EVEN WHEN I'M DOWN, YOU'RE A FIRST MAGNITUDE ECLIPSE

EVEN WHEN I’M DOWN, YOU’RE A FIRST MAGNITUDE ECLIPSE

Even when I’m down, you’re a first magnitude eclipse.

No one I had rather stand in the shadow of than you.

Even at high noon, when I’m ingathered like black wheat

into the siloes of my dark abundance, and the sundials

can’t tell what time it is, you’re the midnight in my house well

that makes the stars more beautiful for having disappeared

from the bright vacancy of the day into this deeper darkness

where the blood rushes to my eyes to stand at the window

beside my heart, and be amazed by your moonrise

I couldn’t have anticipated were I a Mayan astronomer in orbit.

Or the third eye of the Hubble sifting through the rubble

of the old temples to the gods we abandoned

and left to the snakes and the swallows to make of what they will,

as if we could take any of these prophecies that have come true, back.

I’m turning you like a black diamond in the light,

and I’m listening to your dark harmonies like wavelengths

that have traversed great abysses like the gypsy photons

of a gamma ray burst with the power of ten billion suns

going off all at once in a rapture of radiance

as lethal as enlightenment. You bring out

the snake-charmer in me and I want to sing to you

as if all these crows had burning guitars for voices

and the choirs of the dumbstruck doves

were switching from acoustic to electric

when they see how you sway

like the matrix of space and time to the music,

the flying carpet of a dangerous grace,

the membrane of a new world about to explode into hyperspace.

And, yes, my ego is afraid of the agonies of clarity

it might have to endure like the excruciating transformations

of a mirage among constellations, a firefly that expires

like the wick of a candle in a squall of stars

that knows the timing is just as crucial

as the content of the light when it’s too early

for the bud of the black rose to bloom yet,

and if you want to see deeper into the dark

you can’t pry the petals of a matchbook open

before it’s their moment to shine. But black lantern

I may be, blind, empty, looking for my mind with my mind

and losing it in the glare of its own light,

and though I’ve gouged my eyes out to find it,

yet when I think of you, you fill my eyeless homelessness

with billions of unnamed stars with habitable planets

and shepherd moons keeping the secrets of life to themselves

like black pearls in the lockets of oyster shells

opening their mouths like old calendars of stone

to sing the praises of the new moon on this event horizon.

I may be the holographic projection of a fridge magnet

stuck on the two dimensional skin of a black hole

in the great watershed of the Conservation of Data Principle,

but when I’m flatlining like that, mirage, or no,

you’re the third dimension I keep manifesting in.

You’re the occult jewel that has fallen

from my black halo of comets into the sun

that shines at midnight. You’re Immersion.

Ingathering. Illumination. Dispersal. You put flesh

like loaves and fishes on the skeletons of the dragon’s teeth you sow

and every abyss that ever echoed the silence of the nightbirds

that had given up their longing like a begging bowl

is brimming over the rim of my skull cup like a full silo.

All my mirages are drowning in their own reflections

like fountain mouths of real water on the moon,

trying to wash all these deathmasks off

like so many visions of the world that stuck

like the dust of the road clinging to my eyes

like gusts of stars that make me want to weep

to polish the shining in the dark mirror

that’s looking at you like the occult light

at the end of the tunnel of my reflecting telescope

so that even when I’m down, I’m a miner with hope

buried deep underground in this chamber of mystic diamonds,

where I’m painting picture-music in the carbon

of my own charred bones, the kissing stones

of my prophetic skulls wiping lipstick off the petals

of a black rose, face paint off the eyes of all my sacred clowns,

to celebrate the dawn of the new moon pearling under my eyelids.

PATRICK WHITE