WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

Witching for water in hell is like

trying to drink a mirage from an hourglass.

All lightning, no rain. More axons than glia.

Hazel yokes might break like wishbones

but you never get what you want.

I wanted you like a madness I never

wanted to get over, I’d have to make

a truce with to live as if it were worth it.

Nothing’s true but that’s beside the point.

Take true from false and there’s nothing

left to go wrong though the fools play

one off against the other like razor-blades

at a cock fight. Cock-a-doodle-do, who

are you? King of the dawn with a Zippo coxcomb?

Witching for water in hell is like

reality living the afterlife of theater.

You just don’t know who to believe anymore,

the writer or the actor. Or you’re gulled

in the wake of a B.C. Ferry by your own ideals.

Your audience hides behind the wavelengths

of the curtain that you’re parting like the veils of Isis.

If you can do that, if you can pull back the rain

to see there’s nobody at the door, you’ve

already amounted to nothing. Significance

becomes a bore. You do things for the hell of it,

knowing it’s only a staying pattern until

you’re given permission to land in the cemetery.

Witching for water in hell isn’t

an ingenuous man trying to live

like a fire extinguisher mounted on a wall

while above him shine the green-eyed banshees

that go off as if somebody were trying

to steal his car and he wasn’t enough of a heretic

to burn at the stake and have it done with.

Hell, I mean. As if suffering were

the antecedent to everything that’s perishable

about life, the way you wear holes in your dream

pacing under the window, more to lose

than win as if sleepwalking weren’t part

of the delusion. And waking up

weren’t a breach birth of broken glass.

I had both hands on the prayer wheel

of birth and death once, at eleven and two,

navigating between the clashing rocks

so I didn’t get smashed between the opposites

like a bird with no wings and a sky that’s waiting

for it to fly. You can only touch as much

as you can imagine your senses are trying to tell you.

Witching for water in hell is like

a man with eyes that can see learning Braille

so he can track himself like hierogylph in the mail,

a triangular planet that passes like a kidney stone

through the urethra of the zodiac, the slime path

of a boneless morning snail adding

its ribbon of shining to the garden while

the sidewalks are still cool enough not to blister on.

I live in an air conditioned shell with running snot and water,

my body a bag with nine orifices like a sprinkler

on the lawn pretending it’s a galaxy, a sunflower,

the golden ratios of the conch shells of eternity

fossilized in the Burgess Shale, and all

the armies that they called, terracotta

in a lake of mercury that will make me live forever.

But witching for water in hell is like

an action figure with a sword of dry ice

that cries like a ghost of itself it’s dying to return

like a river to a forbidden watershed on the moon.

I loved you once and maybe I’ll love you again.

I’ll greet the snow in your hair as you stand

in the doorway as it adorns something warm

and incorrigibly human that looks at life

as more of a furnace than a fridge. Fire and ice.

The way the world is destroyed in the name

of a madness inspired by the fossils of the fountains

of love, witching for water in hell to amuse the insane.

PATRICK WHITE