TOO DISAFFECTED TO WEAR THE MASK OF A WIZARD

TOO DISAFFECTED TO WEAR THE MASK OF A WIZARD

Too disaffected to wear the mask of a wizard

yet I don’t need to dance with fire to burn.

Poetry, flowers, stars, paint and women

have accounted for most of my spells,

and when I weep in concert with the windows,

a rosary of crystal skulls streams from my eyes

at a seance of nightskies I shall not walk under again.

You can take the grain of the world, the filth, the grit

and blur it like the sun on a cloudy day

into a foggy pearl, creative self-defence,

when it all gets to be a bit too much.

Or, like me, you can bead your spinal cord

like an abacus of new moons and hope for the best

though your friends are going to think you’re a little dark,

and even more demonic if you try to explain, but

don’t underestimate how much light owes to the night

or the mythogenesis of joy to plain-speaking pain.

Getting ambivalently old now, though my emotions

don’t seem to age, and there are no wrinkles

around the eyes of my thought like the deltas of rivers

reconciling themselves to the sea. Fissures maybe

of underground volcanic cauldrons under the oracle

still feeding sweetmeats to her pythons at Delphi.

Though the prophets I cherish the most

are still the trees in a nightwind that raves

like a crazy willow and shepherd moons

that keep the secrets of life to themselves

under an Arctic carapace of magma and snowblind turtles.

My light wanders like a drunk through an expired starmap

of gravitational eyes that drew me to them

like the women I have loved along the way

that flowered on the vine of my circuitous blossoming

and left me heavy and sweet with sorrow

like the fruits of the earth that bend the boughs

of dark abundance like the mystery of receiving

more than you ever knew you needed for awhile.

Grammar. Magic. Magician. I spent my youth

apprenticed to dragons learning how to turn

my scales into feathers. My intensities into

solitudinous islands fit for someone into sorcery

waiting for the first bird to drop the sacred syllable

that would elaborate the genomic lyrics of life

like an amino acid pulled like a sword

from the kissing stone of a lava meteor

I tried to send back to Mars by way of thanks.

To the spiritual clowns. Your perceptions are sound

but you haven’t learned to play profoundly

with your visionary insights into mystic fireflies

that like to play scrabble with your vocabulary

of archaic constellations. Are you still arguing

whether the ho logos that started the world

was a legitimate word? Or merely the slang of birds?

The mountain didn’t need a sherpa to be the first

to ascend its own slopes. If you’re lost without a guide,

things you couldn’t set out to find on your own

will come looking for you like eyes

that depend upon you to illuminate their seeing

like a star that’s never been misplaced by space or time.

It started out as a book, but now my mind

has morphed into a library of gates

I’ve walked through most of my life alone

into a high field, wading through wildflowers

and a low summer moon like the phases

of a waterlily blooming as tenderly as a ghost

breathing on the rhythmic swaying

of the tall silver-green grass like the future-memory

of a muse who walked with me here once

like a delinquent prediction of what was to come

when I learned to make my own path

through the woods and she was gone

as if the night were not a reward

and her beauty were the price I had to pay

for the excruciating freedom of my solitude.

An air of gracious danger still lingers about me

now that I’ve mellowed like a diamond in the rough

into a more fluid translucency of adamantine aspects.

When you liberate a black rose don’t forget

you enlighten the thorns as well like waxing crescents.

No heart cast out, your sorrows deepen

into the watersheds of cosmic wounds

even as your joys transcend forgiveness

like the insanity of bliss under the eyelids

and behind the earlobes of your most intimate eclipse.

Doesn’t matter if you understand me now.

You will. Every flower gets to look at the sun

and the stars looking back at them from the inside

as slowly the light and the rain shed their life mask

like the white peony of the moon losing its petals

on the black mirror of the lake that will strew them

on the obvious path you were intended to take

not the one you do. The one that whispers to you

like the muse of a wayward encounter as if she knows

something you don’t that keeps you awake at night

watching the gibbous moon approaching Jupiter

in the northwest quadrant of a window inspired

by the clarity of the fire that burns in your dreams

more lucidly than a madman who’s made all the mistakes

of common sense before he abandoned the way it is

to the way it seems realizing there was no need

to efface himself in an infinite number of parallel universes.

In everyone’s heart of hearts, a black rose, thorns and all,

wearing a mirage of water like a lifemask flowering

in a desert of stars drinking from the dark mystery

that flows from the wells of our own astonished eyes.

PATRICK WHITE