LADY MENAGERIE’S HEART TINKLES LIKE
GLASSWARE
Lady Menagerie’s heart tinkles like
glassware.
I think of the rain as a musical
prodigy
but Lady Menagerie listens and hears
little chips out of her tears. We walk
through a squall of spider webs
suspended
like veils and bridges over the chasms
of Capilano,
and she’s lost in a fog of cotton
candy
and I’m trying to get them out of my
hair
like evil stars, black dwarfs in the
deathtraps
of their slipshod constellations turned
like dreamcatchers
to the dark side. Lady Menagerie is
precociously precious.
She’s a thermometer of sensitivity.
She sees
the dew in the morning and breaks into
a sweat
because she thinks the grass has got a
fever
she doesn’t want to catch. The world
for Lady Menagerie
is never a crying three year old
wandering alone naked
through the gauntlet of road kill some
computer in Colorado
has made of her family, or, nearer to
home, the neighbour’s god.
There are no blackflies in Lady
Menagerie’s honey.
She’s a cult of fanatical
translucency and if
it doesn’t smell like sandalwood
incense and Patchouli
it’s not the fragrance of a real
flower.
Lady Menagerie is a starmap of
chandeliers.
A one-eyed aesthete. If you tell her
that the moon’s
cratered like the pit of a peach, that
every falling star
isn’t a sign to wish upon with the
benign intentions
of a celestial midwife, that sometimes,
predictably,
they’re astronomical catastrophes
bent on her extinction,
she’ll call out the thought police of
the Vatican
and accuse you of molesting her
pristine psyche
by painting pictures on the lens of her
mind,
So you only point your telescope,
hooded like a falcon,
at the robin’s egg blue of the
chicory growing by the side of the road.
You don’t mention the turkey vultures
in pathology
operating like undertakers doing an
autopsy
in a seventeenth century Dutch
operating theater
huddled around the cadaver of a
dismembered squirrel.
Lady Menagerie says she resisted being
mistreated
as a girl, and now the rest of us have
to make up for it
because she’s a wound in arrears to
her psychiatrist
and if she’s ever going to heal, it’s
important
to be hurt sincerely. Lapwing or
judas-goat,
Real suffering is too messy an ore for
her
to get her rainbows dirty, so she
cherry picks the jewels
out of the eyes of her experience to go
with the flower arrangement she’s
made of her still life.
She draws a drape of tasteful
discretion over the albino fog
of her auroral see through curtains
smudging the gauze of sunlight
into a cataract over her world view,
closing her eyelids
like an observatory on the black holes
and dwarfs
that maculate her radiance within like
sunspots
that no one could possibly mistake for
a beauty mark.
Lady Menagerie is all for peace if
peace is pretty,
but she’s an aggressive sin of
omission against the humanity
of the starmud that has sunk too deeply
into the earthbound
to shine. Her compassion is shallow.
Her insights
ricochet off the fortified mirrors of
the blind
as she milks the cattle of the sun like
solar flares
grazing on the upper ionosphere of the
tear-shaped earth.
Beauty is a Japanese screening myth for
the lies
she tells about ugliness, Tokugawa
spring in Hiroshima.
A tea ceremony where the cracks in cups
are patched with gold
in the middle of a cannibalistic
religious ritual where you
pass your skull around like a half moon
every blood drunk lunatic can drink
from
while the plum blossoms fall all around
them.
Lady Menagerie is a private elevator
with celestial aspirations.
There’s no thirteenth floor in her
high rise
and her door has never opened on to a
slum
it couldn’t transcend at the push of
a button
until she got off on the view from her
zodiacal penthouse.
But this rose is a unicorn with a
poison thorn
she’ll dip like bella donna in your
wishing well
to turn it toxic if the hummingbirds
aren’t sipping nectar
from her happy bell, the bluebirds
aren’t housed by the hunters.
Dark physical energies, only dark to
the mind,
are the muses the body sings for with
unfabricated bliss.
Lady Menagerie is gushing like a
galactic sprinkler
with lyrics she’s writing for the
cosmic hiss.
She was hurt at one time. The abyss
made an impact.
And ever since she’s bathed in a
crater of nanodiamonds
to renew the virginity of the light
that’s been soiled by shadows.
Rage is a pariah. Grief’s a pariah.
Intensity, danger, risk.
Chaos, conviction, despair, doubt,
honest unknowing,
The dark’s a pariah. The firefly in
the dragon mask.
Aging, changing, solitude, the black
mirrors
of enlightened heretics she can’t see
herself in
she has so scrubbed, and expunged,
bleached and effaced
the dark side of the moon she’s
erased herself
like a spray bomb with a concrete
message
under a busy overpass of traffic and
trash.
I wish Lady Menagerie translucent blue
birds
that look as if the glass were crying,
iridescent
supersensitive soap bubbles filling
hyper space
like a nacreous multiverse smearing the
oilslick
of everyone’s third eye in eclipse
with west coast rainbows
that still haven’t earned their
stripes of black and white even yet.
When Lady Menagerie dreams everything
is indefinite.
Even her most hellish nightmares taste
of burnt sugar.
She would rather smudge the world with
sage and sweetgrass
than admit there are demons in the
world
who are not estranged by the rarity of
their enlightenment.
The cold goes through your bones. And
then the fire.
And then the stars put on the lifemasks
of the flowers
so they can see through their eyes how
deeply rooted
their radiance is like brittle
waterlilies shattering in the dark.
I wish Lady Menagerie the dark
beginning of a new moon.
Black Isis. No more veils and widow’s
weeds. Just a night sky
where the dragons are flying with the
swans and the eagles
and the Great Square of Pegasus, and
they’re all burning,
they’re all shining down upon the
messy starmud of earth
giving up their light like a ghost with
a lantern
come looking for us in the cold furnace
of human desires,
created and cremated in the cradles of
our own funeral pyres.
PATRICK WHITE
