DON'T COVER YOUR EYES

DON’T COVER YOUR EYES

Don’t cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don’t

orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,

your love not a misdirected airdrop over a refugee camp.

Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,

friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,

still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.

All the blind librarians of the morning star agree

you are not who you say you are

when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.

Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral

down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto

while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill

high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,

young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch

barely a presence behind the green jubilation

of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.

Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,

the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge

where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off

into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,

sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets

enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies

and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,

your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish

swimming through the flawed water palace

of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it;

your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,

nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.

When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,

unspooling the honey and gold of your body’s flower-mine,

I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,

the landscape of a small, borderless country

trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.

Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,

you string a harp between your fangs

between the unblooded crescents of the moon

and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.

Little killer, don’t you know, little killer,

let me tell you,

the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins

cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows

a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under

lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun

while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings

in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?

Only the great fools who plead for nothing

know all the words to the song.

PATRICK WHITE