WANT TO BE BRILLIANT, WANT TO SHINE
LIKE A BLACK STAR
Want to be brilliant, want to shine
like a black star.
Trying to bend space with my mind.
Trying to stop time
with my heart. Counting moments like
beads on a rosary
of skulls, or shepherd moons on an
abacus of gravity.
Though I know they’re not all strung
out like that.
Asteroids on a wavelength of light, or
a spinal cord.
Or maybe I’m just trying to bead a
guitar string
with a great black hole, or is it a
lunar pearl,
in the center of a lyrical abyss?
Workaday world
in a small town, who spends their time
like this?
Not fortunate enough to have been born
a carpenter,
I’m a mystically surrealistic, poetic
astrophyicist
trying to come up with a new grammar
for the stars
so all they have to do to express their
shining,
is say, Metaphor, and as it is in the
abyss, so it is everywhere.
Because I miss you like the main clause
of my relativity.
The focal point of all my wavelengths.
You’re the radiant
and I’m the Martian meteor shower
that’s dying
to bring the gift of life to the
Antarctic like the Leonids
did in the first place as I look at my
face in the mirror
and think it’s time for a change of
species. Sometimes
it’s crucial to sustain a few
pathetic fallacies about yourself
so when you’re under the moonweather
of an estranged planet
and a black star breaks through the
clouds like the anti-matter
of a waterlily, so do you. Funny how
the flowers close their eyes
because none of them wants to miss the
eclipse.
One of them said we’re all looking
through a glass darkly
but I don’t see any soot on their
petals,
and none of the telescopes are wearing
shades.
I like to keep things clear in the
light of the void.
I’ve come along way from the coal
mines of space
to shine through your diamond so you
can feel
a different kind of translucency that’s
eleven parts cheap thrill
in all the dimensions I can see you in,
and one,
not even you, has discovered yet,
that’s the orphan of an exile
singing to himself to people the dark
in a desert of stars
like a gnostic gospel in the mouth of a
cave
to keep the evil jinn and bad spirits
away
from the watersheds of my wishing wells
where the angels gather to mingle with
the demons like water
they’ve just turned into wine. As for
the other eighty-nine
realms of seeing and being what you
see, they’re shrines
I’ve devoted to you, swearing in
blood and devotion
on the sidereal plinth of my sword, as
I dedicate
all my prophetic skulls from the dark
side of the moon
where the crows are wiser about lunar
things than the doves,
to the enhancement of your radiance,
your love and your art,
by deepening the dark, with a full
heart, with things to harvest
that will make the abyss seem like a
silo of stars you can break like bread.
PATRICK WHITE