I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES
I could look at it with sweeter eyes.
The way boys and cowards romanticize
war.
I could emphasize the honeysuckle and
fireflies.
I could say that’s not a noose in my
hand, it’s an ankh.
I could run an extortion racket of
jukebox mirrors
and have them placed in all the best
cafes
so when you put a quarter moon in
they reflect anything you ask them to.
You’ve got a beautiful face. Man
are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of
Zeus
and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.
And every occasion I can with integrity
I try to. I praise the larkspur.
I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies
that have almost come to mean
as much to me as the stars on a summer
night.
I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary
events
between people, I don’t expect to
experience again
the way he walks beside her like a
green crutch
coming into bloom and leafing like a
loveletter
trying to be a strong tree she can lean
on,
and so much is so crucial to a blessed
few
or a father walking down the street,
listening to his daughter as if she
were the Buddha
or middle C and he had to keep his
eighty-eights straight.
Born a cellular optimist or too stupid
to be a cynic,
though there are days I live like a
dog,
and I know that denying this suggestive
reality
is to summon its affirmation as if
something in the context of life heard
you
and though you’re never certain, out
to prove you wrong.
And likewise endorsing it, invites its
denial.
This is the middle extreme and it
should be lived
immensely with intensity like a Sufi
gyroscope
in dynamic equilibrium with your
wingspan
whether you’re homing to a sacred
grove for the night
and your heart is a bell of shadows
or you’re one of the good sugars of
life
fulfilled by the dawn where all the
birds
sound like one harmony, but if you
listen a little harder,
they’re all out of tune with each
other,
this one a bass run and that an
arpeggio
on a water flute that can hold a note
like a drop of dew
on the tongue of a blade of stargrass
when it wants to.
When the long wavelengths of its tears
aren’t breaking ashore like a
menagerie of glass horses.
My mystic guestimate is. In the dark
beyond
the blazing memes that have yet to
light a candle to the stars,
love silvers the harvest of the heart
in moonlight
and comes by day with a golden scythe
to thresh it,
and an understanding that puts its
trust in the future of life
like a windfall of apples swarmed by
wasps like a train
that had jumped its tracks, or dozens
of whales
were beached overnight and crushed
their lungs
under their own weight, though that
wasn’t as buoyant
as the previous metaphor, nevertheless
it’s not
an injudicious verisimilitude for what
I’m getting at.
If your passion for anything is
ferocious enough
sooner or later you’re going to meet
a nemetic dragon
though I’m sure that’s just a dream
cloak
for projecting my anxieties onto a
blaze
of cold-blooded reptiles with
inflammable wings,
and you’re going to look deeply into
the fangs of its eyes
as if you had to go through this ordeal
to suffer for what you love to prove
you’re real.
Today I lived like one long mouthless
scream.
I could have kicked stars in someone’s
face.
Too much of a black farce to be the
credible dream
of the air corridor I’m trying to
sustain
like a black hole to the other side of
the hourglass
that’s timing all this like a
heartbeat of picture-music.
Now I’m writing poetry beside an
aquarium
at two in the morning with three
goldfish
hovering in their sleep beside me like
hummingbirds
gone back to the sea as we all do
eventually.
And it feels good to see the likeness
in disparate things
and bring them together like the moon
on the mindstream,
maple fire dancing to the rhythm of
northern water,
and though it’s impossible to assess
the worth
of what I’m doing as a poet in the
twenty-first century
I can feel the compassion of a crazy
wisdom
in every feather of light that falls to
earth like Icarus.
PATRICK WHITE
