LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Looking for an orbit in the ripples of rain at midnight

like a rogue planet that doesn’t belong anywhere.

I enter this page like a tent city in my homelessness

without self-pity, a vagantes wandering in exile

having cast myself out like an ostrakon of one

when my heart shattered like an urn full of ashen insights

into my own insignificance as an ageing dragon among the stars.

Scars, scars, scars, the cuneiform of my flesh

trying to translate itself into the linear A of my mother-tongue.

I don’t pair well with women who aren’t as self-forsaken as I am,

though I’ve tried, though I really did love the effort they put into me

and how I was moved to see the eclipse of God

through their eyes darkly so I didn’t go blind

in the mountains of the moon no prophet has ever climbed

without a warning not to look directly into the sun.

As I’ve said somewhere before I can’t remember

my tongue is a leaf on the wind, my eyes are clouds

in a sky that absorbs me like the vapour of a contrail at dusk.

Ghosts of hindsight, no wiser than the man who lived them once,

I mistrust the wisdom I derive from them at these

lonely seances of the heart like an expiry date

on all I’ve ever aspired to in the name of love and poetry.

A great fool, I risked it all, knowing what I was doomed to lose.

My sincerity knew no bounds. My intensity made

the sidereal ore of my Canadian immensity weep starwheat

into ploughshares that laboured to harvest

the mistletoe of the moon as if I had to cut off

my own balls with the golden sickle of my last crescent

like the King of the Waxing Year to keep my imagination fertile

and the siloes full of the dark abundance I reaped

like a reward for the lightyears of bright vacancy

I had to endure like Spica in Virgo at the autumn equinox

before the days got shorter, and the long, cold nights

doled out short straws at the foodbanks for the blind

that wintered in my mind like star-nosed moles

that shone underground like the light at the end of a tunnel.

I raised a black sail like a new moon among

the startled angels fleets that scattered

like the phases of apple bloom on a brisk wind

that blew them out to sea like a deepening awareness

of how transitory even the most beautiful are

running before the storm like butterflies

over the flatlining event horizons

of the black holes I warned them away from

like the skull and crossbones of a poem on a headstone

I dedicated to them like a bride catalogue

of transfigurative unions, alloys of paradisaical hells.

Moonboats and bottles of wine, tokes, guitars, poems

and paintings, existential sex, tomorrow with a no exit sign,

fame a passing acquaintance of mine, I threw my heart

back into the fire time and time again. I ate

the blistered grapes of vinegar that soured

the still-life depressions that censored my subversive silence

like a cut flower on a chequered table cloth

next to the long stem knife in an operating theatre

where I stitched the wounded roses of my miraculous passions

up with their own thorns to make something holy

out of nothing. Holy, holy, holy, the archival dust

of love affairs heaped like the Library of Alexandria

to keep the fire burning in the cracked heartwood

I threw on the flames like a heretical gesture of forever.

Not good times, no, never what anyone would ever ask for,

no winterized cottages with organic orchards at the end

of a country lane, but whole and crazy, resonant

with meaningless significance at the time, no intercessors

between me and my emotions like second thoughts

before I jumped like a skydiving dandelion toward paradise,

encouraged by my failures to find a place to land

to try, try again like the little train that could or a bird

meditating in the third eye of a hurricane like a shelter

for the homelessness of the words I turned out like muses

on the streetcorners of the wellsprings and literary watering holes

of binging poets trying to get it all in before last call

when they turned the eye-burning gaudiness of the light on again

and the proprietors of profitable mundanity who thrived

as our vices flourished, said in unison like a choir of cowbells

haven’t you got a home to go to, knowing quite well, the answer

was invariably no. Not in the way you imagine four walls.

PATRICK WHITE