SUMAC IN THE SNOW

SUMAC IN THE SNOW

Sumac in the snow, towers of coagulated blood

for flames, spooky candelabra, what holy day

do your upholstered spearpoints commemorate

that you’ve hung on longer than most leaves

to all these clumsy hearts throughout the winter

like a young woman splaying her fingers

to blow on her nail polish with a witchey smile

of satisfaction in progress? Are you some kind of art?

Weird gate? A pitchfork in the hands of a crone

with blood on its tines, horns that gored the matador,

burnt burgundy on shamanic antlers guling

down the heel of a paint brush, a mix of alizarin crimson

and night like a maternal Payne’s grey you’re using

to paint a bestiary of enraptured totems on a cave wall?

Where are you going with all your punky torches,

what are you trying to keep alight? Did you lose

something in the woods you’re trying to find

like me intrigued by the way you’ve gone

divining for it like a dishevelled matchbook

for a watershed? Or is that just the way

you coat your nerve endings in red teloremes

to keep your dna from fraying like a strong rope

into a million weak threads? Occultly organic,

what kind of ritual are you that your arms

are stained by wine like evening gloves

up to your elbows as if you’d been pressing wine?

Surrealist phoenix in the spring, the fledgling feathers

of your tender green leaves, the antediluvian wingspan

of a creature that survived the flood by flying over it

like cometary fire in a blaze of blood.

Have you seen October sumac set its wings afire?

I wrote that line when I was twenty-two,

and trying to do the same thing you were

in the autumn rain as if I’d just stolen something

crucial from the gods. A secret of fire I had to master

before they began to miss it like a candle

as if seeing were the first fundamental of love

not even the cold shoulder of the wind

has been able to put out over the lightyears

of heretical fires it’s been trying to rehabilitate

by piling pyres of brambles at its feet

and breathing on them at the auto de fe

of an incorrigibly inflammable martyr

to its own lost cause. Burn through everything

in the dead of winter like a first magnitude star

of white phosphorus that puts the burning snow

to shame like fire dancing on the water in a jester’s cap

because love gets away with the most incredible thefts.

May the altar of the rock never come, the vultures

and the chains, the stem cells of the renewable liver

the undertakers haruspicate by then eat

as if they wanted to consume the same signs

of courage you had to steal life out of the mouth of death

like a secret syllable of fire you fan with every breath

to live like a dragon rising out of the firepit

of its own ashes like the lightning strike

of a forked witching wand with a tongue of serpent fire

tasting spring in the air like the touchy tendrils of a solar flare.

PATRICK WHITE