MY HEART ALMOST DEAD

MY HEART ALMOST DEAD

My heart almost dead, a mansion of ashes and ghosts,

a museum of ancient eclipses and supernovas,

the bones of old lovers hanging like wind chimes

in a shadowless forest of charred trees

waiting for mystical rain when the wind wakes up

and spreads its rumour of regeneration.

Love before and love after; even when they hear the music

no one dances. There are no colours in their eyes,

fixed as fired glass, and their tears fall

like lethal riddles on the nervous breakdown of the sphinx.

And it’s all so sad and okay they’re gone

or were never here, or stayed awhile

and passed on like a pilgrim in a dream

to a distant shrine where they could play the goddess.

Who isn’t the god of their own hovel

sweeping dead stars from the sills of their lies like winter flies?

Somewhere deep in space without and within

the light is two guitars at right angles

trying to play with one hand in harmony. And that’s okay, too,

but I’m bored with reading these well-thumbed books of pain

in isolated lighthouses mourning like widows in the rain.

There’s nothing much in the salvage of phantom ships

that makes me want to run down to the shore anymore

and look for survivors. Why shine or warn

when everyone runs aground on the rocks like abandoned arks?

There are dead elephants among the starfish in the tides,

tigers of salt lifeless in the brine, drunk prophets

giving their flesh to the crabs and grazing fish

like wafers of communion served by lifeless dolls,

whole worlds in embryo, dead treble-clefs

and riderless sea-horses. Why turn your heart into a church

for a congregation of coroners; why turn the wine

into embalming fluid and call it holy blood

and pretend it’s salvation

when the bell is already wounded

by a kiss of black lightning

that wanted to cut the judas-goat down from its rope?

The jackals of prayer are out hunting the motherless lamb

with the golden fleece; every leaf hears the scream

and shudders into a sanctuary of hidden roots, safe for the night;

every eye signs the averted glimpse

of sudden blood on the moon

and denies its own work three times at the crowing of the cock

like the founding quicksand of a compromised religion.

Let’s finally agree that love is dead, a dead bird

washed ashore, its neck broken against the window of the sky,

the dead song in the harp of your hand. You’re hip and cool

in the chemical bowers of your emptiness; why

suborn the only witness for the defense

and accuse yourself of jury-tampering

on a constantly remanded day of judgment

when the heart that wrote the law is also the pen that broke it?

Good-bye, little seed, good-bye; the wind is dying

that wanted you to root by the river in endless summer;

a riot of tender stars and lavish wildflowers

too free and full of life along the flowing of the mindstream

for any rational assassin with scissors and a vase.

No one sees the light within the light, the breath within the breath,

or knows who inked the stars like tattoos on the skin-bags of their hearts

the ignorant mistake for dice.

Maybe we could make a raft of all these scattered moonbones

and sail across a dead sea to an undetected paradise

waiting for us to find it like a flower

pressed between the heavy pages of these infinite horizons;

or maybe we could clear a space beneath our eyelids

and renovate the thirteenth misbegotten house of the zodiac

into a life-boat for two and sail off the edge of this flat world

into an ocean of light with eyes like green, green islands.

But who wants to be a castaway

in paradise, alone, an agony of innocence longing for Eve

to step out naked from the mirrorless wardrobes of the trees

where she’s been trying herself on like a spree of flesh?

Even the tramp and the baglady

begging in the alleys and backdoors of Eden

know more about creation than all these unborn angels

panicking into the webs of the landlord spiders

that slum the haloes of the streetlamps

into a fury of mesmerized food.

Even the ghost of the dream that breathed itself out like a crib-death

alone in the nightward of a silent orphanage

is the envy of the nations of the heart

that stand abandoned on the illusory shores of the sea of being

and long for passage through the dangerous doorways of themselves

into the freedom of the fool’s wilderness on the other side.

If even Buddha and the devil had to pawn their holiness to get across,

leaving everything behind,

what a feeble price is asked of us

cringing in these vagrant shadows under a private bridge.

But what’s the good of following these symbols to the water’s edge

like sacred footprints if you won’t joyfully plunge in?

O you who look among the pages of all these sages and books

for somewhere to send your love-letters to

like a fixed address for life; do you want

to know the meaning, the secret of it all, the key to your release

from all the straitjackets and hasty refugee camps

you’ve established at your guarded border-crossings within

demanding phoney passports from the clouds and the wind

to end your own homeless wandering?

Do you want to wear a real face over that mask

that fear carved on both sides like a one-way mirror

to interrogate yourself into exhaustion for an unknown sin?

When love lights the dark house like a lamp within;

in a word that’s never known birth or perishing,

feeling it softly like the folding of wings

or the breath of a butterfly on the white rose of your skin,

put an end to the long glacial ages of yourself, thaw the grim fictions

and like a stream that whispers in its running, joy

its only teacher, one word along its length:

Begin.

PATRICK WHITE