THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

A mystic dimple in the middle of my chin.

Courage, the Arabs tell me. Hope I’ve got some.

This is a long, dark, strange, radiant journey

I’m never coming home from again. Pain. Pain. Pain.

And the night so quiet, and me in it like river fish

listening to the town breathe, cars out on the highway,

hush. You can just barely hear them now.

The rush of surf on asphalt. The interrupted silence.

The sweetness of life on earth as it sleeps,

and the trees I keep thinking about in Stewart Park.

The trees, lovely, the trees, even after

the ice-storm spoke. The trees. The trees. The trees.

And water and light and air as the chimneys

hold their seance, and the ghosts bite their tongue

whenever anybody’s talking about smoke. And fire.

Now that’s a mouthful. Almost as powerful

as a woman who’s attracted your attention like a star

you can’t name. And you’ve never, ever seen

her anywhere before. And you won’t again,

but she was there once, she was there, I swear

like wild rice in the moon as the mist lifts off the lake

and you think it’s a wild swan heading south

and you want to go with it, but you live here, and you can’t

until your bones are dust in their medicine hut

and then you go west, in the urn of a Canada goose.

They bring you tobacco and berries, choke cherries,

and they adjust the feathers on your war bonnet,

three if you live out east. One for the dream of a totem.

One because you fed somebody somewhere once

and you’re thought of as a mighty hunter. And the last

because you were ready to stand up and fight

for something real you didn’t know if you really believed in

at the time, but it was hopeful. It was just. It was free.

It was sublime. And I liked the way people adjust.

Look at me, Maw, no hands. I’m supercharging

reality with significance. Or is it all just a bad dream
I’m gaining elevation in but it’s all going to come down

on me any minute now like a mountain of gravestones

in an avalanche? I’m a weather balloon. But I was trying

to be beautiful, useful, dance. I was going with the wind

there a while ago. See. I’m gone. A winged samara

on the back lawn. Float plane. That’s me. Or maybe a maple tree.

Feels like a three ring freak show black clown circus

on tour sometimes, but this is my Zen death song

and I’ll sing it with you like a birch bark canoe

gathering wild rice in its prow if it were my mother

in her apron, and you can be the cowboy this time

and I’ll be the flower. Black dog. Blue flower. He’s back.

That means I’ll have the power of a black dwarf at my side.

I think that’s good. But it’s not as beautiful as I want it to be.

Let’s get back to the trees. I painted them once, broken,

fractured, shattered, plinths of chandeliers and stars

all over the place, misspoken candelabras of the twigs

trying to remind themselves of their unhierarchical place

in the scheme of things to come, thump, thump, thump,

like a flat drum roll. Spare me the timpani and drums.

I’m trying to be beautiful here. There’s a moon

out on a lake above the pagodas and totems of

the pine trees and the water’s slowly willowing

with the fish, an elegant black undulance on the water

that reminds you of a woman’s flesh you caressed once,

and you still want to touch it with your fingertips

full of farewell, but you can’t, and you know that,

and it still hurts. My muse was as lovely as any

running doe. And you hope it fits the scenario somehow

of me being beautiful, for her sake, at my own expense.

And I’m not looking for anyone to thank me for that.

Not even her. The wonder was bountiful and holds me

in good stead now. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

It was her. And I’m sure of it now. The wind is rising

out on the lake, and the mist is a veil that’s lifting

off her face. She wants to show me something

I haven’t seen before. You can’t see. It’s an art to love.

And you can’t ignore. But trust me, she’s beautiful and pure

and dangerous as a watersnake swimming beside you

in the feathers of the moonlight I mentioned before

to be beautiful as the cars are out on the highway tonight,

and my occult philosophy of trees as they were seen once

writing poetry about how badly wounded they were

and yet so beautiful, aren’t they, in the way they bleed stars?

PATRICK WHITE