ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS

ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.

The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.

I’m holding it all together like an abandoned barn,

but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble

my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days

or all goes up in fire as I’ve been forewarned.

Don’t care if it’s nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.

I’m not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.

They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking

for a white hole on the other end of this black one

like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope

shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.

Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.

The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps

between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here

in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof

of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein

into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths

of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this

like an exorcism of myself without fireflies in attendance

or the scribes of the wild grapevines

intoxicated by their purple passages of blood.

But I’m the only ghost writer left in this scriptorium

of solitude, where the beeswax candles dripping

with lachrymose honey keep confusing their wicks

for the stingers of drones defending the hive

like the Golden Dome of Jerusalem. Though it comes

as no surprise when I tell them God’s not on anybody’s side.

Wild crab apples crushed underfoot with no appetite for war,

it’s flight or fight in the woods once you get past

the autumnal equinox like a truce between day and night

to give the herbivores a chance to squirrel away the dead

before everything slips into a coma with the raccoons

and the bears, and the houseflies cluster like black dwarfs

into a galaxy of anti-matter between the walls

of the hovel that’s all that remains of the pioneer ice palace

two farms over and six generations down the sway-backed road.

Sickly sweet, the smell of decay, like the corpse of an angel

under a tumulus of fieldstones shrouded in bracken

to keep the wolves from digging it up like grave-robbers.

And all around it the clarions of the daylilies

with their flaming swords and trumpets

all tapped out at sundown like collapsed lungs.

The lake has less to say now that the loons are gone

and the trashed cornfields are pitstops for the Canada geese

bumping into each other without a traffic cop on take-off.

Joy always receives a warmer welcome than despair

when it comes like guest to the door, but, in fact,

one can be as dangerous as the other when its car breaks down

on a lonely dirt road, and yours is the only heart

for miles around, where it can seek shelter for the night.

So how could I set a place at the table for one above the salt

and the other below. When guests come. Receive them,

knowing you can delight in a disease that intrigues you

and sleight the cure because it tastes of hopelessness.

I celebrate the graces of joy and observe the protocols of despair.

Butterflies and bluebirds yesterday. Alcyone in the Pleiades

now Algol bloodied in the fist of Perseus. I break bread with both.

Yesterday I wined and dined with the stars like a chandelier.

Tonight I’m gnawing on an avalanche of moon rocks like a glacier.

PATRICK WHITE