PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

PUTTING IT DOWN TO SOME IMPACT ON MY HEART

Putting it down to some impact on my heart

in my sleep, this sunny afternoon edged

with cold anger like a residual hangover

from some dream I don’t remember having.

Did you visit me again last night like an albino nightmare?

Was Venus in Virgo? Were we unaligned?

Was I talking through a window embedded

in heritage brick? Did I mutter things at the sky

that were indignantly unjust without meaning to?

I wonder if the stars after all these light years

they took to get to my heart, are completely happy

with an afterlife without flowers or hermit thrushes.

Who knows why anybody looks back on their past

and risks turning into a pillar of salt,

or returning to the dead by default

but did you let go of my hand again last night?

I’m sick of your absence always being the prelude

to my dismemberment. And those eyes

that always rebuke my poverty as if they’d

been bathing in jewels. Those spiked stars

you bait like red meat you leave out for polar bears.

The brittle sensibilities of a neglected ice age.

Did you break your windows again like a frozen lake

to get at the waters of life in your mindstream?

I hate it when the light goes unappreciated

but this soulless blue of a late autumn afternoon

is beginning to get on my nerves

like a Hallmark greeting card that’s chewed

all the real flavour of life out of its feelings like gum

masticating its words for public consumption.

I feel I’m letting some prophecy down somewhere

as if I were misreading the tea leaves at the bottom

of the moon cup of my prophetic skull.

The gash of first crescent early this morning.

A lunar hair on the shoulder of the dawn that swears

it wasn’t untrue to the sun the Luciferian morning star

is leading on as if a new fool were born every day.

No matter. By the time I was ready for sleep

I expected a lot less of you than anyone’s ever delivered.

And I’ll be ok in a while, and you’ll hate me for it

when your heart turns into a toxic arrowhead

that didn’t have any effect. Just this Clovis point

to say you’d been here once and been wiped out

with the larger mammals of North America

in the dust bowl of another sudden flash freeze.

PATRICK WHITE