BLUE COMET OF A PEACOCK DRAGGING ITS
TAIL
Blue comet of a peacock dragging its
tail
like the dowdy hen of a resplendent
female
walking in your coronation like the
Queen of Heaven
in a new wardrobe across my inner sky
like a broom down in the dumps of its
middens
sweeping the stars off the stairs, open
your eyes
like the Pleiades and see how even the
dust can shine
when there’s light in your seeing,
and fire
in your starmud. Don’t post your
loveletter
in a hateful envelope. Smile. Like a
kid with a sparkler.
Or as I did in my childhood whenever a
new starmap
fell out of the National Geographic
like a message
from God as if she’d just dropped one
of her veils.
The way I’ve felt about women ever
since.
Don’t live like a mop when you were
meant for splendour.
Even a matchbook can flare for a moment
of two
like the stamens and pistils of a
Chinese star gazer lily
with indelible ginger pollen. This
might risk
being nauseously sententious, but don’t
be
the kind of explosion that keeps
letting its fuse down.
Let your serpent fire run all the way
up your spinal cord
through a gauntlet of planetesimal
chakras
and explode like Roman candles in the
firmament
of your mind mesmerized by the
fireworks of your spirit.
There are sunsets, dawns and moonrises,
night skies,
the grey pearls of cloudy noons you’ve
never seen
waiting for you to claim them as the
children
of your own eyes, artistic children
impatient
to show you the pictures they drew in
rainbow crayons
about the way they feel about you. Do
you know
how hard dusk tries to be beautiful for
you?
How Venus lingers like a blossom of
larkspur
long after dark, though the sun has
given up,
trying to catch your eye above the
shopping mall?
You got it. Flaunt it. Like poppies in
the wheat,
like the apple bloom of the moon strewn
like the wavelength of a particle when
you look away
and something deep inside of you says
follow me
I’ve laid out a flightpath of
feathers for you.
Why keep the pages of your book uncut
like a fan in the hand of a poetess in
Tokugawa Japan?
Let five petals open and one flower
bloom
like a fleet of origami waterlilies
raising their sails
on the Fall River in the summer just
past Maberly.
When was beauty ever not a jewel looked
upon as vain
by the ore of the houseflies in
residence who
can’t see their own smeared like the
aurora borealis
on the stained-glass windows of their
wings
in the indiscriminate sunlight? Let it
shine, let it shine,
let it shine, and what it will be let
it be to the blind.
Not all flowers open at the same time.
The crowbars
of the dragonflies don’t pry the
eggcups
of the waterlilies open like
grave-robbers
in the manger of some stranger’s
belated afterlife.
There’s an hour that comes like
insight to a fist
that tenderly unfolds each finger
gently
and opens the soft palms of the wild
cosmos
swaying like stars and butterflies at
the end
of their aerials, to give freely of
themselves
a generous answer to the stingy
questions
about what we’re all doing walking
around on the earth.
PATRICK WHITE