FROG SPITTLE AND GREEN POND FROTH

FROG SPITTLE AND GREEN POND FROTH

Frog spittle and green pond froth organic enough

to rebuke the crystallographer of ice that’s coming

when life goes underground to hibernate in its own starmud

numb with the inoculation it’s been given

to protect it against its own pain thresholds.

As earth approaches the sun, it gets colder

above the waist, and hotter below,

the occasional bubble of life locked in the eyes

of a bright vacancy as it rises to the surface of the mirror.

And at night, the dark abundance of stars so clear

they’re cruel. So abysmally remote and unconcerned

they burn your eyes like dry ice, sublimate

like the tears of ghosts on a hot stove, hiss

and dissipate like the wavelengths of vaporous snakes

impatient with dancing to a syrinx of icicles

on a pentatonic scale in common with panpipes

that prefer to feather the phoenix in flames

than risk the fire of a dragon in full plumage.

Things go round circumpolarly like Draco

and the planet has a change of heart. She loves me,

she loves me not. The third eye of the uncertain mystic

freezes in the wine glass like a dirty winter window,

and summer’s ambivalence is frosted over

with brittle absolutes that leave no room for doubt.

Cataracts in the eye. Flowers in the sky and vice versa

when the earth is at apogee in the southern hemisphere

and the grass is green below the waist that the sun

fried brown, and above, crucified crosses upside down.

But for now, frog spittle and green pond froth,

exhausted waterlilies letting it all hang out

like the Buddha’s dirty laundry on a tinfoil starmap,

wasps like angry drunks in the windfalls of the orchards,

the crickets and frogs hoarse with the exhortatory

white noise of procreation run amok in the swamps,

the bears in the dumps among the berries,

larding their lairs for seven lean kinds of coma

as the campers and the geese go south

of the porous borders between the sundials

of the American dream, and the frozen waterclocks

of the snowblind mindstreams further north

where time stops and space is the measure

of the speed of thought outpacing the light into the dark.

As the days grow colder and dwindle into matchstick runts

I’ll squander fire the way, when things were warmer,

I squandered the waters of life on fountains and waterbirds

spuming in courtship, making a big splash of moonlight

on beautiful loons that swam away unperturbed.

I’ll sit up late in the night, listening to the pilot light

on a gas furnace as if the eternal flame were about to go out

and leave me catatonically morose and mentally disturbed

as the desk I write at, making lyrical overtures

to the smoke in the room, demonic loveletters that set

the scarecrows on fire like the strawdogs of harvests past

and make the ice queens weep with warnings of global warming.

Creature of extremes, I’ll live one moment like a dolmen

in the tundra of my dreams, trying to decipher the runes

of the glacial striations on my crystal skull

like Nazca lines on on my prefrontal plateau

for any sign the aliens are about to leave me alone.

And the next I’ll be kissing the Tyrian purple passage

at the end of my frozen fingertips like Phoenician snails

as if I’d been drinking wine with the sea around my mouth,

and the poems were just pouring out of me

like a hemophiliac in a blue blood bank in front

of a firing squad of eleven revolutionary stars and one

that’s a capitalist trying to recoup its investment in life

by drawing a blank that strikes like Rasputin

on the margins of a ricocheting heart, bruised

by the blood flow of a rose in the snow it couldn’t stop.

PATRICK WHITE