HOW RARE THAT ANYONE
How rare that
anyone prefers the real,
fire that can
drown, water that burns;
the whole of
the night sky
form-fitted to
your face like a skin
of
translucent cellophane
that
takes your breath away.
My heart
marches like a little drum in a vast darkness
toward a war
it is
important not to win.
The stars are
strewn like white sweet clover
along the
roads of brave men in masks,
but the true
holy wars are faceless
and the martyrs
always die alone
like
leaves without names,
like
a species that went extinct
before it was
discovered
to be the only
known antidote
to terminal
literalism.
Follow your
thoughts far enough into delusion
and they’ll
fray like ropes,
like the
deltas of ancient rivers,
like the
burning bushes of evolution
under the
mammary bell-curves
of
thermophilic bacteria,
the voice of
God, denuded of its mystery,
the magmatic
venting
of a deep sea
fumarole.
The fools
enthrone themselves like rivers
in a palace of
salt in a desert
that withers
like lightning in the root,
but the wise
know they play with their lives
long into the
late afternoon
like toys
that don’t belong to them
and will be
taken back
by the
lengthening hands of the shadows
that approach
us like slow dreams.
And what’s
the body if not
a bag-pipe
full of water
leaking out
of itself like the highland lament
of a widow in
the rain?
Flesh rises
and falls
like the
curtain on a bad play
as one by one
time ushers
friends,
lovers, family out of the audience
until not
even the echoes are listening.
Most die like
the understudies of stars
that never
made an appearance;
darkness
falling like the eyelid of a stage
booked for a
dress rehearsal of ghosts.
We’re the
flame of a little flower
marqueed for
the blink of a lightbulb
in the
nightclubs of the stars
that go out
like fireflies in our tears.
And the
mystics wait like massive coronaries
in intensive
care
for God to
come like a heart donor
only to find
she was the wrong blood type,
and the
scholars study themselves to death like desks,
and the
teachers espouse
their
ignorance with authority,
and the lovers
get drunk on the blood of snakes
to hallucinate
roses and wine,
and most of
the poets
desert their
own shadows like blossoms
somewhere
along the vine
to crush
their eyes like emeralds
against the
anvil of their palettes,
their mouths
the skeletal hulls
of overturned
lifeboats
that threw
their words overboard like passengers
to save
themselves,
desperately
hoping
a village of
magic lanterns
would
run down to the shore in a storm
to salvage
savage little me.
Everyone licks
the empty, lustrous stone,
the simulacrum
of love,
for a taste
of life,
but who can
draw their tongue out like a sword
from the ore
of the dragon
that keeps
them from the secret
of what they
are?
Who can hear
what the nightbird isn’t singing?
Little doors,
little windows,
gulfstreams of
weeping glass,
when will you
ever learn
to sail your
own eyes
over the edge
of the known world,
transcending
all your stars
like starmaps
configured
by a random
throw of the dice
pocked with
shallow graves
like the
fangs of a blind snake
that swallowed
you in utero,
mistaking your
cubist cornerstones
for the
cosmic egg?
How else can
you hope
to turn your
scales into feathers,
stop crawling
like a ripple of blood on its belly
to die like
another ladder of bone
that couldn’t
right itself
like the mast
of a waking dragon
in this desert
of shapeshifting winds
to climb up to
the urgent beds of the rain?
And how rare
to meet anyone
this deep into
the silence
with the spine
to play the
harp of their own lightning,
whose life
isn’t the voice of a barnyard bird
they put up
against their heads like a wishbone
and pull like
a trigger.
PATRICK
WHITE
