AT THE CROSSROADS OF MARTYRS AND REPTILES

AT THE CROSSROADS OF MARTYRS AND REPTILES

At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles,

annihilation’s easy enough. It’s carrying on

that’s hard. All my emotions are feathered

like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese,

and the occasional humming bird but that doesn’t mean

they’re perched in an aviary, or forgotten

what it was like when they had scales.

I’ve softened as I’ve aged. Molars and mountains

worn down like a planet in the tides of time and the stars.

I used to embroider my emotions in blood
on pillowcases full of razorblades that had
as many phases as the moon has thorns,

broken stained-glass windows, the shards

of shattered mirrors. I lived like stolen

radioactive material in a black market

with no flower-stalls, though I was raised

in a city of gardens with hanging baskets

dripping from the lamp posts outside the pawn shop,

with three full moons of leprous white globes

cloned incommensurately down the main street.

I buried my emotions at sea on the run

like depth charges deep within me

where the sharks and submarines cruise

for targets of opportunity. Boom.

But on the surface all you’d hear

in polite company, was this muffled wump

like a boxer connecting a right cross meteorically

with an entire species. And I’d tuck myself in at night

under the chained blankets they use

like straitjackets to discipline dynamite.

I’d dream like a junkyard dog with its head

on its paws in between thieves of one day

winning my colours like a moonrise in a wolfpack.

Ask me what the nights were all about back then

and I’d immediately say black. Intense,

voracious black. Black matter, black holes,

black energy, black dwarfs, black diamonds

on the coal road they took like the wrong path in life.

I’d look at the traffic lights, the colour of lifesavers,

and I’d see three eclipses, two for the way

I looked at things, and one indelibly patched

over my third eye like cataracts on the windows

of a black out in a blitz. Not brutal, not cruel.

But it wasn’t often anyone looked at the ore

and saw a jewel. I was a chip off the old block

as my mother used to say referring to my father,

and I’d go away for days at a time feeling

like Charlie Manson in a nuclear winter

for carnivorous losers like Smilodon

in the last ice age who would never know

what it was like to be petted under the chin and purr.

I may have been evil, but I was smart.

And is that man good, who likes you,

and tells you to get away from him to keep

the infection from spreading? Any merit in that?

If the plague rat jumps ship before docking in Genoa?

Who knows why things change the way they do?

Maybe everybody’s got a quota of mutations

to go through before the world shapes up like a pear,

the snake sheds its last skin, evolution

gives you a break on a long, lonely highway at night

and the prehensile grip of your thumb gets you a lift

from a stranger with cigarettes the rest of the way.

Even as a cold furnace of a kid full of the ashes

of the tree forts I built from stolen lumber

like eyries where I could shriek on the wind

like an eagle with an arrow in its wing

and nobody could hear me but the wind and the leaves

and at night when they came out like call girls, the stars.

That did the trick, I think. When they weren’t

mean and stupid, they were wise as underground cells

of a compassion as tangible as honey on a burn.

I loved to hear the stars roaring like dragons in the abyss

without anyone catching fire for heresy

and then watch them fixing chandeliers of fireflies

to the lobes of their ears in front of the light bulbs

marqueeing the fragrant make-up mirrors

that told them no lies, as if it were raining light out.

You could burn, you could burn, you could burn,

you could burn like a clear blue white star,

pure acetylene hotter than the indigo petals

of the wild irises with their tongues hanging out

like Sirius A in the Big Dog because of the heat.

You could know them all by name and still,

and this is the best part of any art, have no power

over them, even when you knew the secret name

of their god, and kept it to yourself out of gratitude.

Even when they were grasped by the throat like swans

by a john as sometimes happened, it only

went to prove how unattainable everything is

you think you’ve got a handle on, as they’d

slip through your fingers like water and clouds

and seductive perfumes with the names of romantic novels

billowing like mustard gas in no man’s land.

As vivid as the lilac dot of Mercury dancing in the sunset

of a modest telescope that can see light

at the end of the tunnel of death, like a fun ride

in a circus of horrors, I remember looking

through the plumes of smoke from the pulp mill

through a glass darkly on my mother’s back porch

just to get a glimpse of Wednesday’s planet,

exhilarated to see what Copernicus hadn’t,

this tiny seed pearl that never turned its face

away from the sun, intermittently revealed

through a parting of the ways between me

and the black ghosts of an ongoing exorcism.

I began to understand the dark wisdom of shining

isn’t so much a matter of what you put out

as what you take in when the light turns you around

like stars and callgirls and says, here, in this black mirror,

take a good look at yourself. What constellation is that?

Black dwarfs on a starmap, or a cabal of fireflies

cauterizing the lightning roots of your myth of origins

like bad wiring on the electric chair of Queen Cassiopeia

shorting out the fuses of the old asterisms

with the creative possibilities of less terminal visions?

Even today, after fifty years of poetry,

I can’t look at the Pleiades without feeling

I’m in the boudoir of the sibyls trying to make

a decent man of the boy in me they adopted

as one of their own and taught me how to burn

the darkness out on the pyre of a sky burial

devoted to nightbirds like a dragon that emptied

its furnace of a heart out like the skull cup of an urn

or a coal scuttle pouring its ashes out like diamonds

of Zen costume jewellery from the mended tea pot

of Aquarius on the cold side of the moon

to warm things up a bit like a compassionate heretic

with a cosmic emergency exit at either equinox.

That’s when my tears began to thaw like glaciers

on a long inter-reflecting firewalk of waterclocks.

PATRICK WHITE