MADNESS, AT ITS BEST
Madness, at its best. Should I name a
star
after you that rises in the west and
sets in the east
and later gouge its eyes out like a
cartouche
on an obelisk I erected when you were
the queen of heaven, and I was pointed
in the right direction, make a course
correction
and say the compass lied? Things just
reverse spin sometimes. The moon
gets stuck in your throat like your
last thin dime
in a telephone booth, and everything
you feel
is long distance after that, a
soothsayer
parsing aorist oracles in his sleep, as
he grinds his teeth.
Would you understand, would you know
what it means to enshrine what you’ve
laboured
to love the longest in the ore of
meteoric metaphors
with nickel-iron swords at the core of
the rock
I keep pulling out and falling upon
like the significant absurdity of a
peasant king
who refuses to sit on any throne he
can’t abdicate
on a whim. I want to wing it on the
wind
like a maple key, or the silhouette of
a crow
in the locket of the moon. But know
this,
consider this wisely as a starmap on a
lake,
crazy as I am not to care what I sound
like
when the stars confide what’s in
their hearts
to the leaves of the silver Russian
olives,
there’s a magnificent abyss without a
view
of anyone when you come before them
like a lover’s ledge no one’s ever
lept from
precipitously enough for you to believe
the inconceivable has fallen in love
with you
like a discontinued theme song that
never
made a big hit on the bottom you’ve
been reaching for
like the bedrock of a water palace
whose depths
are way over your head like a
waterclock
you weren’t counting like a lover to
show up on time
at your door. Can you hear my words
ticking by
as if they were sword- dancing with
their own shadows
like galaxies and sundials, Sufis and
Buddhas
comparing mirages at a crossroads in
the desert
and laughing because so much is missing
from the message they have to humour
the medium
into making a surprise appearance at
her own seance.
The underage magician is pulling doves
and crows
from behind your ears and releasing
them
from your privatized aviary like voices
breaking their parole like a love song
they’ve
been singing too long in the choir of a
false dawn
at a sky burial for lapwings on a pyre
of crutches
that weren’t even real, that never
got the feel
of spreading their feathers out on the
lake
like wild swans getting ready to take
off in the moonlight
with no cause for alarm among the stars
they leave in their wake like the Milky
Way
rising over the horizon of the
flightpath they’re on
like a catalpa tree in the spring, or a
road of ghosts
beyond the gateways of the starfields
in the autumn,
a scar of light on the wounded waters
of life
that heal themselves like eyes that
have cried enough
to return like the rivers of paradise
through the burning gates of Eden as
if, water
only once, but you get to jump through
the same fire twice.
PATRICK WHITE
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