WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

WHEN I GET TO THE ROOT OF WHAT I REALLY WANT

When I get to the root of what I really want

it all comes down to the nothing that I’ve got.

If a mirror were to publish me the way I really look,

I’d look like a rootless tree, scattering all its leaves

and dropping its fruit like tears that got too heavy to bear.

I look at a beautiful woman now as if she were art,

a Caravaggio in a gallery, as my eyes are

just as happy to see, as my hands once were to touch.

Noli me tangere. Because I don’t love anyone,

not even myself. Love is a double-edged sword

that can’t dance solo, and my longing’s been

a wandering troubadour for so long now, I can

mark the eras of my life by the number of windows

I’ve stood under singing to the waxing moon as it opens up.

I’ve always been a foolish dream weaver

trying to make a waterbed out of a snakepit for two

knowing how long it takes for the flying carpets to wear through.

I’m Pictish enough to live with a blue body

covered in lunar tattoos, or play the sacred clown

so I can use my absurdity as an alibi for the loss of my innocence,

and everybody’s innocent at the beginning of love,

as if the moon were renewing her virginity in you.

I’ve lived with a lioness, two witches, an apostate madonna,

a beast mistress, one demon with juno, a couple of butterflies

that landed on the tip of the split dragon’s tongue

divining for water in hell a moment or two

before their flightpaths got so erratic I couldn’t keep up

and not wanting to fly wingman anymore,

tilted my wings good-bye, and banked back

into the depths and the heights of my reptilian solitude.

If things aren’t perfect after you get over the shock of moonrise

believe me, the night you stop blaming

the flaws in your telescope

or the cinders in your own eyes

and realize how much dark ore it takes

for a nugget of gold to cast it

like a mountain of shadows behind it,

you’d make a much better astronomer than you are now.

You’d be able to relate to the asteroids

as easily as you do the radiant rings and shepherd moons

with their alluring promise of a mysterious life

just under the eyelids of their ice-caps,

as you peer through the cracks in their cataracts.

My heart’s been savaged by firestorms of stars

sweeping across deserts of volcanic ash and pumice

by thousands of delusions arming themselves like mirages

to wound the very water they depended for their lives upon

because they didn’t think there were enough bubbles in the hourglass.

You wake up one morning and find the skull of the moon

polluting your wishing well, it’s time to pack up

and take your lute on the road again like uprooted rain.

Try for a graceful exit but if it’s a little more brutal

than your entrance, do the best you can one abyss at a time

so that when you’re on your death bed reviewing all this,

you won’t have to wince too hard

at all your futile attempts to remain indefensibly human.

PATRICK WHITE