THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN’T CHASTENED
MY LONGINGS
The grave up ahead hasn’t chastened
my longings,
nor joy become an offence to the
probity of death.
Life’s not a protocol I’m trying to
master
to approach the eternal orthodoxy in
good form.
It’s important to bow up once and
awhile to keep
your gratitude from growing reflexive.
Time
might be the shedding serpent that was
generated
like a wavelength out of my flashbulb
of a skull,
but I’ve always kept a good enough
grip on its head
to feed it its tail with no fear of
being bit. Besides,
who’s ever known from the very
beginning
whose hour this is for anyone though we
blithely assume
we’re all living co-terminously. The
Pre-Cambrian
just as it is now existed in the
Renaissance
or the Middle Ages among the
Pre-Raphaelites.
Cosimo Medici greets Dante Gabriel
Rossetti
passing through the bus station, eras
striating their minds
like glaciers, Viking runes on the back
of the mirror.
I analyze my lust sometimes when I
think of you.
I muse upon time as a fountain and a
gutter in the same breath.
No waterclock is flowing the wrong way.
Winter stars in the heart of the green
apple.
Crocuses under the snow. Like our
senses, eventually
I came to understand that all four
seasons
are wholly focused without distinction
on now.
And now can burn a hole through your
skin
the size of a third eye if you’re not
careful.
But as Janis Joplin and Dogen Zenji
said
seven hundred centuries apart,
the lucky day is when you discover it’s
all one day.
And ever since I’ve been living this
moment as if
it were the afterlife of forever and
even meeting you
where the rubber hits the road, the
print hits the paper
like a graffiti kind of shorthand,
seems to me
written in the indelible hand of the
unscripted evanescence
that mingles my mind and heart like
blood and ink
in the inexhaustible watershed of my
art.
Dreams of you. Fragrances of emotion
from these sidereal wildflowers rooted
along the mindstream that gets to where
it’s going
with no hand on the rudder or wind in
the sail.
Are those daylilies or wild irises in
your flames?
Deadly nightshade in the umbrage of
your eclipse?
How many burning bridges did you have
to cross
in the shape of a crucified swan
to get here like the Milky Way without
dying?
Pandora’s box or the Pierian spring
of the muses,
beatific desire in the fire of the
witchcraft of love,
or was I born a ghost too late
to attend upon you like a seance,
to get you humming to my unearthly
resonance
like the witch hazel of a tuning fork
divining water that breaks
its vow of silence on the moon
to reveal the secret of life is a
woman’s body
when she reveals it like a sacred
syllable
to open your eyes down to the blood
roots of her rose?
I taste the air, and I can sense the
enormous vulnerability
that is the inversely proportional
index
of how potentially dangerous you are to
anyone
who hangs their heart like raw meat
on the first and last crescents of your
claws
like a sacrifice to ensure an abounding
harvest,
like a lure to a mermaid that’s never
been caught.
Who could take hold of you like the
moon by the earth?
The golden fish that swims from one
extreme to the other,
depending on where it’s being looked
for,
jumps into the drifting lifeboat by
itself
the same way apples fall into your lap
with no intention on the part of the
wind
to knock them down. Whenever I intuit
your presence
as if a room just walked into a person,
you’re always such a windfall
stampeding through my gut
like mass amorous extinctions making a
comeback.
Neuronic lightning flashes along my
axons
like the discharge of a high voltage
cloud of unknowing
illuminating the black mirror of the
midnight lake
that sees everything through its third
eye like a sky
whispering stars intriguing enough to
make you
want to overhear their voices like
fireflies of insight
that can’t be attributed to any sign
of the zodiac.
And as far as I can tell from what I’ve
heard so far
you could be the proto-nostratic
grammar
of a new mother tongue with the
grassroots vocabulary of a star
I have to leave more space in my heart
than my eyes
to reach out and touch as if even my
ashes
were still the green initiate of these
immolations
where the mystery burns like a dragon
in love
to prove its heretical innocence, and
everything
is only as sacred as its taboo is
revealingly dangerous.
PATRICK WHITE
