MY BACK ACHING LIKE THE SKY GODDESS NUT DOING YOGA

MY BACK ACHING LIKE THE SKY GODDESS NUT DOING YOGA

My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga

over a sidereal painting that’s burning like a bridge.

I’ve been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound

but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens

like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow

still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.

I’ve been accelerating into space driven by a muse

of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops

as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters

flowering in my wake like New England asters

with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas

glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent

except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium

and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming

in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings

as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices

like the wind through the harps of the trees,

like the angels that descend among the daughters of men

when they’re feathered in their beds at night like black swans,

or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies

that just don’t know when to quit making beauty

out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.

She’s firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching

a documentary of how the universe works in another city.

I’m flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth

outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,

trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.

Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.

I need some rest. I’ve been bleeding like a cut rose

on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,

a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields

for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting

to show something grazing under the full moon

like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it

lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.

Even when love is cosmically oriented, God

how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything

right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds

hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.

Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher

in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye’s wholly open

and I’m casting silver nets I’ve woven out of

my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,

lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord

like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar

I’m holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.

When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn’t invent it.

I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.

I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue

with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,

dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness

as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights

and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes

on a a night of the new moon that isn’t on any calendars

that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart

because there’s never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan

that could stand up to the courage that it takes

to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes

inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless

as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin

and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly

like a discipline that isn’t for the petty or sane at heart.

The stargates just don’t open for those who are still in their right mind.

Just as the maple key to your entry, isn’t about

what you leave out like a sin of omission that’s culpably blind,

but what you leave innocently behind you

like mountain streams, and morning snails,

and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets

plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus

into a sun that only shines at midnight

like a candle on a windowsill calling out

like a poet for a new medium that’s lightyears beyond words

to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams

when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn

knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art

won’t pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes

of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her

shining in the ascendent of Leo long after

the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down

and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,

enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.

PATRICK WHITE