THE IRONIC SMILE OF A SWORD THAT’S
TASTED BLOOD
The ironic smile of a sword that’s
tasted blood.
Bless the slayer who wounds me. I’ve
been
hemorrhaging roses ever since. And
bless
the tormentors of the heretical truth,
voice coaches all
who taught me to sing in the fire to no
one
without feeling the pain. Bless the
executioner
for dropping the double-bladed axe of
the moon
on the nape of my neck. I transcended
thought,
tore all the wire-mesh down from
the home-made aviaries of my voice
and released all my cages from the
grasp of my doves
in a slum of rapture that pitied the
landlords
who had none. I bless the manipulator
who taught me
how to love the joys of spontaneous
chaos without contrast
and the psychosexual sadist with the
intimate private life
of an X-rated hardware store who sold
me a sabre saw
that allowed me to cut my umbilical
cord to the puppet masters
and fly without strings like a burning
box-kite among the birds.
O, and the long erosive sorrows of an
afterlife
with nothing to hope for anymore, what
gifts
have they not arrayed before me like
wine to a grape,
enlightenment sweetening my heart
with the fluid fruits of compassion?
Namaste, my old teachers, namaste.
I sing it from a low-hanging bough
like the new moon in the heart of a
nightbird
and when I went like a wolf to dig up
where I was interred, to give myself
a decent sky burial, I discovered
a motherlode of constellations had
replaced
the dusky, sad marrow of my bones
that lay all around like the clappers
of bells
that had their tongues cut out by the
silence.
Praise be to the assassins on top of
the world mountain
and the Old Man who wheels and deals
in sex and drugs like a false prophet
who casts
a shadow upon the earth like a tarpit
where the trophies of extinction sink
into time
and the abattoirs are redesigned as
museums of the mind.
I decultified myself like a contract
killer
and rehabilitated my existence by
letting a full moon
kiss your eclipse on the lips like the
birthmark of a man
who’s about to die at the hands of an
apprentice
he raised like an orphan as one of his
own.
Ever since you died, the flowers don’t
mind coming to my wake.
I shall always sing lyrics of acid rain
over your grave
that sting the heart like a child choir
of scorpions.
And I want to honour the pettiness of
all the maggots
and leeches and tapeworms and
high-minded parasites,
who pitched their love like tents in
the place of excrement
as Yeats remarked, and spoke like
monostomes
out of the same mouth they ate and
eliminated with
for teaching me that karmic retribution
is instantaneous
and reincarnation isn’t a single
event of birth
but a kind of regressively
transformative justice
that can swarm one lifespan with many
afterlives
like a law of diminishing returns. And
that a lion
can learn as much from its unlikeness
to these
as it can from all its shining solar
affinities.
And humans are known not only by their
friends,
but the qualities or lack thereof of
their enemies.
Which is why wolfpacks don’t hunt
flies.
Out of the effluvium of the swamp I was
born into
I broke into poems like nocturnal
waterlilies
and even as the eyeless night darkened
around me
my fireflies of insight deepened their
radiance
into first magnitude stars. And all the
lunar deaf-mutes
of my scars opened their mouths for the
first time
in a long time, and my blood begin to
sing
to the picture-music of songbirds
returning
to a sacred grove of first violins
branching out
to watch the bud of the moon blossom
like a whole note
at the tips of their horse-hair
pernambuco sticks.
Praise be to the krill that nemetically
created the blue whale.
I’ve learned to fractalize the
singularities of black holes
into radiant galaxies lavishing
themselves
on billions of life forms upon as many
worlds.
Out of a single atom being told it
won’t amount to much
by the encroachment of the abyss, I
have
elaborated myself out of a dangerous
contradiction
into a creative heretic disciplined by
the unconditioned
without making an orthodoxy of a lack
of tradition
like a great barrier reef of dead
polyps mouthing
sacred syllables to the lunar seas
they’re buried in like cement.
My eyes have been guided by the shadows
of sundials
toward the light. Born with nothing
but the love of a mother who taught me
even a breadcrumb can be as generous
as loaves and fishes on a compassionate
hillside,
I have been squandering the riches of
my poverty
like a scarecrow on the hungry ghosts
of the unfulfilled
like an inexhaustible silo ever since,
growing sunflowers for the blue jays in
winter
corn for the raccoons that come with
their kits in the night,
and whatever they like for the
white-tailed deer
who enter the garden I’ve laid out
for them,
shy as moonlight, with no intention
of ever harvesting anything but the
wind
that sowed it in the first place with
the teeth
of a dragon with starmud in its heart
and mind
that brought the rain to temper and
heal
the starfields of grain that had felt
the forge and blade of an igneous heart
that knew the dark abundance that would
come
from the bright vacancy of the crazy
wisdom
that evolved out of adverse nothing
the sublime absurdity of its
efflorescent art
of breathing in coal dust like the
black lung of a mine
and exhaling diamonds as expansive as a
palace of water
to house the homeless radiance of the
stars
in the largesse of a mind you could
only enter
like a wound through the heart you
could feel
in the pain of everything else like
steel through your own.
Born like a star or a dragon in a cold
furnace of your own ashes,
when you come across a muse chained in
a dungeon of ore,
is it not a mystic act of love and
compassion to fire her up
and pour her out like gold from the
crucible of a base metal
with wings like bellows to fan the
flames
of your own extinction into the
creative immolations
that illuminate these dragon paths out
of hell
with fireflies, stars, and the deeper
insights of the night
burning like enlightened serpent sages
up the spinal cords of black candles
dancing on their own funeral pyres like
heretics
sacrificing themselves to their own
shining
well off the beaten paths of the
orthodox nightwatchmen
who make the rounds on the graveyard
shift of the zodiacs?
PATRICK WHITE
