CITY ROSE
City rose, you don’t bloom like the
other flowers
the sun coaxes into unclenching their
fists, you unfold
like an ocean at night lingering in
your dark depths
behind a veil of fish hooks swaying
with the bullwhips of the kelp to the
pulse of your tides.
How suburbanly garish you look all
trashed out
like the black farce of a substitute
for love.
A poet and a prostitute. Doesn’t get
much more skinless
than that. We’re both walking through
the world naked
in a blizzard of thorns blunting
themselves
against our ice-age hearts in an
interglacial warming period.
Dying on the instalment plan to make a
living,
there’s a glint in your eyes like
moonlight on a knife,
and you’re armed to the teeth with
fingertips and lips
and hourglass hips and here you can
have my sword
even before I surrender as you know you
can
when you walk into my life like an
eclipse of the moon
with mascara running down your cheeks
and ask me if I still love you as I
ever did
and I say, lady, you’re an innate
releasing mechanism for me.
I sublimate you into poetry like dry
ice.
I may be the bullet. But you’re the
trigger.
And what’s a voice without a tongue
but a gutted gun?
How could I ever use you on myself when
the day comes
if you weren’t here with me in this
wilderness
dancing for my head like a mirage in
the skull
of a vast abyss that’s gone on
dreaming all this
like a boy with a book under the covers
way past lights out?
You give me that funny look like I’m
half mad
or I might be making light of you, but
your spinal cord
resonates like a guitar strung with
powerlines
on the same wavelength as the crystal
in your dreamcatcher
and I know your listening for
disturbances in your web.
And I remember when two roads diverged
in a yellow wood
like a wishbone the separated the song
from the bird
and that night you came pleading to me
out of the rain
to let you into my homelessness, and I
took you in
like a wet kitten with claws and needle
sharp teeth
that never knew when to let go of my
heart
like a piece of raw meat you were
always snarling over.
And you weren’t exactly the noble
enemy
I always hoped would eat it, more a
foodbank as I recall,
but you can’t always choose the
heroic sacrifice
you give yourself up to, and I gave it
up to you,
saying to myself you don’t always
need to believe
in the witchdoctor to take advantage of
the medicine,
and I’m always moved when your
sunflower
turns toward me like a full-faced
friend into the shining
and I’m the one who feels I’ve been
following you
like a starmap to the dark matter
shaping the universe.
But tonight the rose is bruised. You’re
crying
like a broken window pane over the
death of the wind.
Your eyes are funeral bells and your
body language
is indecipherable, and I don’t know
what’s hurt you so deeply,
and it’s only worse when I guess, but
there’s
a dragon in the heart of the firefly
I’m trying to be
that’s got a scorched earth policy
toward anyone
who tries to lay their hands on you for
any reason
other than lust. And though I’m an
intimate of the oracle,
I never ask. You franchise your body
like a fast food business
with crooked books, but I’m not your
spiritual accountant
just because I died before you did and
I don’t
think of the unknown as something
impenetrably mysterious.
You, for example, whenever you discover
the young woman in you that isn’t
looking
for vengeance upon herself for lying
about
the things she wanted to be to her
dolls.
Voodoo dolls or not. With marbles or
buttons for eyes.
And you abuse her like a country mouse
for reminding you
how you used to live off the crumbs of
everybody else’s dreams
but now you’re a cultivated rose of
bling and tinfoil
that wins all the garden shows they
weed in Eden
like the bad girls from the good, but,
off-stage
when there are no lights shining on
you, and the rose
wipes her lipstick off like blood on
her sleeve,
I’ve seen you mesmerized like a stone
bird on a fountain
staring into the eyes of a snake pit of
venomous regrets
for the way you abuse your innocence as
if
it were subject to experience and time,
all used up,
too much scar tissue over the wound
that kept its mouth shut
like dawn over the ashes of a dollhouse
you burned to the ground.
Did you ever go back in for your dolls?
It’s not too late, you know. It’s
never too late
to stop treating yourself like a straw
dog at a black mass.
It’s not a religious ritual. It’s
just a bad habit of misperception.
And however much sulphur dioxide there
is in the acid rain
of your tears, the rain still doesn’t
fall in pentangles
and the stars and the wildflowers in
the abandoned fields
still don’t attend opening night
rehearsals
to improve their appearance on the
catwalk of the zodiac.
They’re still walking the same old
fence they always were
like gold medallists on a balance beam
at the Olympics.
And I can see that the moon, as it does
in you,
still dies inside them like a swan at a
ballet except
you come to the climax of the dance
dressed in Satanic black.
And that’s just the scarlet letter of
a dead alphabet
you’ve carved into your forehead with
a fingernail,
not the Rosetta stone that’s going to
open you up to yourself
like Egypt with the eyes of a mood
ring. O yes,
I know how many thresholds you’ve
crossed,
how many taboos and cracks in the
desolate sidewalks
you’ve stepped on to break your
mother’s back,
but she wrote her alibi on a gravestone
a long time ago
and she’s well beyond anything you
can do to disappoint her now.
Born into sin, isn’t death a drastic
enough measure to take
to clean the slate with the tears that
should have been shed
while we were alive? The roots that
should have been
watered with stars, the hands that
should have been revered
like gnostic gospels even in a time of
persecution and exile.
Maybe the blossom was betrayed by the
roots
and the fruits were ruined. Who can say
for sure
whether the tree’s a strong rafter or
a coffin door,
or you’re just punching holes in your
own lifeboat
to be spiteful, but I suspect you’re
tired of sinking by now.
Three bells and all’s not well. And
you remember
how you wanted to fly with the
effortless beauty
of an arrow straight through the heart
of a falcon prince
who came when you called out like a
night bird
for someone to hold you against the
dark like a door
love leaves ajar like the place in the
book
where you left off reading and started
dreaming again.
You’re taking a bath in the squalor
of your own grave to renew
the ambiguity of your innocence as if
you were
holding your breath underwater until
you turn blue,
but there’s an expiry date that
doesn’t matter if you’re late
and you don’t need a passport to walk
through the gate unchecked.
The mindstream doesn’t cling to what
it reflects.
It clarifies itself like flowing
diamonds in its own running,
like crystal skulls thawing like honey
in a blast furnace.
You can project yourself imaginatively
like clean water
on the moon, and still feel the rain is
a message
to someone else more like a watercolour
than you are an oil
but before you begin painting in pain
again,
look in the mirror. Isn’t that
mascara running down your face
like a black willow rendered in sumi
ink by a sad geisha
or is that just you washing off another
eclipse
like a dirty window you’ve got to
break to look through?
The light will find you all on its own
if you stop
using the night to cover your eyes with
shadows
when there’s something you don’t
want to look at
that shines like a waterstar in the
face of a sewer
blindfolded to the beauty and grace of
its own imperative to change.
Be that as it may. Just because the
exit’s false
doesn’t make the entrance unreal, and
I can see how
you’re looking out the window for
something
to fix your gaze upon like a reflection
from a bridge
you let go of like the hand of someone
you loved
to wear this blossom of a painted life
mask
like a screening myth for the reason
you let her drown.
Hurt, and lovely, and sad, battered
down
like an orchid in the aftermath of an
unexpected storm,
you make me want to cry for everything
in existence
all at the same time, for what happens
to us here.
I feel my vulnerability in yours.
Half-insane for a moment
looking out the same window you are I
become the pain.
I embody the sorrows of the trivial and
sublime alike
and there’s no one to scream out to
who isn’t wounded themselves
and I’ve died repeatedly not to make
a philosophy out of love
just to satisfy death with a verifiable
alibi for what
I was doing while I was alive, and none
of it
lessens the sum of our suffering by a
single tear.
We can put cushions around it and bank
it up with dolls
and throw a warm blanket over it and
kiss it
goodnight on the forehead as somebody
else should have done
when childhood was wholly the timing of
the content,
and go to bed with a will like a broken
arrow
and a heart bruised like the blue rose
of a starless sky
waiting for some small light, even a
firefly of insight,
even a black hole on the negative of a
starmap back to our eyes
to emerge from all this like Venus
sinking down
over the darkening hills of her eyelids
as if to dream
in the solitude of her beauty of
rescuing her voodoo dolls
from the fire she threw them into,
casting spells
like the shadows of moonless nights on
earth
when pain had no value, and love was of
little worth.
But in the face of it. Staring it in
the eye
like a star or a reptile, trying not to
lie like a placebo
to the spiritually hysterical about to
give birth to the new world
out of their apocalyptic expansionism,
not minting
cosmic keys to things that are not
necessarily locks,
mustering my dusky yellow blood into
the fire sage of a dragon,
and foregoing my penchant for
self-destructive optimism,
the deepening of the terrible silence
of our suffering
is the only reason I can come up with
that our burning doves
don’t come back like loveletters we
write like waterbirds on the wind.
There’s a silence within that is
slowly ripening into the new moon
of the black pearl we’re making of
the dirt in our hearts.
It’s not a third eye, or a rosary you
can say the names of God on,
not even a sacred syllable of a secret
that keeps to itself,
but something distinctly human that
sacrifices its suffering
on the dark altar of the absurdity
there’s no metaphor
to cling to like the lifeboat of a
shipwrecked paradigm.
That everything’s been left
relentlessly unexplained
as if only the silence were pure enough
to receive our sorrow
the way our roots can’t conceive of
the fruits of their labour,
or the sea receives the rain like a
mirror of eyeless tears.
Sweet one, sleep without redressal. in
the quietude
of what appears to include you in its
innocence
like sugar in apricots when the locks
fall away like ripe fruit.
The rained out peonies weeping their
eyelids away
like phases of the moon by the open
gate always
look ravished by the wind’s
indifference to bliss.
The nightwatchman’s in the next room
playing
solitaire with the scars of a wound as
old as the stars.
PATRICK WHITE
