DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,

elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates

in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.

I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace

the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don’t think

a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star

where he was born, so let’s put one there anyway

for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path

through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.

I love the double entendres of the unadorned.

How the waterlilies land like migrating swans

in the wetlands of the windows, and don’t expect to drown

like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.

But then I’m not in the habit of looking at things

like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer

nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars

as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter

and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng

in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,

all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head

waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,

all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,

I’m Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows

of my hydra-headed anti-selves

for the lack of better company

until the muse of my solitude shows up

like a knock on the door of my coffin without

expecting a cogently analogous answer.

I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke

I conjure from the ancestral inkwells

of my penumbral black holes to express

the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.

In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire

black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire

of an heretical apostate trying to burn

his God-particles into the wavelengths

of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies

of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if

the sherpas of the Book of the Dead

were way over their heads like clouds

in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel

you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches

of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,

it’s different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask

and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted

as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are

in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors

that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.

To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs

and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals

of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.

Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups

with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen

like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms

along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness

as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go

without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.

But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,

a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes

and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse

in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,

as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,

sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom

through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go

like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit

of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

PATRICK WHITE