CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,

and my shadow’s got me in a choke-hold

so I can barely breathe. I’m wrestling

with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,

the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.

I’m in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.

Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter

or somebody’s about to read a poem,

but it’s got big windows, and it’s safer

living above people than it is on eye-level

and I don’t mean that in any kind of way

except everyone’s afraid and that’s when

they’re at their most dangerous. But you can

see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I’ve got a fix on what I’m doing.

I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.

I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity

on the temple stairs of a goddess I’m beginning

to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they’re cherished.

Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.

Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead

of drawing from it with a desert at your back

eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.

But how would you get the flavour of sex

into a bottle of water without it

souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls

of the chic boutique across the street

that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak

behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can’t people.

Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,

and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,

every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy

like the evolutionary emergence of birds,

neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.

Life just the flimsiest of distractions

on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.

There’s a black hole in my heart

that’s lapping blood from the rose.

I’m trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.

I’m cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.

I’m grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones

without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.

I’m transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers

with black diamonds on the same wavelength

as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything

that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind

of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway

that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,

all the things they’ve seen before, they’re looking at again,

as if the light could ever be new in yesterday’s eyes,

but I’m inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis

trying to pass through this black hole

into an entirely new world that isn’t

just another sketchy metaphor for this one.

I want to see the roots the blossom’s wired to

if at all. Or if it’s just one big disconnect

and all understanding is playing unplugged

like a downed powerline with the oracular powers

of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,

I’m waiting like an image of the imageless

for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time

it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly

and there were no other recourse for getting around me

except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes

where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth

in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar

grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence

to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue

from me for a change, and branch out dendritically

like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire

sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through

like the mirage of a waterbird through

a shapeshifting hourglass of stars

that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive

to the darkest insights of the human imagination

that doesn’t create worlds in the likeness

of a preconceived image but each to their own medium

turns the light around on them like a revelation

of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

PATRICK WHITE