THE SERPENT

The serpent sits enthroned

at the top of its own stairwell,

helically reposing in its own empryean

like an August hawk

coiling up its own thermals;

its fangs, a stargate

to an unknown afterlife, emancipation,

and the jewel of its head,

the first stone thrown,

a small planet without

the eyelid of a sky,

a nugget of mystic uranium,

looped in a turban of orbits,

a sacred arrowhead

that flys from itself like a bow

drawn back long before the wind

knew its first feather.

Lethal healer,

the sword that kills is the sword that saves.

This morning,

the drubbing of the rain on a tin roof,

the hiss of traffic

flaring like matches down the sleek asphalt,

if I were to say

I want the emotional life of space,

I don’t know if I’d mean it,

but I’m so weary

of being this slow crisis of a bird

mesmerized by the swaying eyes

of the black lightning

that has caught me in the net

it weaves of my own nerves,

I want to douse my heart

in the next providential tide of tears

like a torch I put out in the night

to see better in the dark.

I asked for wings

and my spine was adorned with fire.

I asked for water

and I’m a fish on the wind.

and now this desert I hoped to remain,

a craze of sand,

has grown teeth

and is overgrazing the starfields like pyramids.

I don’t think

I will ever recover

from the wound I received

like the hidden twin of the moon,

trying to love the world, myself, women, people.

Every word was a road, a pulse, an eye,

a drop of blood

I could ride to the end of and beyond

into the implacable subtlety

of my own empty, ageless temples

where even the silence isn’t ghost enough

to conjure a medium

to jar the table as a sign,

and death is buried in its own vacuity

like an embryo in a mask without eyes.

I was bound by my own boundlessness,

my nerves, wicks in the abyss

that enhanced the darkness

by cleaving me like a tree

vision after vision,

another world

with every blink of the eye

that wiped the mirror clean of me like an ax

until I understood

that even the most enlightened watersheds of wisdom

are just a smear of perception

on the least drop of that splendour

I went looking for like a cloud

saturated with the ancient seas of the moon

that was covered by my own looking.

I lay at the bottom

of my oceanic odyssey,

trying not to sink,

but I wanted to give something back

for what I felt I had received;

not an ethic or a metaphysic,

but a spontaneous action of the blood

that remembers it was once a rose.

I wanted to return spring like a water-key to the moon;

I wanted to harvest the shadows

of my own non-existence

and break bread

with the famine of ghosts

that came like royalty to beg food from their servant,

blind doors standing on the thresholds of awareness

asking me to address myself

to the terrible openness

of their unanswerable need.

I have eaten my own ashes

in the furnace of every star

I have ever looked upon.

I have drowned in the wells

of the faceless, fathomless mirrors,

and every woman I have ever drunk from

was a grail with an enigmatic black pearl in it

lustrous as the moon in eclipse.

O promises of bliss

that tuned the webs of the spiders

like a guitarist with perfect pitch
to the frequency of my spinal cord 
that I might entangle a star

in the silk of my conceiving;

that I might seize a firefly

in the fangs of my thought

and taste the honey of the lantern

that lit my dark corner

in the era of the moment.

O sweetest of lies to ripen with longing

like the eyes of a child in the darkness

far from home.

I was trying to find a road

that fit my walking like shoes on a mountain;

I was trying to walk on water with mystic crutches;

I was looking for an arrow

dipped in the blood of a serpent with wings,

set aflame by a demonic star

and feathered by spiritual fire

to restring me like a bow

severed like the branch of a sacred grove

by the oracular blade of the moon.

I was too deeply sheathed in the truth

to appreciate the arcane sagacity of my lies.

I stood like a shadow in the burning doorway of my own fire

and looked deeply into the night

to answer my own knocking

like the echo of a stranger in the darkness,

walking away from someone who didn’t know

how to greet himself.

I was a tree crucified on a man,

a vandal in the shrine of the moment,

bleeding like stained-glass,

a rosary of vertebrae and skulls

reconstructed in the future museum of now

I played myself into like a funeral plan.

Now everywhere the wind is a pilgrim,

I leave my heart like a shrine

I will never return to.

And the sadness, and the solitude

and the vastness of my insignificance

is the shadow of a bird on a cloud.

The only way to perfect my defeat

was to sit at the feet of my most cherished delusion

like a rootless flower watching over a coffin,

then rise like the wind

from the rubbish of the shedding,

the loneliest pillar and sole cornerstone of the sky.

Now my apish profundities

no longer crack fleas of light like stars

I picked out of God’s burning beard

with the forceps of the moon.

Now I am infested with constellations.

I no longer turn the pages of the waterlilies

like the holy books of an inspired swamp.

I no longer seep down to the river

to drink from the moon

like a serpent at the water’s edge 
and watch the panicked angels jumping
from the reflection of an uncrossed bridge

that collapsed like a covenant with hell.

I no longer shred my heart

like a secret document

in an abandoned embassy of swans

looking for asylum further south,

tormented by the unattainability

of a woman’s beauty,

looking for sanctuary

in the ashes of a black sail

that flared like a poppy with passion

at every gust of desire

that silvered the trembling grass

with sidereal aspirations.

Why bother to laminate your lovers, your legends?

Let them go like autumn leaves and smoke,

the last breath you took

before you were interred

like a scream in the larynx of a deaf-mute,

a foreign currency you can’t spend at home.

Naked is the only way to dress for the rain,

but it doesn’t matter which

from the wardrobe of all your many lies

you wear to the fire that waits for you

like a fledgling waits for its plumage.

And this is a long river

and this is a long day and a night

and maybe only the silence is listening

to what the stars are preaching

from the pulpits of the flowers,

and this that says me now

is just the promo for the intensive care ward

of a new religion

the founders are always the first to betray;

but when I truly let go

it was my falling

that taught me to patch my shoes with the sky.

And have you come this far,

passed through this many gates

for wisdom, compassion, freedom,

wandered aimlessly until you could not tell

the stars from the sand,

the journey from the arrival,

suffered worse than all the things you cannot say

until you forgot what you were looking for

in the first place, until

you despised what you craved the most?

I don’t remember how long I slept

before my dreaming woke me up

and I realized

no fool could defame my solitude

and that life

was only the story of a scar

looking for the knife that inflicted it

like a shadow

in the forsaken valley
of the mountains of the moon.
Looking for a pear of light

I had to plunge into a darkness

deeper than anything

my eyes had ever given birth to.

PATRICK WHITE