O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN'T GO

O NO WITNESS TO ME YOU CAN’T GO

O no witness to me you can’t go,

though I long for it, you don’t follow,

my shadow stops leaving itself behind as a sign.

I have been ungrammatized by the madness of scientific magic,

a waterclock of life boats I kept bailing out of

until I threw the baby out with the bathwater, mushy as soap.

I tore down the shrines of chaos as an act of irreverent devotion

and the dead thanked me for stealing what they couldn’t give away.

Divine solace without earthly consolation,

I wanted to be crucified diagonally as a random act

of symbolic defiance, but I was buried

under an avalanche of skulls on the moon

and all these voices in my head that swear they’re prophetic

keep baffling me with alternative universes

that have no interest in cultivating me as a way of life.

But you my heart, dark star, dying insurgent of my solitude,

homeless door into the open, your eyes more beautiful

than reflecting telescopes on a cold mountain

far from the city, I am a casualty of space, what hands

do I have to hold you with? Time has ripped out my tongue

like an autumn leaf, and the clouds gather, sweetness,

the clouds, hushed like a book-signing at a mortuary.

Whatever value I had once as a man has turned

against the mirror of miracles, the chthonic excellence

of elegizing the teen age suicides and untactical drunks

that curled up in a coma on the train tracks

as the inevitable came into view with a warning whistle.

I poured libations of poetry to beseech the poppy gods below

among their immortal bees, to explain something to them

gentle and soothing, cool honey on a burn. Delusional

but compassionate in a useless kind of way. A gesture

of ineptitude that swept me away in tears for how much

has yet be lost in the abyss of human affairs

that doesn’t even taste of us after all these years.

At the window of wonder, if you don’t throw

the moon through it, you’re going to drop like a fly.

No more questions to pin down like the head of a snake

to keep it from turning on you like the lethal insight

of a gamma ray burst into the nature of nothingness

across the great divide of the razorwire

that twinkles like stars that are deaf and dumb

to the wishes we make upon them. I wish I may,

I wish I might be seen by you as the missing wing

of your cosmic symmetry, and you, the dark matter of mine.

Could we fly? Could we shine? Could we go mad together

under your bedroom window in a connubium of moonlight

and even the insincere candles from the dollar store seem sublime?

This far out at sea, would you be my island galaxy,

would you let me be washed up on your coasts

among the drowned, my whole life flashing before your eyes

as I reached out for you ingenuously as the tide

leaves things at your door like nomadic starfish

and my fingers, almost touching your face,

as I have so many times imagined

an enlightened savage might your talismanic sorrows,

feathers of joy and sacred dirt in a sexual medicine bag?

PATRICK WHITE