THIS LATE IN THE DAY

THIS LATE IN THE DAY

This late in the day, could I love you, could you

love me? If I made a black rose of my blood,

redshifting into the dark, and gave it to you,

not knowing what to expect, would you counter-intuit

the wounded watershed of the poetic imagery?

Younger I was a lot more dangerous than I am now,

though I wasn’t trying to be. Dragons raged in me

in infernal crusades of the bad against the worst

as I stood at the flaming gates of the vulnerable

and said to their worst nightmares you shall not pass.

I used my horns and scales to empower the innocent,

trying to turn a curse into a virtue, the atrocities

of the left-handed legacy of my condemned childhood

into something even a stranger might be proud of.

In Zen it’s said that nobody likes a real dragon

and even among those I came to the rescue of

like a Viking long boat with runes like scars

chiselled into stone, and well-seasoned swords

that backed up my word down to the very least detail,

even among the exiles who felt compelled to love me,

even among those who didn’t want to be seen

as hypocrites of their fashionable memes if they didn’t,

I could see people backing away from me

like an expanding universe running on dark energy

and that was ok, I was raised to bite the bullet

whenever my heart was liberated by amputation.

Free of me, I am unencumbered by concern.

I can solo in the night skies I return to without fear

of estranging the stars with my intensities.

Now there’s more mage than king in my immensities,

and time, sorrow and death have blunted my edge

like broken glass rounded in the turmoil of the tides

and Merlin has returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake,

I feel more like a rodeo clown in a barrel

with a funny hat, a painted tear, and a flower on my head,

a floppy poppy in red, trying to turn the crescents

of the moon bull on me like a Mayan calendar

to keep from goring the fallen who were mounted

above me like heroes that took a fall. A dragon

sheds its deathmasks like petals of the moon.

So if I presented myself to you as I am

could you learn to love an enlightened buffoon

with the injured nobility of a distinguished demon

guarding a small boy’s notion of doing

some good in the asylum of the raving world,

intrigued with the urgency of innocence

to redeem itself like a mutant gene in the fuse

of an occult chromosome that’s always

about to go off like a bomb buried

in the Milky Way of a fanatical supernova?

Was a time I’d hang the heads of my enemies

like Al Ghoul from my earlobes if they dared

to threaten anything I loved that couldn’t defend itself.

Was a time I’d start a fight at my own funeral

just to stand up for someone when I couldn’t.

Now I’m hemorrhaging like amaranthus

on an infernal summer day and my heart

is a coal bin of all the things I used to be

and there’s more tears in the diamonds than blood.

I don’t dip my pen in the trough of the world,

and I don’t shepherd wolves to graze on the mountain.

Even when space turns to glass, and water leaks out

of the reactor like a constrictor from an aquarium

I endure the inverted question marks

of the hooks I hang on in a deep freeze

as if just to endure were to spite in spades

the cruelty of conditions taking their natural course.

Seven come eleven, but I can look at things

through the snake eyes of frost bitten dice

and not end up piping on a stone flute.

I was born standing in the doorway of an exit

that glowed red at night like a miscarriage of the light

but still the road sign of a back way out of hell.

So if I wrote you a poem you couldn’t understand

would you exalt in your power to unman me

or would you feel the tenderness of the beast

behind the eclipse of the black lion that wears

the corona of the sun for a mane, a sunspot for a face?

Would you trust that the darkness is full of eyes

and some are hunting you, and some are shy

in your presence like wolves that have been shot at

because they’re wild and as cunning as life?

Would you bait the meat with poison in a leg hold trap

or would you defang me into affability

and teach me to lower my voice when the moon was full?

Would we lie in the same bed with a sword between us?

I could befriend your fireflies. I could mitigate your thorns.

I could get behind whatever you dream

like dark matter behind a light filled universe

and when you were sad, let the rain play my scales

like a harpischord or a guitar with a black hole

in the middle of it I would descend into

like an Orphic underworld to sing you back to life.

I would lift all my taboos for you and give you

an exemption in the night to approach me as you wish

and even if your hand weren’t brave enough to ask

I would fill it full of jewels with magic properties

that tempt the thieves of light to risk the labyrinths

of the inviolable graves on the dark side of the moon.

I would beatify you like a grail in a secret society

of warrior saints that haven’t had a drink in years.

And if your chandeliers ever had a nervous breakdown

in a lightning storm, I would dig up the bulbs

of the crystal skulls I buried in your garden for next year

and let you talk to them yourself about your fears

of what’s to come, and how to heal the shattered

with the dark clarity of compassionate crazy wisdom

drifting on the oceans of your tears

like a hydra-headed lifeboat empty but for you.

I would plunder spiritual islands in the wake

of extinct volcanoes to bring you

the rarest herbs of insight prophecy could afford

to see you dancing again like a constellation

rising over my event horizon with no fear of the abyss.

I could do this, I would be this, and will and more

and mean it if you’d let me. I could be the quicksilver

water of life and you could be the white sulphur

substance of the great work, its spirit and activity.

Or the other way around, if you like, given I was born

on a Wednesday with wings on my heels and head.

I could be the dragon trickster, infernal and divine

the hermaphroditic hidden secret

buried in the earth, creature of fire and air,

and you could be the salt, the anima mundi,

the philosopher’s stone, the light of the soul,

the wisdom that gives life and energy their forms,

mistress of the planets and the stars, the divine energy

that moves all things around to bring things about.

What an experiment we’d make, what an art,

what a conjunction of life and love and bodyminds

what signs we could reveal, what prophecies scry,

what freedoms take we could be burned at the stake for.

And the sand paintings we could pour through an hourglass

that would blow away like the dust of the road

and the comets that fell from their black halo

around the sun, and the lifting of waterbirds

in the pewter moonlight feathered on a lake

we could observe, and the scores of new constellations

we could form like new houses of an alternative zodiac

for the dispossessed stars of the homeless

burning their hearts out around oil drums under bridges

that span them like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut,

and the poems that would flow like spiritual transfusions

into the carnal bloodbanks of the burning rose

with a needle exchange of thorns, and the transmutations

of base metal into gold and back again, of dragonflies

gleaming like anthracite in the birth fluids of their chrysales

drying the filigreed silver of their wings in the sun,

paper clipped to the waterlilies like pencils behind their ears,

and the light years of passion and devotion

this would take to be done in unison, in chaos,

in wonder and bliss, in fingertips, eyes, skin and lips,

two alchemists in the Vas Hermeticum of a conceivable abyss.

PATRICK WHITE