wing of the setting sun,

and I have been scarred enough in life

by the liquid knives of my own credulity

to know what I dared, to know

what a temptation a skinless man is

to the acidic looms of the nettles,

the hypodermic carpet-baggers

who swarm the rose like wasps and blackflies,

junkies, a healthy vein.

Or maybe you’re mad at me

for some oblique infraction,

some chromatic aberration on the rim of the mirror,

rainbow lipstick on the lips of the chalice,

some line of a poem, the track

of an animal in the snow

you couldn’t recognize among

the hushed fauna of your sacred groves,

a species in exile with unknown weapons,

because new is now and forever evil

and I’ve been ashes enough

at the foot of charred stakes

to know this bed of nails I sleep on proves it.

Or maybe you’re bait

in the traplines of a legless gesture,

or one of the unsalted crackers of common sense

crushed like a blizzard

over the soup kitchens of circumstance,

just not enough hours in the day

to spare the feast of an eyelash,

and I’m the dead battery

exposed to the cold

like a firstborn daughter,

electrochemical quicksand,

a black Kaaba of plastic and tar

no longer the direction

of your eastern prayers

when you were hoping

for a meteoritic foundation stone?

My deficits are as sulphurous

as the light of flaring matches is

to the exalted constellation

of the amorous fireflies;

my shadows are as open as my hands

and even my eclipses

have nothing to hide from the blaze

of the tiger in the snow

thawing in its own fire

to dispose of its claws and fangs

like flames and lilies

that touch without tearing

the midnight skin of your water.

Or maybe I’m deranged

by my own intensities

to feel like a cold draft shut out

by the silence of closing doors

that would rather leave this gust of leaves

playing on your stairs unsaid.

Sensitivity make you sensitive,

the tuning forks, the tender horns of the snail,

lightning rods cauterized

by the cattle prods of slaughter-house storms,

weathervanes that pivot

at the breathing of butterflies,

and eyes at the end of your fingers

that can play their revelations

up and down the wharves

and keyboards of mystic blue

that woad the nippled fez

on the breast of a warrior tattoo;

and there are shadows

that sing like the ancient scripts

beneath the voice of the bees

in the morning locust trees

and valleys that turn

their ears like begging bowls

to the stone tongues of the mountains

for the widening smiles

of tremulous faults,

avalanche warnings everywhere

like troubled birds

and even the ants recalling

their scouts to rock proof shelters.

I just want to hear from you

like the curtains of an old house

that misses your ghost at the window,

like a space probe well beyond

the black-ice shades of gibbering Pluto,

that keeps on faithfully

broadcasting these love-songs

from the edge of an expanding heart

accelerating into the engulfing mouth of the void

like the universe you detonated with a single spark

from the cricket-sticks

of a fire-wired atom exploding into bliss.

I don’t want to be this motley of shadows

bleeding in the deer park

like grapes and razors,

wondering whether those

are cherry-blossoms or eyelids

banked in the gasoline gutters

of acidic snake-showers,

this pygmy circus in the oversized

straitjackets of its carnival tents.

And I tell myself everything,

a lexicographer of reasons

to explain the absence

of your fingerprints on the wind,

the fist of your light

in the taste of the apples,

why the flowers smell like dirty laundry,

and there is a funeral stench to the stale fires

embering in their creosote like black wasps

snarling like angry drunks in harvest orchards.

I draft the curse of twenty religions a day

and rearrange the hierarchies

of the demons and the angels

to dance like the Milky Way

on the head of a pin

without anyone’s hooves

stepping on anyone’s wings,

to raise you like a lifeboat

from the bottom of my cloven heart.

And I don’t know how many nunneries

I’ve dedicated to the Coptic stars

of Mary Magdalene,

how many brotherhoods of bone

I’ve donated my igneous marrow to,

hoping to exculpate the sinner from the sin

of the abysmal kiss

of your baffling silence,

how many trivialities

I’ve followed home to your old address

listening for the opening breach

of a golden bolt

to answer the mind-seizing

koan of sartorial doorbells

emptier than the water sills that preface

these bent event horizons

of a mute unhappening

like lips that kiss the air

to supplement this crash diet

that is already eating the eyes out

of the dragon vines of space,

and dipping these famished feathers I

n the inkwells of my mouth

to divert a panicked lover

from the seabed of my face,

the burnt bough of the apple tree

still holding out for birds

and in the dry throats of the flowers,

the rumours of rain that silver

the lifelines of your words.

PATRICK WHITE