A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A MOMENT AWAY FROM THE WORLD, PLEASE

A moment away from the world, please.

Denude me of this coat of killer bees.

I have endured its agony long enough

to know there’s not much honey in a stinging nettle.

This kind of pain doesn’t break into flowers.

The stars have been telling me that for years.

The darkness doesn’t ask for a sacrifice

and you can tell by the New England asters

the light doesn’t treat them like martyrs at a crossroads

between the high and the low. You just have to look

at how wide-eyed the day lilies are

even when they’re dreaming to see

the sun doesn’t burn their eyes out with its blazing

and their tangerine goblets are always full.

Drain these toxic squint-eyed metals out of my blood

but don’t ban me to the slogans of a religion

when what I need is an environmental protection agency

with soul, instead of being buried under

this avalanche of pebbles in a gold rush of cornerstones

like a seven thousand year old skeleton

of an adolescent Archaic Indian by the Straits of Belle Isle,

as if everyone in the world had lain their head on my chest

as a place to rest, or they were looking for a heartbeat,

or they wanted to make sure I never rose from my grave again.

Free my metaphors from these chain gangs of d.n.a.

I’ve spent most of my afterlives here

and I’m not looking to be paroled or escape,

I just want out. Make a chrysalis out of a fortune-cookie,

not a straitjacket, and free me of all this spiritual punctuation

as if thousands of dragonflies were drying their wings

on the eyelids of the waterlilies without any regard for grammar.

Let me flame out like a meteor in the upper atmosphere

as a sign of what I was dying to say and if

you’re going to embrace me because you love me so much

do it like space, so I’m never out of it, but there’s

lots of room for the galaxies and I swear you do that

I’ll open the lockets of the black holes

in the inner core of their hearts, and show you

whose picture is inside of them. Leave me alone

with the inconceivable awhile to listen to the musings

of the unnamed as she washes her hair like a lyric

in her own tears, and sings to herself like a willow

that has been made beautiful by suffering

that has finally lifted its heavy veil of tribulation

from the unmapped mystery in the eyes that remind the stars

of why they’re shining in the first place.

Amor vincit omnia. It said in big gold letters

on a baby blue banner tacked to the wall by doves

above the minister’s pulpit in the First Centennial United Church

I was pressed into for ten bucks a month when I was a kid,

one of the myriad ways, my ingenious Catholic mother

kept us fed. Love conquers all. I suppose.

But then I was never on a crusade against it to begin with

and though I’m an infidel, I’m not religious about it.

And I’ve never lived my life as if

I had to close the gates of the city at night

and if love ever wanted anything from me

all it ever had to do was ask, regardless of the recipient.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not infernal enough

to know how to hammer swords out of the bell-towers of my defeat

whenever anyone speaks to me about conquest.

Free. Free. Free. Freedom deeper than sorrows.

Freedom more expansive than bliss. Freedom

the invisible gift we’re all born clutching in our pudginess.

Like a butterfly that lands on your finger.

A shooting star with your name on it that took aim

and missed. A poem that lands in your lap like a maple key.

Or comes like words to the tree like birds in the morning.

Or shovels you like coal into the mouth of a dragon

brutally wise in the ways of diamonds, and in its claws,

the mercy of scalpels. The compassion of rain

from an ocean of awareness. Free to change

as life would have it without any notion

of betterment or reform. Each as they are, unmaimed.

Freedom the only holiness. Not a state of mind

at absolute Kelvin, motionless entropy,

but dynamic energy creatively shaping

the world out of itself like a child making up a game

when she’s alone, to amuse herself when no one’s watching,

whisper secrets she confides to her own ear

like the sea to a shell on a deserted beach

without a lighthouse demoralizing the mermaids.

PATRICK WHITE