KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

KISSES INSTEAD OF SCARS IF YOU CAN MANAGE IT

Kisses instead of scars if you can manage it.

Love, not a science. Still an art. Though a dying one.

The discipline of staying a constant beginner.

As if the morning glory had never felt the light before.

You want to love or be loved? Make up your heart.

But you want to sword dance with queen cobras in heat

like a lapwing in a snake pit, two egg-layers

at opposite ends of the same extreme, you better not

step on anyone’s toes, and if you do, hope

the wing you favoured with a false wound

like a collapsed bridge you lay down like a joker

to trump your Tarot pack, is as long as the other

royal flush you neglected to play like a winning hand.

Human, you might be the measure of all things,

but believe me when I tell you, love’s got a bigger wingspan

than Cygnus and Aquila in the Summer Triangle have light-years

to get a fix on the wing tips of their feathers by parallax.

Love with class if you want to make something elegant

of your absurdity, diamonds of your dirt, if you want to

water flowers with your tears without salting the seed bed.

If you want to steal a little fire from the mystery

to enlighten your nightmare, if you want to be the star

that everyone points to in your lover’s eye,

don’t enter it like a dirty needle of light washed up on a beach,

you keep overdosing on like a starmap with a bad addiction.

Love is a retroactive prediction from the past come true at last.

Even after dismemberment, love is Orphic, a prophetic skull

bobbing like an apple all the way to Mytilene from Thrace,

that can still sing the dead back up out of hell

until they realize the light of love’s too strong

for the eyes of gibbering shades and turn around

as if they’d come too far down the wrong road.

As a working stiff, love is kind, generous, trustworthy, loyal,

like the smell of heartwood after a carpenter has built

his own sturdy cross. Not acrid oak, but terebinth.

As a thaumaturge, love works miracles with silver herbs

cool as moonlight laying its feathers on the sacred pools

you return to like a battered salmon or a sword in tribute

to give back in gratitude what was given to you.

O, yes, you can be a nice guy or an agreeable woman

for a moment, and bask in the whole wheat sunshine

of a promising harvest, but love is the blue,

the second full moon in October and it looks down

on what’s been threshed to see what you’ve left for the birds

and if you ever get so drunk in your delirium

you went dancing with the scarecrows as if you

were all martyred by the same cause like a prelude

of watchdogs to the white nights of the living dead.

Love’s a celebrant high on the bliss of poppy wine

but it doesn’t turn the dancing floors of the starfields

into a bride catalogue for impoverished wallflowers.

Love’s got the eyes of a snake, the voice of a bird

and the wings of a vampiric bat in an unpredictable eclipse.

And when love mystically sublimates its appetites

like black ice into more beatific ionospheres of solar flaring,

the poetry goes aurorally absurd, but nobody cares

because everybody’s more awed by the picture-music

of the rippling veils than they are by the face behind them.

You make love safe. You take the danger out of it,

you defang the lightning storm, you brainwash

the theta waves of the turbulent night sea

where the soul journeys alone, into saying aum

every time there’s a breathless squall of stars in the southwest,

though you might think in your lustreless way

you’re throwing sacred holy oil on troubled waters

you’re just another oil slick running a nunnery of pearls.

You want your honey without a stinger. You want

your rose without a thorn. A one-eyed oxymoron.

I’ve made it a counter-intuitive point of survival

most of my occult romantic afterlife

to never fall in love with a woman until I’m absolutely certain

it’s well within her power to kill me outright

without a word of warning. But she abstains

and in that moment of hesitation you can live

three full lifespans on the cutting edge of a black hole

without a fear of lights or vertiginous heights.

You can ride the helical stairwells of your mutual d.n.a.

like the parallel bannisters of two hawks wheeling

synchronously on the twisted ladder

of their thermophilic passions for the highs and lows of love.

When did Icarus ever fly too close to the sun

with a parachute or a safety net? What fool

shot out of a cannon like a fly into a spider web

doesn’t expect to get entangled in the details

of hedging his bets instead of taking the fall on his chin.

If you fall in love, and you’re not a clown,

or someone who bumbled over the cliff by accident,

be prepared to fall deeper than any place

your death has ever descended into before, and darker,

and more intense than the petty sentiments

of people dropping stones in wishing wells

to fathom the abyss by staring into the eyes of a telescope.

PATRICK WHITE