ONE SIDE OF MY FACE

ONE SIDE OF MY FACE

One side of my face what the world

looks like on the inside,

a mindscape I’m walking through

that changes shape whenever I do.

And the other just a clay bust of the moon

that somebody keeps working on

like erosion in Death Valley.

But tonight I’m tired

of looking for signs of life

where there are none.

The air is as smudged with cigarette smoke

as the dirty winter windows

I’m staring numbly through are.

Infra red aura of the town lights

reflected off the big-bellied clouds

as if something were burning

across the highway as those

who are awake yet listen

to the Doppler Effect of the sirens

to know if they’re still safe or not.

A pastel green wall

through an open window

across the street from here.

But I haven’t seen anybody in it

for nearly a year since I moved in here

where every second thought

ends in so what ?

Like a cynical kind of cowboy zen

that’s had it up to the proverbial

with koans and haikus

that provide you with spurs to enlightenment

but no winged horse

that isn’t already a corpse

lying by the side of the road like roadkill.

My mind soars like a turkey-vulture

when my heart

wants to swim like a swan

down river with the stars of the Milky Way

as I did one suicidal May in a six man raft

with no rudder or guide

in the spring run off of the Ottawa River

to raise money for

the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

But the cheap thrill

of risking my life for virtue

has worn off like chalk on a pool cue

and if light is the function

of the body of the lamp

right now I feel like

a blackhole with a bad complexion

that’s gone snowblind

in the glare of a computer screen.

I figure if I stare back long enough

sooner or later

one of us is going to blink

and discover what’s on the other side

of what the other one thinks

it’s looking at

when it puts an hourglass

up to its eye like a telescope

to know what time it is

and how many light years there are

between solitude and exile.

Between staying in and going out.

The tin gas pipes crackle

like ice breaking underfoot

or a bird in the chimney

trying to peck its way out

of a black cosmic eggshell

that’s as starless as hell on the inside

and tarred and feathered on the other,

assuming, of course,

it ever does crack the koan

in the liberty bell of enlightenment

and emerge with the wingspan of a dragon

into a room full of cigarette smoke

and patchouli incense

rising like the ghost of a white horse

as if someone who just fell off

the cutting edge of the flat earth

were trying to get on again like Icarus

waning in a wax museum on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

LOVE COMES IN UNASKED LIKE A FLASHFLOOD

LOVE COMES IN UNASKED LIKE A FLASHFOOD

Love comes in unasked like a flashflood to a dry creekbed and suddenly there are toads that have slept for seven years, raising their randy voices to the stars like bass clefs of the earthbound who’ve just discovered water on the moon. Crazy dream with first violins that bloom like wild columbine. Magnetic tangerine with sunspots. Encyclopedia of prophetic birthmarks. Every blink of the eye yarrow sticks thrown down to read the Book of Changes. Reluctant fireflies appear after the sword dance of the lightning to gentle its fear of the dark with nightlights in the long shadow-filled halls of the heart. You taste the wine. It gets drunk on you. Someone lays cool herbs that shine from the inside out like albino fish in the sunless depths of a long eclipse, and you wake up out of your coma of normalcy, and it’s not the same planet that left you to die by the side of the road. There are wiverns singing in the locust trees and thorns that had lodged in your heart like the last crescents of the moon it was easier to leave in than it was to pull out, are dipping themselves in the inkwell of a rose like arrows dipped in the antidotes of loveletters with no known cure. Suddenly you’re a junkie and someone mails you the key to the medicine-chest of the Amazon like love potion number nine. And you come to love the sword like the wound between you and your beloved because when you lie down with the dead and you’ve broken your blade, your vow, your taboo, like a threshold that is more obeyed in the crossing of it than standing in the doorway, because love is inspiration and inspiration abhors obedience the way nature despises a vacuum, when you get up, everyone wakes up with you with the taste of a dream in their mouth they didn’t think to have this side of the grave again. Golden apples from the orchards of the western Hesperides. Candles in vulnerable corners, braver than stars, tilting at black holes in the center of galactic windmills. Waterclocks going over the falls in intimate kayaks like splinters washed out of your eyes in the tears you shed by yourself in the back yard in front of the grape hyacinth under the black walnut that has kept the abandoned garden hanging on under its wing for years. And you confess quietly under your breath, because you are you and everyone, how hard it is to believe something true and terrifying as love for the moment, when your longing takes its tail in its mouth, and the circle remains unbroken for eternity become palpable as flesh and blood, and dares you to risk being happy, or deepen your death with cowardice and regret you didn’t jump toward paradise in a windfall of singing apples at sunset.

Carding the snow out of your hair as if you were dying it over a sink in front of a mirror, you apologize for coming over this late, but you just couldn’t wait to confide in somebody, you were in love with a younger man and it made you feel like a queen cobra that’s having an affair with a flute player that makes all the right moves and isn’t afraid to kiss Medusa on the lips. And for the first time in a long time it’s easier to hold back your toxins than it is your tears. To wear that old boa of swans’ feathers you’ve kept in the closet since you gave up stripping in vaudeville and started wearing scales with low heels to maintain your sense of balance in an afterlife beyond theatre. And you’re afraid to make a fool of yourself like a graverobber breaking in to a cradle to steal the golden death mask from the face of the living. And you say you’ve aged. You’re not a raving beauty anymore. There’s more ore than diamonds in the mine. What do I think of the colour of your lipstick? Too timid? Or does it make you look like an emergency exit in a conflagration of poppies that are trying too hard to keep the fire alive? You can remember when your flesh was as tight as a plum, but now you say it sags like a used condom, a prune, the flag of a dead daylily at halfmast, someone taking down the sunset at the end of summer like a sail that’s finally reached port like an empty lifeboat that had to throw everything in loved overboard along the way to nowhere. And I notice you’re smiling a little wider and more often than you used to like the chrome bumper of a curvy fifties cadillac gleaming in a showcase window. And it’s disarming and cute and strangely charming to see the old snakepit you used to say you were, growing girlish about your hairdo, to see Medusa rooting flowers in her locks, trying to look wilder than the zoo you’ve kept yourself in for the last fifteen years. And you ask me, and I can see the tenderness and vulnerability of the question in your eyes and the anticipated answer you fear like a truth that bruises and bullies your lies. Am I beautiful? And I say, lowering my voice to the whisper of a sacred syllable that makes all the difference between life and death. Yes. You are beautiful. And if it’s the end of summer for you, though no season is younger or older than another, and each of us have to taste death at least once a day to know what hour it is, I say not all the flowers bloom at once, and those that bloom last are more beautiful in our eyes because they don’t hold back. They give it all they have to give. They don’t throw themselves like morning doves and loveletters into the fires of autumn as if the moon rising among the delirious willows had turned its head away from their beauty, its ear from their lyrics, like the urn of a skull full of ashes. Lady, put your make up on like Babylon, deadly nightshade or the lapis lazuli of the guardian bulls of the sacred gate into the daughters of night dancing like tendrils at an occult initiation into the sorcery of veils. Take that hourglass off your back, and cast your nets wide as the dreamcatchers and constellations of a starmap like the blueprint of a black Taj Mahal deeper than night in the esoteric teachings of the undeniably sensual. Both sides of the moon. You say they’re wrinkles, hieroglyphs in a dry irrigation ditch that used to be the Nile, but I see the deltas of a myriad rivers flowing into the mystic night seas of your deliriously enlightened eyes. And that cold stone of a moon you rolled over your tomb in a borrowed grave, now a giddy pin ball bouncing off the stars, as bells and whistles go off in a riot of lights, and you’re laying your soul out like dresses across the bed, not knowing which of them to wear. Wear the one that makes you feel like a snake shedding your skin as if the moon were renewing her virginity in the grave of her lover when the candles close their petals for the night. Remember that pole dancer that could once wrap her body around the winged axis of the earth like a snake that could heal or hurt? Have you made caged birds of all that passion and power? Are you still the sibyl of that coven of doves that used to rise up to the stars like ashes out that fire you danced around naked in the wilderness? Have you stepped down like the goddess of an abandoned temple, afraid of letting love lay its tribute on your stairs? And no, your ass doesn’t look like the rump of a galleon in the Spanish Armada. You’re still a sloop of a woman. You’re still an English fire boat with the figure of a mermaid that can lure an invasion fleet up on to the rocks anytime she wants. And if you’re afraid to be wicked in the name of delight, what are you evil in the name of, if it isn’t love?

PATRICK WHITE