THERE’S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A
BLACK DOG ONCE
There’s a blue flower in me and a
black dog once
that lived like a big, black hole in
the heart in Sirius.
Darkness is an engine. Darkness is a
root.
Who knows what’s going to jump out of
the hat
the stump, the boot? The cosmology of
your guitar.
Set it on fire. See if there are any
galaxies in it.
What’s happening to the music in that
hole
besides giving birth to the universe
because
a spiny little fish with a life line
with the back bone
to light it all up was given the risk
to live once
with no idea of what was coming after
it
and everyone’s been dogpaddling in
curses and blessings
ever since waiting for their ship to
come in.
It does, one way or the another it
always makes port
but you’re the dock, the long wharf
and the short walk
that disappears to the end of the plank
and over without a blindfold
to be keel-hauled on the hull of the
moon like scalpels and calderas,
goblets of bone and prophetic skulls no
one’s had
the gall to drink from in millions of
silent years
the rudder, the wheel, the emptiness of
the lifeboat on the shipwreck
you’re sitting in feeling like some
ghostly mode
of foghorn and moonlight swirling all
around
like a shroud that’s never had a
tattoo before,
or the forearm of an embroidered
pillowcase,
as if it didn’t have anything else
better to do
than mope around a smoke dance with wet
heartwood
cedar boughs in a tin bucket trying to
smoke
the bats out of the attic like cinders
of chimney sparks
scattering the ashes of a dead sister
in a rose garden
as if it were raining somewhere deep
inside you
like a calendar of tree rings that had
a miscarriage
it almost sounds as if someone is
crying
for a mortal loss that’s irreparable
as a simple
potted cup at a Japanese tea ceremony
that’s been
broken and mended with gold. Things get
better. So I’m told.
But that’s something you’re going
to have to
figure out for yourself. Is the water
hot? Is it cold?
Will you ever forgive the dark for
taking hold of your soul
until the stars came out like eyes in
the night
that have been looking at you all along
like a bloodstream
in that hourglass of stars every night
before you go to bed
in a comforter you’ve made a friend
of
until the real lover arrives and
everything is splendid
as the dawn in the morning or an
artificial moonrise
in the shopping mall of a Hallmark
greeting card
you send yourself once a month like a
death threat
or a loveletter you leave unsigned
because, because, because
you’re endless but you know that
you’re really not.
And that scares you. Scares me, too.
Now let me tell you
about this big, black dog I had once. I
let him off his chain
like chromosome with red eyes who could
see in the dark
like an emergency exit sign and he
hasn’t ever come back since.
And I don’t blame him. I miss him.
Which is a kind
of peculiar sickness of mine I’m
growing overly fond of
like a dog collar that’s as open and
empty as Corona Borealis
for a blind seeing eye dog of savage
indignation
probably out somewhere chasing deer
through the woods
as if he were dark matter making
constellations out his grave goods.
I shudder. And then I think of it all
as a happy event in the end.
PATRICK WHITE
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