BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

BITUMINOUS BRIQUETTES OF COAL FOR EYES

Bituminous briquettes of coal for eyes,

and the shadows of diamonds in your heart

the crows delivered like loveletters in the dark.

Spooky and eerie, the Aquarian wyrd

of someone with the emotional life

of a Tarot pack who picked up overlooked skulls

from the forest floor like lost moons

only the undertakers of the rain

and the anthracite ants you blew gently

out their eye-sockets like lunar landing craft

wept over as you placed them in the museums

of your windowsills, artifacts from the firepits

of Stonehenge at an equinoctial eclipse.

The longer I loved you, the younger you grew.

I knew you were coming back from the dead.

That love had dislodged you at the side

of your hospital bed like a snowdrift

sliding off the roof. Death or a hysterectomy

in your early twenties. They tore the bell

out of your steeple, the nest out of your bird,

the promise of dawn out of your La Brea Tarpit

and there wasn’t a lot to sing about after that

but you kept the slash of a smile on your face

like the scalpel of light edged by the new moon.

Blind isn’t a colour, but black suited you best.

A lover isn’t a knife at an occult sacrifice,

but you’d had several that wheeled you

like a butterfly crucified in a circus

where every blade that tried to cut your heart out

after your womb, was the addition of another petal.

Xion flinched, but you had the courage

of a black dwarf that took everything in

they threw at you like a shelter for the homeless.

You healed the shadows of small, broken things.

You took the fallen in like birds of prey

and you mended their wings. And for awhile

they felt like constellations after you left.

In that vast expanse of night that unrolled

like a starmap of your soul, you restored them

to an exalted place of shining in your darkness.

Noble, a few more stars and you could have passed

for a queen of Egypt rummaging for your body parts

in the canopic jars of other people’s hearts,

your beauty, an ancient creation myth restored

after long severance as if the moon in its mourning veils

hadn’t come up in years, and then, in full eclipse

just appeared one night like a sacred prostitute

on the stairs of the Iseum with a fascination

for pyramidal men aligned with the circumpolar

indestructibles of heaven centred on an afterlife

too much like this one to be astronomically credible.

Microcosmically honest, you never fully mastered

trusting anyone, though you smiled at their efforts,

but not once in nine years did I ever doubt you

when my back was turned like a sundial

though there was always something slightly suspect

about the heroism of your compassion for the dead

as you leapt like a genie in an oil lamp

into the calderas of their spent volcanoes on the moon,

to trade their new mirages in for something completely old.

I saw you grow like a religion of dependents

who never wanted to get over themselves

for fear of losing someone like you to worship

like initiates into the coven of a great witch

as many told me you were as if, being a male.

they knew more about you than I did, and who knows,

in retrospect, maybe they did, maybe they did.

Hear that northern river of raven hair

is long and white now, that you’re still beautiful,

that the guys in motorized wheelchairs line up at

the entrance of the mall to compete for who

gets to drive you across the overly waxed floors

as you jump laughing into their laps on your way

to work in the morning, and you keep

the hotshot owners of the chic clothing stores

leaning in their doorways wondering why

you choose them over them. Had to smile

when I heard that. The spirit of love lives in you yet.

You still know how to raise the dead.

Prayer wheels, hot wheels, wheels on meals,

training wheels, wheels and deals, cogwheels,

wheels of birth and death. Where the rubber

hits the road, I could have told them how it feels

to stand there like a crop circle in a labyrinth of rain

that goes round and round, spinning its wheels

like a red-tailed hawk sliding down the banisters

of its thermals, remember, when the sunsets

painted their eyelids over the alder groves?

You want a beautiful witch to ride shotgun

with you, brother, you better learn to shift

that four on the floor as if you were riding

that golden chariot of yours through a slum

and everyone were hitchhiking, and you stopped

to pick them all up to remind you that you’re mortal.

Your driveshaft better be yoked to six white moons

and every spoke of the tree rings in your heartwood

better be a broom that knows how to do cartwheels in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE