I WAS THINKING ABOUT ABSURDITY, THE UNNAMED MUSE

I WAS THINKING ABOUT ABSURDITY, THE UNNAMED MUSE

I was thinking about absurdity, the unnamed muse

of nine in the fifth place in the Book of Changes

when the daughter of black matter came to my door again

wired and crying as she tried to smile

like tiny serrated edges of pain as she said

she couldn’t find a bar tender or dope dealer

that wanted to talk to her as if there wasn’t a black hole

in the middle of the third eye of the Medusa.

I could tell right away by the way she was swaying

like a suspension bridge hanging by a last thread

out over the abyss like a torn spider web, she had dark fears,

unenlightened shadows with no mystic noon

on her indelible sundials to draw their fangs in like the moon.

I was thinking about absurdity as if that wasn’t absurd enough

in and of itself, but she’s not the first mermaid

to sing an ode of alluring laurels derived from her sorrows

like wild columbine sitting like a hair transplant

on the rock of my skull as if I were an exemplary habitable planet

more water than granite in my attitude toward humans.

I’ve been here before. I’ve put pomade on the frayed ends

of her snakes coming out of hibernation now that spring’s here

and she’s starting to groom her image in the mirror

from the first bud of lipstick on the mouth of the rose

to the last pout of the downcast shedding of a black defoliant.

And she’s insecure about what God sees when she imagines

what He sees she’s done to his creation like a doll of herself

she took things out on instead of talking straight about it

with a spiritual weathervane to get the lightning she harboured

out of the heartwood that was always being ripped

and set aflame by a drug-induced revelation. I was

thinking about absurdity for once without feeling as if

I were going to my own execution and seeing how much easier

it would have been to have been demonized as an heretical saint

than try to bless a sinner with stained-glass paint

so her eyes aren’t boiled away like hot tears into space

in the death valleys where her mirages are immensely proportional

to the intensities of the shadows they’re casting on the new moon

she hopes to make of herself like a total eclipse in rehab.

Don’t get me wrong. I love her dearly. She’s a fashionista

on the catwalks of backalleys when the moon howls

like a vicious feline in heat with crescents she hooks in your eyes

as if she were fly fishing. Back in the day, lightyears ago,

she could reel Moby Dick into her lifeboat with her longing,

she was so dangerously endowed with a talent for innocence

but now when she calls her fan club of sailors to the rocks

the silver spoon jumps over the moon and runs away with the cow.

Someone scorched the grapevine. The wine tastes burnt.

Watered down with blisters to age the bouquet.

Who needs to think about tomorrow when you’ve got yesterday?

It doesn’t matter what we talk about. She listens to me

the way a snake listens to music like a spare guitar string

and resonates metaphorically like the tines of a tuning fork

and I tell her about a man who fixes the wings

of owls, osprey and red-tailed falcons up around Westport

then sets them free again, and she says he must be

a good man to care about birds like that but I can tell

someone shut the cage door on the false dawn of the aviary

she’s been singing in like an encore into karaoke at a nightclub

where all the side men want to be front men

and all the front men want to go home and damage their voices

while the echoes pursue their fifteen minutes of fame,

number one with a bullet that ricochets around the room

so every one gets a turn to burn like their very own starmap.

I was thinking about absurdity, sublimely,

when my light on in the window summoned a muse

out of the dark like a black mass to the candle of a Luna Moth

that singed her antennae like lightning rods on an analogue tv

still playing reruns of the way things were supposed to be.

I was trying to take myself seriously like a sacred clown

at a ghost dance of one in face paint appealing to the stars

to return me to a solitude that didn’t make me old as a child.

Everything written on my forehead I wanted them to see

through my eyes, at the other end of the telescope

where it’s impossible not to receive more than you give.

Not out of ingratitude. But more in the way of deepening

the mutuality of our estranged visions of one another.

When the one without metaphor returns to the many

some have blood, some have fertile crescents of starmud

under their fingernails, others, moonrise on their thumbs,

but hers sparkled like small town fireworks at a festival of fireflies.

Time had stopped sowing seeds on the wind to fall anywhere

and put down roots in the vernal equinox in her eyes

and you could get an occasional glimpse of wood violet

under the duff of her eyelids as if every exile needed

a home address to cover her tracks in long-sleeved zodiacs.

PATRICK WHITE