GOD, I HURT SOMETIMES FOR REASONS I CAN
ONLY GUESS
for Sally
God, I hurt sometimes for reasons I can
only guess.
Don’t know what it is, too much love,
too little,
but it feels like I’m giving birth to
fog,
or my heart is standing in the doorway
of an abandoned chrysalis asking if
we could do it all a little differently
this time,
and ingather like the nebulae of the
stars
instead of the circus tents of these
gypsy moths
swarming the Dutch elms like fake
starmaps
that don’t know much about shining in
the dark,
but eat mini blackholes through the
leaves
that have known greener days of
radiance,
and more creative things to do with the
light.
I can see the stars even in daylight
from the bottom of this fathomless well
only the snakes and the frogs and the
fireflies
descend into to drink from the dark
watershed
of the mystery I’m swimming through
like an albino bioluminescent fish
through black ink
trying to find the words to express
this sorrow
that overtakes me from time to time
as if life’s waterclock had confined
itself
to one bucket for awhile. And time had
stopped.
It’s as if I could feel every wound
in the world
pierce the hummingbird of my heart on
the thorns
of a black rose, as if I could feel the
secret grief
of the yellow star in the violet eye of
the beautiful lady
who toxically weeps like the belladonna
under the chandeliers of the deadly
nightshade
that cures what it kills in love
administering death like mercy to put
her lover
out of his misery with an oceanic love
potion
he can’t help but thrive upon like
nectar and ambrosia.
As if I were picking up the small body
of a sparrow
in the cradle of my hands and seeing in
it,
its random extinction in the face of
the windowpane
that lied, the death of the sky. And
it’s strange
that I do, that my eyes should fill
with unprompted tears
that I’m digging a hole with my bare
hands
in the same bed of tiger lilies I
buried my goldfish in
like the big June bugs lying on their
backs
perfectly preserved out in the open on
the cement sidewalk
where I stopped to bury them with a
finger for a spade,
when no one was looking who might laugh
at me,
and mark their graves with two blades
of grass,
on my way back from rugby practise, on
King’s Street,
to make sure nobody stepped on them
just for fun,
as if death itself weren’t already
enough of a desecration,
a seeming destruction, to satisfy them
for awhile.
And it’s silly, I know, to bury the
dead
in the soil of my heart as if they were
bulbs
I planted in the fall to bloom in the
spring
like the bells of the blue hyacinth
and the white gold daffodils of a pagan
Easter
emerging like the high priestesses of a
mystery religion
that returns resurrection to the womb
of a woman.
Amorphous pain, homogeneously
dispersed,
like the afterbirth of the background
universal hiss
that miscarried into the post-natal
depression
of an emptiness that keeps reversing
its spin
on the state of things like synchronous
happenings
in the charged particle field of a
duplicitous politician,
like a ghost in the rain, like a
faraway train,
my heart’s the red lantern of a
Chinese box-kite
way down the line at the last stop
where no one gets off, and no one
arrives,
and there are no starmaps like tourist
brochures
to point out like cabbies, the hotspots
of what’s shining down upon nothing
tonight.
I can feel the inhuman solitude
of eighty thousand prisoners sentenced
to years of isolation in the third eye
of the pen
chewing on their shadows like leg-hold
traps,
and the contemplative vengeance of
their keepers
walking the night rounds with socks on
their feet
in the wee hours of the morning as if
it were they
who had avoided capture and mastered
failure
by defeating these uncaged in their
sleep.
As Robert Louis Stevenson said, or was
it Walter de la Mare,
tread lightly for you tread on my
dreams,
some like mushrooms, some like
landmines.
But it isn’t the kind of pain you can
factor
a cause into like fireflies into the
Slough of Despond,
or the Valley of Death, after the storm
has passed
like an electric chair that’s just
thrown the switch.
It’s softer than that, inclusive,
embrasive, almost
lunar in its compassion for the least
of things
from flies with wings torn off like the
pages
of a calendar, June bugs, to the
orphanage of asteroids
that nobody wanted when the solar
system
was first forming into myriad nuclear
family ways.
Not the kind of sorrow that brings
rain, but
pain like the condensation of hydrogen
clouds
that have been lingering like ghosts of
the stars
they used to be, waiting to break into
light
like the constellation of a new myth of
origin
to explain being exiled this far from
home.
No grave in sight, but still I mourn
for all the wishing wells that
didn’t get what they wanted
when they kissed the moon
like a coin they had blessed
and returned to river they had
retrieved it from
only to discover the dark side of their
luck
when it popped up again like a sacred
syllable
under the forked tongue of a lottery
ticket.
Pain without locus, pain without focus,
a blur, a smear, a smudge, an
atmosphere, an aura,
cataracts in the eyes, flowers in the
sky,
and everywhere I see the belongings of
the Beloved,
her passion for lightning and
fireflies,
scattered all over this unbegotten
house of life
like battered flowers and shattered
trees
and power-outages that make the stars
flicker
and black out, for days at a time, like
an ice-storm
in the middle of summer, passing over
the distant hills,
like a glacier following its own
melting
all the way to the dark night sea
as if water, as it is to a river a
raindrop and a tear
whether it’s painted on a clown’s
face or not,
or just trying to make the mascara of
the poppies run,
were the only guide it could trust.
And these are the green swords of the
gladiolas
and wild violet irises down by the
river
where the waterlilies and the corpses
flow by
like floats in a parade of burning
flowers
that make the river’s eyes run with
grief and bliss,
hello, farewell, good-by, as if you
just saw
the silouhette of a bird fly across the
moon
with a few beats of its wings, a small
pulse,
the brief thought moment of a passing
wavelength,
like my own, a braille dot on the
starmap of a blind star,
with the emotions and aspirations of a
Cepheid variable
trying to keep pace with the measure of
the death march
beating on the drum of my heart
like dollops of funereal rain on a tin
roof.
And what do you learn when you die like
this
for the things you lived in the name of
too long
to bear the loss of the world mountain
on the turtle of your heart when the
black swan
of the new moon has been snapped up
from below
as if the only way you can come to the
end of things
is to run out of beginnings, and that
hasn’t happened yet
since the universe first broke into
stars and went prime time.
All opening nights. Everyone of them.
And there are
scimitars of the moon at last crescent
and poems and lovers
you can cut your wrists on like the
brass moonrise
of a tuna fish can, if you don’t
really want to talk
to the ambulance about anything unreal
as reality.
And you can be rushed to the emergency
ward,
like a rose that’s bleeding out, and
there’ll
you’ll meet a nurse, not a nun, at
the end
of a long tunnel of light that isn’t
estranged from death
but embodies the female principle of
life
with a smile like a silver herb of the
moon
and she’ll insert the other fang of
the snake that heals
into your vein like a boomslang of
blood
hanging on the branch of a a chromium
tree
with mandalic wheels that wobble like
planets down the hall.
And there she’ll teach you as you
heal
that just as your lungs have learned to
trust
the oxygen in the air that others are
breathing along with you
like the Amazon jungle, fish in the
sea, the flower
of the candle that blooms in fire, so
your heart
that imbibes the skull cup of the moon
down to its lees
to read the partial eclipses of your
prophecies and dreams
like shipwrecks at the bottom of lunar
seas
that have been drained of water,
drained of atmosphere and wine
looking for signs in dry creekbeds
like the lifelines on the palms of your
hands,
must water the dust at your feet,
the stars above your head like the
Milky Way,
the Road of Ghosts, your passage on
earth,
with as many boodstreams in life
as it takes to float your lifeboat
on a bubble of the moon at high tide.
Such is life. Such is the flashflood of
love
that makes the seven year long sleep of
the frogs
up to their voices in starmud, sing
that their dream has finally come alive
again,
and the voodoo doll of the cactus
pierced with thorns,
flowers, and the serpent revels in the
rain
that falls on its scales like the
petals of a marigold
or the keys of a piano with its
eighty-eights straight
and plays such music as it’s never
heard before
its scales turn into the feathers of a
bird, or if
it’s enlightened, the wings of a
dragon of serpent fire
running up your spine like the sign of
a healer
coiled around the axis of the earth
like a caduceus
because even a single blade of grass
here
is a strong enough medicine to give
the whole world vertigo like a Sufi
at a crossroads on the moon
dancing alone with dust devils
when things begin to overflow again
like a cup, like a heart with a crack
and a broken handle,
like a watershed in a hourglass,
or a mirage in a desert of stars
because love, when it leaves home,
always forgets to turn the faucet off
like the four rivers flowing out of
Eden
to water the root fires in the star
gardens of paradise
when love jumps up stream like a salmon
coming home to the womb it will be
buried in
like a loveletter from the sea to the
moon.
PATRICK WHITE
