YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.

When it’s not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics

in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass

is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars

to empower the wind to blow them away,

bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox

all the bells of your body were left speechless

at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties

from a car window like a litter of roadkill

along the side of the highway? Did I transit

the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,

or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in

to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?

Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate

in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.

It’s getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock

followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who

begat what upon whom. I don’t want to meet your father.

I’d kill him on the spot. I don’t want to prove

to your mother I’m going to be good to you

in ways that she was not as she soaks

the blood from the carpet like gouts

of insincere candlewax. The price you pay

for three meals a day and a creative finishing school

where you can afford the kind of problems

the poor don’t make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal

is coming from. You were born knowing

how far out the soup spoon was supposed

to be aligned from the begging bowl

like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.

And me? I eat out of my skull on the run

whenever I’m writing poetry to the moon

in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn’t I

bituminous enough when I entered the dark

to show you how I could shine out of

my own inner resources like two hundred million

urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars

by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes

like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?

And when I watched you slicing the throats

of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers

and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer

as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn’t I

make a Zen comment on the way you’d arranged them?

I’ve been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform

in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow

has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury

my dismembered body parts to guarantee

a higher yield over the ensuing light years.

The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye

more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,

I’ve cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations

of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing

what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.

I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing

the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes

weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs

like the bass strings of a slack guitar

to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn

like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down

and scarlet stripes casting magical spells

like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas

with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka

in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze

its abdomen into a whalebone corset

before the Arabs changed its sex

into the belt of a less subtle Hunter

with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed

by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back

like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses

from the skull of the moon. I’ve known

the innocence of the crow when its feathers

were albino white before its failure turned sinister

as a starless night. A penury of insight

pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love

that swore the new moon would last forever

like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant

in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes

and flowers of oil and what’s left of the shining

is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting

his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools

that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn

the astringencies of enlightenment that burn

like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating

nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake

out the box like Draco, without getting bit

by the picture-music of our own motives

trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes

jamming with the downed powerlines

of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing

with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics

of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers

with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

PATRICK WHITE