WHEN MY HEART ISN'T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

WHEN MY HEART ISN’T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

When my heart isn’t a hummingbird on a keyboard,

it’s a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon

my mother used to say, the air bright with potential

and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,

a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.

Now it’s an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith

over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.

Blessings on everyone’s head, I’ve shed a few lives of my own,

but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,

scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning

like a nuclear winter that won’t let me forget.

Now there’s nothing perennial about my paradigms

and the flowers don’t grow as imperial as they used to.

Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden

and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails

impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.

I’m looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos

to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage

by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me

as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending

to a recurring dream I haven’t woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don’t climb higher than the mountain is tall

unless you’ve got a star in your eye you’re going to follow

for the rest of your denatured life. But no one’s listening.

They’re all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.

Can’t stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity

of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.

But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent

I like to slip out through and let the darkness

wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes

and encounter six thousand stars whose shining

ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone

where who I am is nobody’s business but the willows

and they’re not saying anything to the wind

that’s heard it all before. One moment you’re the canvas

and the next you’re a paint rag up to your alligators

in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.

If there’s any rafter of my life left standing

it’s as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.

One moment you’re teaching spiders to play the guitar

without barring their chords, and get rid of

those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner

like dreamcatchers they couldn’t hold a note

if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next

you’re boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there’s no assent or denial,

and the false redeemers are orphaned

in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,

I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds

bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse

without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords

the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.

No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils

among my crayons, I have been schooled

in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees

I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death

without having to turn around and go home again

or forget I’m just an organ of light that makes things visible

for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time

to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet

like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

PATRICK WHITE