O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O the women, the women, the women, mistrusted sacrifice,

who led me to the altar in a garland of stars

and left me to my own device to figure them out

which I never have. It would have been rude

to declare that kind of solitude resolved in your heart

and inside their urn and hourglass bodies

there’s a kiln of a firewomb and furnace weeping

like a window into God’s eyelids like a rose

with thorns they took out of a lion’s paws

as a simple act of mercy for that much wounded power

you couldn’t say in any other way if you weren’t

so rigidly contemporaneous, than flower, moon, claws.

Man is an abacus of prophetic skulls that have learned to count.

Woman is a rosary of infinite chakras and prayer bells

that plough the starfields when they’re melted down

into chandeliers and candelabra that have gone

witching for light as if there were a watershed of it nearby

or a housewell the grass has covered up like a veil

of green flames as if you just threw salt in the fire

that flared into a genie of apple boom and green leaves

then disappeared like an apparition nobody believes you saw once.

But you did. Like kleenex on the kitchen table

and the smear of red lipstick and the impression

of her lips as if she’d been kissing a bleeding snail

and then the darkness followed as she slipped

between the pages of the Burgess Shale like a loveletter

she decided by then not to send because it would be better that way

and you knew enough about women, at least

by the end, not to argue, but try to make a friend

as best you can. And watch how the river runs

your mindstream across your heart like a whetstone

that sharpens you up like a prophetic skull again

for what’s to come that there is to sing about

which is everything if you learn to sing it right to the end.

Tra la, tra la, tra la, like the live ones have forever sung

or whatever kind of kyrie eleison comes to mind

like water to your lips that tastes like distant rain

in a desert of stars she’s left you wandering in

as an adequate substitute for time when it grows sublime

fecundating the white mares of Libya in passing

like the north wind bringing the mail to Africa

like a million birds with a return address to what

she left behind her in a moment of sadness

when she looked into her heart and all the songbirds were uncaged.

Woman isn’t a sentiment. And man isn’t an adage.

But you’ve got to say it as if you crossed your heart

with a fire ax that a dragon set on fire like the house of life

in a crematorium that celebrates the great event

as if you really did live once and had a chance.

PATRICK WHITE