SOMETIMES THE DEEPER I’M LOST THE
HAPPIER I SEEM
Sometimes the deeper I’m lost the
happier I seem.
Missing. I go looking for myself
with Mason jars full of fireflies and a
crystal skull
I send out like search parties into the
woods
but I’m getting more selective as I
get older
about who finds me. I’m a lighthouse
cowled in the hoody and cape of an
eclipse.
A sinister cardinal with a heart of
gold
that’s been burnished in the forges
of hell.
I doubt if I’m anything at all except
the bone rack of the skeleton I climb
up on
to paint new provisional creation myths
to accommodate the growing
sensibilities of the stars.
I keep tearing myself down and building
myself up
as occasion and opportunity require.
Known a few angels that got in my way
for my own good
but said, no, you’re looking for my
brother, Jacob,
and went on limping my own way with the
old demons
that keep things running smooth as the
last ice berg
of a comet in an ice age riding its own
thawing
like global warming breaks the spirit
of a wild glacier.
It’s not a warning. No one needs to
convert the Roman Empire.
The stars come out in the dark. The
flowers
come out in the light. I’ve got a
damaged heart
but there’s more art in the bruise
than in the caress.
You let the dead speak through you. You
can hurt your voice.
And what the living who accuse you of
putting words
in their mouths like cockatoos in the
aviary of a zoo,
have to say for themselves, when called
to account,
is self abuse however you try to
dissuade them.
The way of the stump is the jedi of
trees in a swamp.
I’m rooted like a molar in a lower
jawbone.
I’m the sunken caldera in the
archipelago
of an island hopping volcano and I’ve
got my fault lines
like a small delta of tears reaching
the sea
in the corners of my landlocked,
Mongolian eyes.
Most of my genes have come to me as a
surprise
from my ancestry spread out all over
the earth
as if their prophetic skulls were
trying to cover
all their bets. I have high cheekbones
like the ledges
of a precipice I’m always on the
brink of.
In the absence of a soul, I get by with
a little love
from my friends like a cowboy Zen
master
from the lunatic fringe of the West
Coast sixties.
Good possibility I’d scare you in my
silver-buckled,
black leather belted avatar, but it’s
the snake skin
of a new moon I don’t intend to shed
just to blend in
with the inoffensive twilights of a
wedding cake into yoga.
Not as tough anymore as I used to be,
but it still
gives the mail lady a cheap karmic
thrill
if I play the part. Never hurts to act
as if
you’re into the dark, nemetic arts of
the occult.
She says my shades look like the
irisless pupils of a shark.
I tell her they’re just eyepatches to
cover a detached retina
in my left eye that hurts like a spider
wincing
in the glare of the flashlight that
caught it in the corner
like a moment to remember forever on
You Tube.
In truth, I’m a hermit thrush. I’m
inspired by the dark.
I can wow you with the way I keep
my heart in my mouth like a strawberry
chocolate
without getting lockjaw from the rusty
nails of the saint
who keeps following me around trying to
pull
the fangs of the snake with the claws
of a crab
when what he really needs are the
dental pliers
of the first and last crescents of the
moon,
but his polymorphous, atavistic
perversity
isn’t nuanced enough for that. And
there’s no gold
in the albino ore of my happy, happy
crowns.
Comes a time when your body begins to
feel
like a used mattress someone’s
throwing out
like a corpse from a trunk in front of
the Sally Anne.
I work out like a hair sculptor
labouring in carrara marble
but I’m not a masterpiece of
Michelangelo,
more Moses than David, but I’m still
not standing
in the puddle of a melting candle of
body fat
at a black mass. I drink my own blood.
I eat
my own flesh when there’s nothing
else in the house
but the last full moon of tunafish in a
Mayan calendar.
This might be the Last Supper, and I’m
sitting here
in an upper room by myself, but I’ll
go without
if I must, give up my place at this
desk below the salt
like a peasant abdicating his throne to
avoid
the protocols of the princes he’s
trying to be free of
even if they say their coup d’etats
are all about love.
I’m not a tenant farmer. I’m not an
habitant along the river.
If I pay tithes at all these days, it’s
to an extortion racket
that threatens to cut my secular lights
and heat off
or the internet when things get really
rough.
I juggle things around like a balancing
act on black ice.
As Willie P. once sang before he died,
wouldn’t
be in this mess if I could take my own
advice.
But who am I to tell anyone what to do
unless they’re hurting someone else,
and isn’t
that precisely the whole point of art?
To get yourself
out of the way to let other things come
into play?
To disappear like a volunteer at an
exorcism?
To be the gold that synarthritically
mends the crack
in the skull cup of the Great Schism
that broke
like a collection plate at a Japanese
tea ceremony?
Even if sometimes taking shelter from
the storm
can lead to Pearl Harbour or Megiddo in
the valley
of Jezreel. Or Icarus trying to hang on
to his tar and feathers
like a wing and a prayer in a two
bedroom apartment in Perth,
with north facing light as circumpolar
as the wheel
of death and birth someone once told me
they were turning
like a cosmic starfish, but I took as
an idle boast
and went on burning like Arcturus
caught like a kite
in the powerlines of a sacrificial
host. Less Holy Ghost
than a last lifeboat drifting like a
lost starmap
to the jewels in the land of the lotus
eaters on the West Coast.
PATRICK WHITE
