IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME

If you were to ask me to sweeten your suffering

for a night or two. I could do that. If you

just wanted to pass galactically through my mind

drawing off stars in your train as you passed

as if you were picking wildflowers in waist high grass,

believe me, darkness, I could do that,

and I don’t say this lightly, given how much danger

your beauty adds to the night, but that would be ok too.

I don’t know if it’s a function of the resonance between us,

but the dust on the blue guitar in the corner

is beginning to glow like the nebula in Orion’s belt,

and strings that were boiled once too often

to renew the vibrancy of their flatlining are humming

something funky and upbeat they want me to put the lyrics to.

Been awhile since the moon flowered on these autumn boughs.

And to tell you the truth, starling, you scare me a bit

stepping out of the shadows of the power you embody

to dispel the myth of the eclipse I’ve been living by.

If you were to ask what I see in you I wouldn’t try

to seduce you with the truth because the truth

is just another kind of looking glass that reflects

whatever lies we’re trying to pull over our eyes

to keep most of us from looking at who we truly are.

Mascara and stars. Lampblack on the chandeliers.

Scars from the roses that bled us out like the kisses

we risked that close to the lips of a hot branding iron

and never forgot how fiercely they continued to burn

long after we we turned out to graze free range again.

And if you were to ask me not to ask anything of you

but a few mirages here and there, and I’m not, the desert

wouldn’t be any stranger to me than this sidereal quicksand

in an hourglass I’ve been swimming around and around in

like a sundial in an aquarium most of my life. My starmud

cracked like a cosmic egg and made its way to the sea

nocturnally, a candle of dragon fire in a relay race

against the odds of surviving death as an innate instinct

you either mastered on the run, or were dropped from a height

you couldn’t quite fathom by marine eagles trying

to teach the serpent in its claws how to fly and take a fall

like an uppercut of the earth to your chin, that’s it, that’s all.

The rest of your life spent trying to compensate

for your shabby entrance by making up for it with a grand exit.

All this before the tenderness of mammals began to show up

in a compassionate attempt to feather my scales. Ever wondered

what kind of lizard a peacock was that it has to molt its eyes

every year like the expanding starmap of a snake shedding its skin?

I don’t expect you to be more honest than you are creative

but you’d bore me if you told me lies I’m better at telling

than you. No story of myself to stick to anymore,

God’s Own Zero, my absence amplifies things. Add one nothing to one,

if I dispense with this shadow I wear like the lifemask of a persona

to pass identifiably without making a fuss, by a factor of ten

your solitude’s enhanced like a binary dancing solo

with the sun in an eclipse darker than the shadows

the fireflies cast like wired lightbulbs of insight

into the interrogation rooms of your nervous imagination

when I tell you, if you were to ask, without ratting anyone out,

I could talk about anything with you, without going overboard,

as if I were pearl diving in the dawn for new moons,

knowing the stowaways like to hide their hidden treasures

in the holds and the hearts of the deepest shipwrecks

and they’d be as safe with me as if I had gone down with you.

PATRICK WHITE