I NEVER ASKED YOU TO LIE

I NEVER ASKED YOU TO LIE

I never asked you to lie.

I never insisted upon the truth.

I was wholly absorbed in studying

the comparative mythology of your alibis

as they came to me like mystic revelations

dropped off in the wrong mailbox

like the Koran addressed to Muhammad

that was meant for Ali. At least

that’s what the angel said through its eye-teeth

when it came to the door and I asked

Why me? And it left me a flightfeather of light

to read like a glossy flyer when I got a chance

to sit in a room alone with a votive candle

and watch the dawn advance

like a lamp in the niche of an indigo window.

I might have momentarily hoped

I meant something to you closer to the heart,

but after awhile I thought Nietzsche

would suit you as well, or Spengler’s

Decline of the West and got on with my art

like a madman with things to express.

Better to be loved than right most of the time

and who could argue with a silence

that wasn’t a sin of omission, to prove it wrong?

So much I could say swimming in tears

to the polyglot candle on my desk,

speaking in oracular tongues to the stars

for the both of us waiting for Venus

to come up just before the sun exorcised

the graveyard shift of the ghosts

that worked so hard at becoming us.

I could hear the picture-music of your soul

dreaming in the next room like rain

on the windowsill of an ivy-covered asylum

and the eternal recurrence of the leitmotif

you kept trying to take in your mouth

like the light of the stars catching up to their tails

or an ouroboros spinning its wheels in the starmud

as you played long sad wavelengths

of your red shifting thematic life schemes adagio

on the bull horn harps of your golden larnyx,

expecting different results for the same credentials

over and over and over again, like the pulse

of a Chinese water torture tapping on the forehead

of your crystal skull like like an impatient finger of rain

on your windowpane to get you to sign the confession.

You were always Mata Hari in front of a firing squad of stars.

You gave me your body like a foreign agent

spying on my mind for critical secrets

you could pass on to the Kaiser like antidotes

to the mustard gas of toxic English unicorns.

I used to mutter false information in my sleep

but I never liked misleading you that way

but no leaks worth listening to, no charismatic sex.

Now it’s thousands of light years hence,

and I’m still a lyrical existentialist

trying to make sense of the essential mystery of it all.

O, how I would have loved to have danced with you

without the encumbrance of a disguise.

The petals of five life masks open

and one face blooms like a nocturnal waterlily

the stars return their eyes to like the lunar dew

of a fertile enlightenment experience

that bales the mangers and drinks from the grails.

Bereaved wise men have been known

to cross deserts to satisfy their astronomical curiosity

in spiritual hourglasses going supernova

like wine glasses smashed against the walls

of Greek weddings dancing for joy

on the splinters of their tragic chandeliers.

And the Buddha, too, sat still in the presence

of the morning star, supremely assured as I am

that he’d attained absolutely nothing

from the shining of the clear light of the void.

Yet how beautiful you were, and what

a promise of bliss was missed by this delusion

of what is and what isn’t the true identity

of emptiness in an exuberantly abundant world.

And though I keep winding up the wellsprings

of the waterclocks to keep them running on time

like train whistles keening across town,

and things have grown momentously pendulous

since you left, like a water drop hanging

from a blade of stargrass trying to be a lamp post,

I can still regret, delinquently sitting here by myself,

trying to have a conversation with a candle on death row,

waiting to be eradicated by the dawn

as a few remaining winter birds begin to tune

the trees up like shipwrecked guitars

there are no sequels to a mirage however

many lunatics fall to their knees in the cults of the moon

and pray it wasn’t retroactively over so soon.

PATRICK WHITE