I CAN'T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I CAN’T SLEEP IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STORM OF TEARS

I can’t sleep in this beautiful storm of tears

that keeps showing me how much love there is in the world

now that I’m leaving it through the rose trellis exit

where there’s a drop of water on every

anointed thorn of my thoroughly wet eyelashes.

It’s beautiful loss that’s sad and scary all at the same time.

It’s a flashflood of emotion that thaws the frogs out

and gets them singing like small ice floes in a lily pond

clinging with polar bears to what’s left of the Arctic ice cap

that’s unravelling all around me like a snowman

riding its own melting into an oblivious mindstream.

Easy to love ordinary things now as if they were sacred,

domestic rituals, chores, objects, dust in the air,

dirt in an organized drawer, cracks in the plaster

diversifying the dinosaurs like fractured Pangaea’s skull.

The thunder and pulse of a lost drumbeat in the jungles of time.

Everything glows. Even the dark shines.

With an aura of beautiful mysterious numinosity

that polishes the dawn like a dusty abalone shell

on an opalescent day at deserted beach as long and wet as yourself.

PATRICK WHITE