MY BACK ACHING LIKE THE SKY GODDESS NUT
DOING YOGA
My back aching like the sky goddess Nut
doing yoga
over a sidereal painting that’s
burning like a bridge.
I’ve been many kinds of fool before,
some just silly, some profound
but this is the work of a sacred clown
hemorrhaging in the heavens
like the supernova of a pot of gold at
the end of a ragged rainbow
still shining through the remnants of a
colourful wardrobe.
I’ve been accelerating into space
driven by a muse
of dark energy with an expansive heart.
Time stops
as I exceed the speed of light across a
threshold of starclusters
flowering in my wake like New England
asters
with cadmium yellow suns with auras of
orange coronas
glowing in their eyes. The apartment is
silent
except for the trickling of the water
pump in the aquarium
and a dance arrangement of goldfish
that are swimming
in synchronicity with my thoughts and
feelings
as if the heart of a human can speak
through many voices
like the wind through the harps of the
trees,
like the angels that descend among the
daughters of men
when they’re feathered in their beds
at night like black swans,
or stars rooted in their own decay like
waterlilies
that just don’t know when to quit
making beauty
out of the muddy deltas of their
creative bloodlines.
She’s firewalking in her sleep by now
I hope, watching
a documentary of how the universe works
in another city.
I’m flipping through the pages of the
rooftops of Perth
outside my window like a weirdly bound
heritage history book,
trying not to get any paint from my
fingers on the view of the stars overhead.
Arcturus in Bootes still flying its
kite in the west.
I need some rest. I’ve been bleeding
like a cut rose
on the blades of the moon all day, and
I feel threshed,
a cylinder of hay left out in the open
starfields
for the black horse she told me to put
in my last painting
to show something grazing under the
full moon
like an eclipse that just discovered it
had life on it
lyrically at peace with the siloes of
light in the distance.
Even when love is cosmically oriented,
God
how it loves to focus on the mystic
details of everything
right down to the eyelashes of the ruby
throated hummingbirds
hovering in a Pleiades of first
magnitude larkspur.
Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a
dreamcatcher
in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my
third eye’s wholly open
and I’m casting silver nets I’ve
woven out of
my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,
lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled
around my spinal cord
like a helical riff of a bass run on a
burning guitar
I’m holding like a metaphor for the
body of a woman in my arms.
When I told you I was a sacred clown. I
didn’t invent it.
I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for
ghosts at a seance.
I can dance for rain and war. I can
paint my face blue
with moonlight and wode, and dance for
peace, dance for fire,
dance for someone like you to step out
of the darkness
as if someone had shaped a jewel out of
the northern lights
and I was looking at it from the inside
out through your eyes
on a a night of the new moon that isn’t
on any calendars
that are going to hang doom over my my
voodoo heart
because there’s never been a curse
from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan
that could stand up to the courage that
it takes
to receive a blessing without worrying
what mistakes
inspiration might make when your muse
is as flawless
as imagination obedient to the laws of
her own myth of origin
and your art elucidates the crazy
wisdom of your folly
like a discipline that isn’t for the
petty or sane at heart.
The stargates just don’t open for
those who are still in their right mind.
Just as the maple key to your entry,
isn’t about
what you leave out like a sin of
omission that’s culpably blind,
but what you leave innocently behind
you
like mountain streams, and morning
snails,
and the long uncombed comatose trails
of sleepwalking comets
plunging from their dark haloes like
Icarus
into a sun that only shines at midnight
like a candle on a windowsill calling
out
like a poet for a new medium that’s
lightyears beyond words
to the first of the autumn stars
purring like a cat in her dreams
when she hears the holy nightbird just
before the dawn
knowing Regulus and Spica and all the
stars of my art
won’t pale in the lotus of the heart
like real jewels in the eyes
of a sacred clown whenever he looks for
her
shining in the ascendent of Leo long
after
the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle
have all gone down
and all these poems I write on the
wings of Luna moths,
enraptured by the sphinx of her
radiance, are irrevocably skybound.
PATRICK WHITE
