THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN'T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN’T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

The grave up ahead hasn’t chastened my longings,

nor joy become an offence to the probity of death.

Life’s not a protocol I’m trying to master

to approach the eternal orthodoxy in good form.

It’s important to bow up once and awhile to keep

your gratitude from growing reflexive. Time

might be the shedding serpent that was generated

like a wavelength out of my flashbulb of a skull,

but I’ve always kept a good enough grip on its head

to feed it its tail with no fear of being bit. Besides,

who’s ever known from the very beginning

whose hour this is for anyone though we blithely assume

we’re all living co-terminously. The Pre-Cambrian

just as it is now existed in the Renaissance

or the Middle Ages among the Pre-Raphaelites.

Cosimo Medici greets Dante Gabriel Rossetti

passing through the bus station, eras striating their minds

like glaciers, Viking runes on the back of the mirror.

I analyze my lust sometimes when I think of you.

I muse upon time as a fountain and a gutter in the same breath.

No waterclock is flowing the wrong way.

Winter stars in the heart of the green apple.

Crocuses under the snow. Like our senses, eventually

I came to understand that all four seasons

are wholly focused without distinction on now.

And now can burn a hole through your skin

the size of a third eye if you’re not careful.

But as Janis Joplin and Dogen Zenji said

seven hundred centuries apart,

the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day.

And ever since I’ve been living this moment as if

it were the afterlife of forever and even meeting you

where the rubber hits the road, the print hits the paper

like a graffiti kind of shorthand, seems to me

written in the indelible hand of the unscripted evanescence

that mingles my mind and heart like blood and ink

in the inexhaustible watershed of my art.

Dreams of you. Fragrances of emotion

from these sidereal wildflowers rooted

along the mindstream that gets to where it’s going

with no hand on the rudder or wind in the sail.

Are those daylilies or wild irises in your flames?

Deadly nightshade in the umbrage of your eclipse?

How many burning bridges did you have to cross

in the shape of a crucified swan

to get here like the Milky Way without dying?

Pandora’s box or the Pierian spring of the muses,

beatific desire in the fire of the witchcraft of love,

or was I born a ghost too late

to attend upon you like a seance,

to get you humming to my unearthly resonance

like the witch hazel of a tuning fork

divining water that breaks

its vow of silence on the moon

to reveal the secret of life is a woman’s body

when she reveals it like a sacred syllable

to open your eyes down to the blood roots of her rose?

I taste the air, and I can sense the enormous vulnerability

that is the inversely proportional index

of how potentially dangerous you are to anyone

who hangs their heart like raw meat

on the first and last crescents of your claws

like a sacrifice to ensure an abounding harvest,

like a lure to a mermaid that’s never been caught.

Who could take hold of you like the moon by the earth?

The golden fish that swims from one extreme to the other,

depending on where it’s being looked for,

jumps into the drifting lifeboat by itself

the same way apples fall into your lap

with no intention on the part of the wind

to knock them down. Whenever I intuit your presence

as if a room just walked into a person,

you’re always such a windfall

stampeding through my gut

like mass amorous extinctions making a comeback.

Neuronic lightning flashes along my axons

like the discharge of a high voltage cloud of unknowing

illuminating the black mirror of the midnight lake

that sees everything through its third eye like a sky

whispering stars intriguing enough to make you

want to overhear their voices like fireflies of insight

that can’t be attributed to any sign of the zodiac.

And as far as I can tell from what I’ve heard so far

you could be the proto-nostratic grammar

of a new mother tongue with the grassroots vocabulary of a star

I have to leave more space in my heart than my eyes

to reach out and touch as if even my ashes

were still the green initiate of these immolations

where the mystery burns like a dragon in love

to prove its heretical innocence, and everything

is only as sacred as its taboo is revealingly dangerous.

PATRICK WHITE