A NICK OF THE MOON

A NICK OF THE MOON

A nick of the moon. Thin smile of circumstance

and the paint rags of the few, modest dreams

I had left, are bleeding out again. Alizarin crimson

leaking like lipstick out of a slashed mirror as my blood

congeals glacially and gives my heart freezer-burn.

Crazy alert. Three alarm anxieties. Loser brigade.

Should I drown like a new moon in the calendar

of my waterclock mindstream going through

all these phases or rush to my rescue again and again

and again, the lifeboat of a waterbird with oars for wings?

I’ve been exhausted by mundane terrors.

The man gets scared. And he sings in the face of despair.

He waits for the night to heal. An injured wolf

in the bone-box of his lair. And the stars like Arcturus

for months above the dark roofs of the glaring town

always the charm of a long, hard-won childhood

lightyears away from this creosote of a life

that gets left like the slag of a dragon that’s gone

up in smoke like a short-cut through a chimney

all over the inside of the dead furnace of my heart

where I’m still trying to keep a few fireflies alive.

Poetry, my sanctuary, my asylum, my chrysalis,

my fortune-cookie of oceanic consciousness in a seashell,

my Braille koan laid out like a starmap for my eyes only,

my spinal connection to the blue guitar of my imagination

in an ensuing phylum of Chordates, black box of my soul,

anti-grail of my worldly aspirations, look

how I’ve worn your lip down sipping from your elixirs

like a devotee walking up the sacred stairs on his knees

he’s blunted like a pestle and a mortar to throw

his crutches onto a pyre of fossilized wing bones.

My curse. My blessing. Inkwell, thorn, heart, pen.

Could be a bad choice of metaphors or a pillowcase

full of flightfeathers I wear like a war bonnet in my dreams

when I’m ghost dancing off the reservation.

Cowboy Zen art martyr from the lunatic fringe,

I’ll make it cosmically through the Leonids somehow,

if not by will, by a spiritual reflex of my imagination.

I’ll walk barefoot over the ashes of my root fires

like a rusty cedar down to the bedside manner of the lake.

I’ll watch Jupiter bobbing like a lure in the narrow field of view

of an atmospherically unstable telescope waiting for a bite

and when the swim bladders of the northern pike

mythically inflate like nuclear submarines surfacing

off the Lomonosov Ridge. I’ll carve a barbed spear point

out of the tusk of the moon and reign sovereign

over the ice like a dispossessed Inuit hovering over a bubble.

In an oblivion of heroic numbness, I’ll wear my laurels

like razorwire proudly to the stake of my heretical desire

to let the nightbirds return to the gentler nests of last year

in the heartwood of a rootless tree, undisturbed

by the unconfessed holy books of the leaves

that burned in their absence like the sky burial

of a snake in autumn that won its wings, at last, from the flames.

I’ll climb the burning ladders of my own lunar vertebrae

like a dolmen of moonrocks that stood its ground

in a firestorm of solar flares in the Sea of Tranquillity.

Even if my tears blister into glass, I’ll water

this desert of stars like a dragon tending a garden

until it blooms like an ocean of broken chandeliers.

PATRICK WHITE