THE SERPENT
The serpent sits enthroned
at the top of its own
stairwell,
helically reposing in
its own empyrean
like an August hawk
coiling up its own
thermals;
its fangs, a stargate
to an unknown afterlife,
emancipation,
and the jewel of its
head,
the first stone thrown,
a small planet without
the eyelid of a sky,
a nugget of mystic
uranium,
looped in a turban of
orbits,
a sacred arrowhead
that flys from itself
like a bow
drawn back long before the
wind
knew its first feather.
Lethal healer,
the sword that kills is
the sword that saves.
This morning,
the drubbing of the rain
on a tin roof,
the hiss of traffic
flaring like matches down
the sleek ashphalt,
if I were to say
I want the emotional life
of space,
I don’t know if I’d
mean it,
but I’m so weary
of being this slow crisis
of a bird
mesmerized by the swaying
eyes
of the black lightning
that has caught me in the
net
it weaves of my own
nerves,
I want to douse my heart
in the next providential
tide of tears
like a torch I put out in
the night
to see better in the
dark.
I asked for wings
and my spine was adorned
with fire.
I asked for water
and I’m a fish on the
wind.
and now this desert I
hoped to remain,
a craze of sand,
has grown teeth
and is overgrazing the
starfields like pyramids.
I don’t think
I will ever recover
from the wound I received
like the hidden twin of
the moon,
trying to love the world,
myself, women, people.
Every word was a road, a
pulse, an eye,
a drop of blood
I could ride to the end of
and beyond
into the implacable
subtlety
of my own empty, ageless
temples
where even the silence
isn’t ghost enough
to conjure a medium
to jar the table as a
sign,
and death is buried in its
own vacuity
like an embryo in a mask
without eyes.
I was bound by my own
boundlessness,
my nerves, wicks in the
abyss
that enhanced the
darkness
by cleaving me like a
tree
vision after vision,
another world
with every blink of the
eye
that wiped the mirror
clean of me like an ax
until I understood
that even the most
enlightened watersheds of wisdom
are just a smear of
perception
on the least drop of that
splendor
I went looking for like
a cloud
saturated with the ancient
seas of the moon
that was covered by my
own looking.
I lay at the bottom
of my oceanic odyssey,
trying not to sink,
but I wanted to give
something back
for what I felt I had
received;
not an ethic or a
metaphysic,
but a spontaneous action
of the blood
that remembers it was once
a rose.
I wanted to return spring
like a water-key to the moon;
I wanted to harvest the
shadows
of my own non-existence
and break bread
with the famine of
ghosts
that came like royalty to
beg food from their servant,
blind doors standing on
the thresholds of awareness
asking me to address
myself
to the terrible openness
of their unanswerable
need.
I have eaten my own
ashes
in the furnace of every
star
I have ever looked upon.
I have drowned in the
wells
of the faceless,
fathomless mirrors,
and every woman I have
ever drunk from
was a grail with an
enigmatic black pearl in it
lustrous as the moon in
eclipse.
O promises of bliss
that tuned the webs of
the spiders
like a guitarist with
perfect pitch
to
the frequency of my spinal cord
that
I might entangle a star
in the silk of my
conceiving;
that I might seize a
firefly
in the fangs of my
thought
and taste the honey of the
lantern
that lit my dark corner
in the era of the
moment.
O sweetest of lies to
ripen with longing
like the eyes of a child
in the darkness
far from home.
I was trying to find a
road
that fit my walking like
shoes on a mountain;
I was trying to walk on
water with mystic crutches;
I was looking for an arrow
dipped in the blood of a
serpent with wings,
set aflame by a demonic
star
and feathered by spiritual
fire
to restring me like a bow
severed like the branch
of a sacred grove
by the oracular blade of
the moon.
I was too deeply sheathed
in the truth
to appreciate the arcane
sagacity of my lies.
I stood like a shadow in
the burning doorway of my own fire
and looked deeply into
the night
to answer my own
knocking
like the echo of a
stranger in the darkness,
walking away from someone
who didn’t know
how to greet himself.
I was a tree crucified on
a man,
a vandal in the shrine of
the moment,
bleeding like
stained-glass,
a rosary of vertebrae and
skulls
reconstructed in the
future museum of now
I played myself into
like a funeral plan.
Now everywhere the wind is
a pilgrim,
I leave my heart like a
shrine
I will never return to.
And the sadness, and the
solitude
and the vastness of my
insignificance
is the shadow of a bird
on a cloud.
The only way to perfect my
defeat
was to sit at the feet of
my most cherished delusion
like a rootless flower
watching over a coffin,
then rise like the wind
from the rubbish of the
shedding,
the loneliest pillar and
sole cornerstone of the sky.
Now my apish profundities
no longer crack fleas of
light like stars
I picked out of God’s
burning beard
with the forceps of the
moon.
Now I am infested with
constellations.
I no longer turn the
pages of the waterlilies
like the holy books of an
inspired swamp.
I no longer seep down to
the river
to drink from the moon
like a serpent at the
water’s edge
and
watch the panicked angels jumping
from
the reflection of an uncrossed bridge
that collapsed like a
covenant with hell.
I no longer shred my
heart
like a secret document
in an abandoned embassy of
swans
looking for asylum
further south,
tormented by the
unattainability
of a woman’s beauty,
looking for sanctuary
in the ashes of a black
sail
that flared like a poppy
with passion
at every gust of desire
that silvered the
trembling grass
with sidereal aspirations.
Why bother to laminate
your lovers, your legends?
Let them go like autumn
leaves and smoke,
the last breath you took
before you were interred
like a scream in the
larynx of a deaf-mute,
a foreign currency you
couldn’t spend at home.
Naked is the only way to
dress for the rain,
but it doesn’t matter
which
from the wardrobe of all
your many lies
you wear to the fire that
waits for you
like a fledgling waits
for its plumage.
And this is a long river
and this is a long day
and a night
and maybe only the
silence is listening
to what the stars are
preaching
from the pulpits of the
flowers,
and this that says me
now
is just the promo for the
intensive care ward
of a new religion
the founders are always
the first to betray;
but when I truly let go
it was my falling
that taught me to patch
my shoes with the sky.
And have you come this
far,
passed through this many
gates
for wisdom, compassion,
freedom,
wandered aimlessly until
you could not tell
the stars from the sand,
the journey from the
arrival,
suffered worse than all
the things you cannot say
until you forgot what you
were looking for
in the first place,
until
you despised what you
craved the most?
I don’t remember how
long I slept
before my dreaming woke
me up
and I realized
no fool could defame my
solitude
and that life
was only the story of a
scar
looking for the knife
that inflicted it
like a shadow
in the forsaken valleys
of
the mountains of the moon.
Looking
for a pearl of light
I had to plunge into a
darkness
deeper than anything
my eyes had
ever given birth to before.
I had to
swallow the key before I could open the door.
PATRICK WHITE
