PATINAS OF DISTINCTION
Patinas of distinction trying to green
the terminated poets.
Death drools its cruel elixirs. Perfume
from ambergris, whale vomit for those
who have the stomach for it, dung
under the snow, then come the
squabbling sparrows
to tend upon God in her rehabilitated
ruins.
Literary forensics putting flesh back
on the skull.
Red threads of blood in the nests
they build for themselves like pyres of
cosmic eggs
in the tree where the poet hung
like a poached bird, a plumb bob of the
depths,
a pendulum in a still life with
choreographed knives.
The cooing pigeons who write with
flight feathers
plucked from fledgling suicides. Water
has a voice
of its own, the blood, the wind, three
octaves
of fire. Here come the uninspired
with insulation, rebar and cement.
And even road kill’s got an
undertaker.
A telescope’s more of a work of art
with a poetic vision of the stars
all waiting to greet you like long lost
relatives
and friends, at the end of a dark
tunnel
than the barrow tombs of all these
blind, star-nosed moles grubbing
among their damp root fires
to add their smouldering voices
in Braille like singularities
to a dying tradition of black holes.
Equinoctial careerists of their
fair-minded lies,
they damn the solstice for taking
more of a stand in summer and winter
like a Stonehenge of the light
and lament the evanescence
of spring and fall that sheds them
like roseate petals of snake skin
that strike the heart like toxic sins
of omission.
The sheep are hunting the tigers to
death
and there are maggots in the moonlight
like toxicara worms eating the hearts
and eyes
out of Mozart and Liszt to see what
they saw,
to see what they did, but maggots
never turn into butterflies, and in
time,
their lives are fined for fouling the
footpath
like commas of excrement in the
aftermath
of all the winged heels that stepped in
it
like Sylvia Plath in a hive of killer
bees
making a grand entrance of her exit
like the black queen of the uninhabited
planets
in the corona of the starcluster in
Cancer.
PATRICK WHITE
