THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES

THERE ARE NEON VACANCIES

There are neon vacancies in our squalid eyes

and letters missing from our garish names

that eloped like snakes in the night

with a bridal catalog of juvenile trains.

For once in our left-handed lives

let’s concentrate on the salted cities

of the nightshift snails in the wounded factories

that scald the bolts on the cannibal cornucopias.

Let’s chalk our bodies to a sidewalk somewhere

and pretend we’re Renaissance artists

trying to put our pillars in perspective.

Let’s stop flogging the moonlight with razorwire

for rhetorical misdemeanors of mud

and see what the drowned man wouldn’t let go of

when they fished him out of the mirror:

O my love, you are nightwater and torn mushrooms,

and there are chandeliers of ruined cherries

that stain the light that sleeps in the seed

on the shores of your abandoned kisses, and your intrepid flesh

is urgent with the chlorine lanterns of the fireflies

you saved from the urns of your secret laments,

and in a fury of tangled starfish

that array their constellations

on the bottom of shipwrecked seabeds,

we have bestowed upon one another again and again

like thieves on the nightwatch among our captors

the passionate wealth of the long, delinquent voyages

that dreamed among the islands of never making it home.

PATRICK WHITE