SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

SAD TO SEE HOW WE BAIT OUR MIND-HOLD TRAPS WITH OUR HEARTS

Sad to see how we bait our mind-hold traps with our hearts,

put all we are on the line, just for a little love, a kiss, a touch

an embrace that doesn’t snap shut like the jaws of a great white

we put our trust in not to draw blood at the first bite.

I take people’s faces off the shelves as they pass by

like second hand bookstores, and casually browse

their life stories only to find whole chapters ripped out

and sometimes the eyes, so you can see clear through

to the other side of what there was in the way of a view

to look back at you, that someone despised, and cut out

like a number two, twenty pound, book paper death mask,

black holes like the eye sockets of a skull,

slowly eating what was left of a face that yesterday

was the peer of the stars, the great seal of the sun,

the imprimatur of moonlight on the waters of the lake.

And I know those who love love for love’s sake

more than they ever have the topsoil of an erosive human,

or the bedrock and watershed of their darker depths

where the fish, like ghosts, or fireflies and stars

have to shine by their own light if they want to walk

swim or fly the rest of the way whistling in the dark on their own.

Or just want to stand there like lighthouses

unaware of the danger they pose to themselves

when they don’t take the advice of the seagulls in a storm

and just stand there, upright and brittle as the eternal names

on an obelisk in an earthquake, or a candle

whose spine was broken before it had a chance to burn.

Trashed, rejected, betrayed, played and abandoned,

the spring equinox makes its precessional wobbling way

through ordeals worthy of an Apache warrior

daring his adolescence into maturity

like a flagellant whipped through the stations of the cross,

or the slums of the black-hearted houses of a zodiac of anti-matter

dreaming of Shangri Las of light where totem animals and taboos

are tasted like forbidden fruit with ritualistic immunity.

Bitterly estranged by the excruciating transformations of love

I’ve seen people befriend and sword dance with each other

like alarm clocks in a snakepit with what they hate the most

to see which of two assassins is going to wake up first

from the coma they’ve put each other in like a direct hit

in public in broad daylight, or more discretely,

slumped against a lamp post like a garbage bag.

Love can empower a hero in a hardware store,

but once someone walks under a ladder,

love sours into an infernal power base

that depends on the opinion of its inferiors

to sustain its paranoid grasp of supremacy.

Love cuts the power lines to the embassy

like a coup d’etat as it shreds

its correspondence in leaving

for a covert afterlife without extradition.

And fair to say, love’s the white blossom of the moon

on a dead branch that breaks into leaf again.

Love’s the pain-eater, the bliss-giver,

the sacred whore outside the Iseum,

the vestal virgin that keeps the hearth flame

alive for the lifespan of a vow of thirty years,

or be buried up to her headful of honeyed tresses

in red army ants that burn like stinging nettles.

Love’s the lonely career of a bank cashier

that talks through a hole in a bullet proof window

wishing there were no time locks on her heart

to keep the bad guys out of the hope chest of the vaults

or the morgue of safety deposit boxes

where she keeps her feelings to herself.

I’ve been in love and know that when you’re in love

there’s no outside anywhere. I’ve felt the fire

run its fingers through my hair and ignite

the fuses of my cedar roots burning underground

to flare up five miles down the valley,

a week after I thought I’d put it out. I’ve

touched the mystery of life embodied in a woman

and drank the wine of the shipwrecked hareem

of amphorae on the bottom, and been slain

by the beauty of the death that was offered me

by the black muse of a waterlily into witchcraft

and been feted like an Ainu bearcub at the New Year

before she sacrificed me like a message to the gods.

Though less immediately appealing to the Luna Moths

who want to be immolated in the candle flame

that’s driving them tantrically mad with mystic lust,

I’ve loved women who were kinder than most sunsets

and bloodbanks, gardens like nurses

in intensive care units on the nightshift

whose tears could keep you alive intravenously,

whose smiles were bouquets with something illicit

smuggled inside, to motivate a full recovery.

And the way a stone feels the sun seeping into it

in the morning, until it’s saturated with light

like the fruits of the earth, I came to love them

the way a rock with any understanding of life

comes to love its lichens, moss and columbine

even though, a moment ago, it was a nickel-iron meteor

about to put its fist through the mirror like an change of species.

Nymph, wife, and crone. Birth, life, and death.

The triune identity of the moon that gives you breath

and then takes it away like a gift you would be

better off without. A black widow spider

playing a violin as if she were rocking a baby in her arms,

and you couldn’t help but be brought to tears,

and in the blink of a third eye,

the bloodthirsty eclipse of a detached retina

wrecking the rainbow of a promise that wasn’t kept

as if the cockpit just blew out of the space shuttle.

O and then the cooling loaves of the flesh

she makes of her occult body and breaks with you

like a wishbone she makes of her hips

from the throat of a black swan in the chimney

of an amorous anaconda with the eyes of a running doe.

And I know that death is love, is passage,

extinction and renewal, is growth that leaves you

feeling like a stranger on your own doorstep,

or it was your house but there was no one left

to answer you when you showed up again

like a loveletter feeling like junk mail.

Walk away, walk away, walk away,

on your own two feet, not your hands and your knees

and on your way out, see if you can remember

all the names of the stars in the Pleiades,

beginning with Alcyone, even as space turns to glass,

and ruminate on the beauty in the vastness of things

that come together, mingle, and separate

like restless sacred rivers out for a fling

that ended up crying alone before themselves or God

as if their eyes were jewels, and their hearts

the mystic watersheds of flowers smiling through their tears.

Walk away like an actor turned audience

walks out on his own play on closing night.

Not always, but often, separation is a veil of tears

that gives its eyes up to the beauty of the light

that comes shining through them like a smeared insight

into how easily the simple radiance of being alive

to discover in compassion the sweetness and wisdom of life

how easily the afterlife of love can thaw

the diamond snake-eyes, the lunar fangs

of the most intransigent horrors at zenith or nadir

and liberate all the stars like the pollen of fallen flowers

from the glacier the Milky Way turned into

to bloom again like starmaps gone mad

and green the Sahara into a sea of mammals and grass

with ten degrees of warmth and affection

at the end of a long ice age weeping into its hands

for how creatively beautiful, sad, freaked

with motherlodes of wisdom in its darkest ores,

inspired visions in fires that put the constellations to shame

when love goes supernova and can be seen a galaxy away.

And the metaphors that proliferate like new forms of life

as if the Pre-Cambrian were merely the blueprint

for masterpieces to come, and yes, even when love

plays the delta blues with its face against the wall

like Robert Johnson, and the abyss breathes in your face

as if you were about to be swallowed like a cosmic egg

by a dragon of dark transformative energy

unhinging its jaws to consume you without pity

like a black hole that turns you

like the key to another universe

where snakes can fly and you’re not denied

some of what you weren’t granted in this one.

And looking back at what you thought had ended

you’re amazed at the dark harmonies of picture-music

that kept on playing while Atlantis sank,

like deep undercurrents of love

in the watershed of your housewell,

and the eclipses that no one heeded in time

or mistook for sunspots, shed themselves

like the petals of a black rose

emanating the fragrance of a new moon

tempting the martyrs of moonlight

to the danger of her thorns

and the elixir of her tears

we sip from our own skulls

like hummingbirds at the lips of holy grails.

PATRICK WHITE