OVER HERE, YOU SEE
Over here, you see, this is where I
keep
a hospice for the strawdogs and voodoo
dolls
that wander in off the road like
spiritual emergencies
that have had enough of being used at
sacred rituals.
I made peace between my blessings and
my curses,
blew the angels off the heads of the
pins
they were dancing on like the axes of
uninhabitable planets
stuck through my eyes, the splintered
glass
of wreckless stars it took more than
light years of tears
to wash from my seeing when everything
looked so painful
and the angels were grinding reflecting
mirrors
to give corneal transplants to the way
I looked at things.
Away with the blessings. Away with the
curses.
The doves and the crows, the veils and
the bars,
and the way some stars burnt like
meteor showers,
chimney sparks, with the radiant of a
welder’s arc
trying to repair the rip in the hull of
my heart in drydock
whenever I scuttled it like the moon on
a coral reef.
And this is the matrix of the lost and
found
of all I’ve known and seen and
couldn’t find
any other context for other than the
artificial paradise
of this womb in waiting everything that
hasn’t happened yet.
There are generations of orphans here
with toyboxes full of the enduring
relics
their mothers left like endearing
fossils
of a love that never came back to claim
them.
Petrified butterflies among the sea
life of the Burgess Shale.
I keep a place for them in my heart
like a pressed flower
until they can root on their own, and
bloom
like a star they can follow anywhere,
and it’s home.
This is the dark closet where I hang my
skeletons
like a wardrobe of mannequins that have
worn
my skin from time to time like the
flying carpets
of world-creating cosmic membranes
blowing
shapeshifting bubbles into hyperspace
like alternative lives
that occasionally pop on the razorwire
of their umbilical cords
like prophylactic thorns on the
miscarriage of a rose
as never to have existed, as Sophocles
said,
is the best part of life, bar none.
Whether you’re dressed
like a zodiacal king in the cochineal
robes of the universe,
or wear the richer rags of a man who
walks naked.
And you don’t want to know what’s
in there,
but over here in this chamber next to
where
the picture-music has a sound proof
room of its own
when its rehearsing the silence of the
mystery that beguiles it
like a lyric of blood in deep
irreconcilable exile,
if you look through this little mica
window
you can see the dragons glassblowing
their tears
as delicate and fragile as the rain
that falls
like chandeliers from a lunar watershed
just below
the manic desiccations on the sun-baked
surface
of a reflected glory that doesn’t
come
with dedicated flowers devoted to
hummingbirds
that showed them the sweetness of life
in surreal replication.
And this water palace has a thousand
rooms
with great bay windows and walls that
can speak
of the great events of tragedy and
bliss
they’ve witnessed discretely in a
cosmic context,
hung with heavy velvet curtains of
blood
and tapestries of loose ends the moon
unweaves at night
into a million separate wavelengths of
enlightenment
it will gather on a loom of blood into
the narrative unity
of tomorrow when the tide draws back
like an arrow on a bow.
But there’s one floorless, wall-less
windowless room
ageless as eternity and bigger than the
abyss
that’s lit by the dendritic
candelabra of fireflies and stars
coming into blossom nocturnally like an
apple tree
on a cold night in spring, I especially
want you to see.
This is the doorless niche of my
solitude I burn in like a candle.
This is the inexplicable emptiness in
my heart
that’s learned to cherish the abyss
with open arms,
not just as space, though learning that
is wisdom,
but as living people and inanimate
things, stars,
leaves, ants, wolves and windows
expressing forms
to console themselves in the
pervasiveness of their isolation
by taking a hidden secret and making it
known
as the black waters of earth long for
the moon as a companion.
And this is where I have enshrined your
dark radiance
like a telescope in an observatory
buzzing with stars
at the prolixity of wild flowers
opening themselves up
like loveletters they received
anonymously in the night.
This is the sacred grove of the
silver-tongued silence
where the birds of insight ripen the
fruits of their longing
like windfalls of jewels in the ores of
the darkness like eyes
that have sweetened and deepened their
seeing enough
to orient the Parthenon to the rising
of the Pleiades
liberated like a flock of doves flying
off everywhere
in the ubiquitous directions of prayer
voiced by the light
of the sailing ones nursing the
catasterism of the heart
risking a more enlightened suicide
by falling in love from ever greater
mythologically inspired heights in the
depths
of my astronomical awareness of the
shining that is you
as if you were the only mirror in the
room I can look into
and see way more than the eclipse of
myself
than I ever expected to.
PATRICK WHITE
