NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in

while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin

rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore

in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.

The holy men who couldn’t speak our language

without trying to fix it with an accent of their own

were recruiting for an army on the moon

to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels

who didn’t share the same direction of prayer

as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials

with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps

that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas

so when you asked how things were going,

they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.

I was sitting in the window of a burning house

trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,

when you showed up like a stranger’s doorway

out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell

with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold

of a black hole that said jump right in, there’s light

on the other side of sin if you go through this

like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.

Who could forget that day you came like a muse

up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage

looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse

of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage

like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound

that languished in the eclipse of your innocence

like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself

like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.

I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh

like a staple gun under a rosebush in league

with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed

as if the great mystery of love were nothing

but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs

though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong

about the moonrise, you weren’t strong enough to be right for once

without starting a pogrom that interrogated

the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months

I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.

I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on

and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp

on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus

a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.

It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest

for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm

it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos

that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms

in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots

that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if

they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music

in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.

Even the madness wasn’t enough to mollify the sadness

of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out

in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools

to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.

And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,

you were trying to set fire to my voice-box

like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out

like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell

to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id

and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.

PATRICK WHITE