LIKE A CHILD THAT'S BURNT ITS HAND

LIKE A CHILD THAT’S BURNT ITS HAND

Like a child that’s burnt its hand experimenting with matches,

testing your sympathy, suffering in its innocence,

to see if you understand there are rattlesnakes

under the rose-bushes, and they both have thorns,

as the moon sheds its scales on the lake

that turns them into feathers when it’s in

the right mood, kisses the burn and makes

it better, as if your lips were two scars coming together,

I don’t cry out to the fixed stars anymore

thinking anyone’s there to take notice of the hurt.

I don’t turn women into mothers with me

as their only child. Black roses no less

I don’t bring them bouquets of bladder wort.

If a woman isn’t far seeing enough to spot me

in the crowd like the Hubble telescope

toward the oldest, fastest, darkest galaxies

she’s just a mere window to keep the cold out

and let a little light in when there’s light to be had

in the middle of winter. Her eyes don’t

touch me dangerously, there’s no creative mystery

in the way she speaks to me like the Pacific ocean

in a storm or kingfishers flying all over the place

like flakes of halycon blue soothing the waves.

There’s healing in the left breast of the Medusa’s

most ancient body cells, and tumours in the right.

The antidote’s in the last crescent of the moon.

The Milky Way not the issue of mammary glands.

Who could look at a woman that way without

a heart of stone back in the Burgess Shale?

If she takes you for a lover, you’ve got to be equal

to the horror and the lust. You’re never going to find

a winged horse in a bird cage made for the heart.

Woman’s what beautiful about being fashioned of starmud.

There is no other image you were created in,

no earth, no night, no sky, no art, as the angels

stood around and marvelled at the names you gave her,

the metaphors you kept compounding into light

as everywhere she walked the Periodic Table of Elements

was set like a garden with underground rivers

and a candle of a firefly or a star to slay death

for a moment in the hourglass figure of the beauty of life.

She’s the crone, the nymph, the nubile witch,

the abyss, the dark mother you return to. She’s

water that burns like the fire of hot tears

in the shedding of the leaves, in the wedding

of her blossoms to a windfall of overjoyed orchards.

You draw a sword from the stone. She draws

a bell that mourns and celebrates your coming

and your going, a door on one hinge

like a lapwing that’s trying to distract you

from yourself as you try to square the round table

like a line you drew in the sand. Assessment hour.

You were lacking for the longest time weren’t you?

Draw a line in the sand. Dare the wind.

If she got the better of you, you didn’t give your best.

I’m not talking about slavery here. No

quisling metrosexual with gender confusion

who smells as if the cows just ate deadly nightshade.

Love is genderless and the law follows suit.

She’s Bellatrix in Orion. She’s the first sphinx

at Gobekli Tepe that we know of like a lioness

that does all the hunting, the bitch that leads

the wolfpack, or lures the barnyard dogs

with her pheromones lingering in the air

like low-hanging fruit the mutt can’t resist.

To be torn apart like a stuffed boy having a temper tantrum.

Hic sunt dracones and blood sports with the heart as a goat.

She’s three bells on the quarter deck and all is well.

The moon lies down on the water

like the Silk Road to a vocal mulberry bush.

And then the silence of a sandstorm coming

in the deserts of the moon blind as the stars

to the havoc they cause on earth. Unforseeable

circumstances that burn the bridges and filaments out

in the light bulb of a good idea. The wicks

and antennae, the lightning rods of a billion fireflies

all going off at once like ladyfingers

or a Gatling gun on the Sioux at Wounded Knee.

One moment you’re having tea with her

mending cracks in the cup with gold as if

you were repairing your own synarthritic skull

or a continent at a Chanoyu Tea Ceremony on Pangaea,

and the next there are volcanoes of dark matter

connecting the dots along a fault line

of separatist feelings that can read between

the gaps of the mountains on the moon in eclipse

like Bailey’s diamonds, hard and cutting as the mind.

She’s to be celebrated, if that’s at all possible.

She’s to be trusted like a muse not a precedent.

She’s to be feared like a blasting cap in a beaver dam

or the beginning of wisdom. She’s the dark mother

of her own inner child for the child’s sake.

She’s the healer of your scarred medicine bags

and she knows what herbs to look for like

silver green Usnea lapponica on the forest floor

as if the moon were in the corals and she made

a lichen tincture for a Zen tea totaller allergic to penicillin.

I owe as much to women as I do windows

and wide open night skies exotic with

Spartan stars culling the helots as the sun

does asteroids. They’ve taught me to keep

things to myself like the private life

of a sad mystery that isn’t trying to cultivate

an audience. Emotions deeper than poetry,

more radioactive than fish bleeding from their gills,

or somebody standing too close to the ricochet

of a rifle shot before the firing squads of the stars,

blind folded no less and not allowed to smoke

as the sentence was carried out against

the unwilling heretic for the good of his soul.

I have been untrue to myself to be faithful

to them. And I haven’t lived long or down enough

to regret it yet. A vow of silence doesn’t

echo in a nightclub, and the shadows in the mirror

put their fingers to their lips as if time

were creeping by like a sundial in love

with the moon on the far side of its dead seas.

And it’s not a matter of grace, not

a stray hair from the head of an imaginable

aristocrat in pursuit of an earthly excellence

by coming down off his high horse like a king

who lived among the peasants, so much as a way

of honouring what I’ve learned of love

and how binary stars learn to dance around

one another like a seance to the trines

and the first violins of an exorcism waltzing

with the willows down by the river

that doesn’t give a damn where it’s going

as long as it’s flowing seaward against its own current.

PATRICK WHITE