IT’S BEEN TRIED BEFORE, EVIL COME TO
THE DOOR
It’s been tried before, evil come to
the door
to school me out of my muscular
optimism,
my seven times down eight times up
approach
to not throwing the fight, the agon of
life, until I’m dead.
And even then, even then I’ll
probably end up wrestling
with the angel in the way,
strategically growing stronger
with every honest defeat. I weld my
wounded heart,
the crack in my skull cup into a deeper
bond
with these challenges in life that
flatter me
with the quality of the enemies I’m
known by
just as much as my friends. A medicine
man
is only as strong as the wounds he’s
called upon to heal.
Physician, rise from death. The
dragon’s real.
Though the princess is fictitious and
the knight’s
overdressed for combat, what difference
between
the slayer and the slain when they’re
both quantumly entangled
in the same ghost dance of the sun and
the moon for renewal,
the bull and its matador with seven
cloaked eyebeams
driven into its back like serpent fire
as it kneels
in the garland of its own blood like a
rose
releasing its dark abundance from the
sweet meat
in the mouth of its wound. Horns and
thorns,
the moon gored on its own sword to pour
starwheat
into the empty siloes of mammals,
crustaceans and reptiles.
Defeat as a sacrificial act of love
that shames its victories
into more self-abnegating modes of
power that flex
their generosity without knowing where
the gifts come from
or who they’re meant for, but uphold
the rhythm of giving
like a waterclock determined to make it
through the rapids ahead
like a thread through the third eye of
a needle
trying to stitch up the rift between
the discontinuity of chaos
and the narrative theme of the
space-time continuum
that keeps unfolding like the manifest
destiny of a bad guess.
If you don’t feel stupid and foolish
and empty a lot of the time
trying to attain the unattainable
you’re not much of a wise man
or a woman in her craft. The genius and
jester
of your own crazy wisdom, enlightenment
comes
every spring to the locust tree like
unlikely blossoms and honey-bees,
to teach you to respect the
unpredictable absurdity of returning to joy
like a dead garden on the moon looking
for its way back to life
suddenly breaking into light like a
starmap of dandelions.
The destroyers hate the
irrepressibility of life
and they’ll come with the
Tetragrammaton around their necks,
undertakers with eyes like available
sky burials to the dawn
chanting elegaic aubades over the
afterbirth of the stillborn
like black laughter at life’s
irredeemable inconvenience.
Even the little fires can’t empathize
with their trained indifference
to burning in the name of anything the
stars aspire to
but an urn of ashes like the
fortune-cookie of a crematorium
that begins where it ends like an
adolescent geriatric.
You can carve a guitar out of rotten
heartwood
and teach it a few chords and a sense
of timing
like two minutes with a hook at amateur
hour
but that doesn’t make you a singer
with a gnostic turtle shell
for a lyre. The destroyers are
endlessly tuning
their eye-puncturing guitar strings
like spiders
mending fishing nets for the big catch
their nasty boy selves riding
Apollonian dolphins
are going to sheepdog toward shore like
pitbulls
as if Rubick’s cubes and Moebius
strips of feigned emotion
were the necromantic tricks of arcane
magicians
they never got out of their own nets to
see how vast the ocean is.
Any poet worth their stars has always
intuited
a bridge is the third bank on the river
of life
and kept reaching out for their
opposite extremes
like the wingspan of a waterbird in
oxymoronic unions
of disparate elements, hammering the
slag out of their words
and tempering their fire like the
swords of the vows
they made to the mindstreams of life
like an unbreakable alloy
held in trust and tribute until the
night they drown
like a reflection of fireflies in the
eyes of the stars
sitting lightly like the laurels of
Corona Borealis
on the crowns of the black walnut trees
that oversaw the fledglings
fly from the nests of their leftover
begging bowls
as if the earthbound were holding out
its arms
to offer the gift of a gift to the sky
from the bottom
of the watersheds it’s rooted in like
black swans
among the counter-intuitive waterlilies
anchored in our starmud.
No other way to say it or hear it
without contamination
except to express it faster than you
can think about it,
before your shadow can get a leg up on
the light,
or the past starts writing epilogues
for a future
that spends its life longing to happen
as if something were always missing
like the truth of a man lingering on a
bridge
watching the waters of life pass
beneath him
like the picture-music of a sacred verb
in a dream,
waiting to encounter himself coming the
other way
like the faces of everyone who’s ever
crossed to the other side.
The destroyers will always try to live
like legends
of something that’s already been
tragically achieved
and off-handedly left conspicuously
behind them like a rootless tree
so the screening myth goes, walking
casually away
from its fruitless windfall like Elvis
leaving the building.
They hate the infinite creative
potential of stem cells
with no identity of their own so they
can live on call
like organ donors with a healthy
respect
for the heartfelt failures in life who
don’t know why
they tried, but did. And in so doing,
fell toward paradise,
feathered by the light, riding their
thermals
like inspirations of the earth and the
air toward nightfall.
Solitary hawks as clear-eyed as the
stars they’re dancing around
like the fires of Cygnus and Aquila in
the east
and the burning Lyre we’re heading
toward at
18 kilometers a second as the Great
Winged Horse
springs from the severed neck of Medusa
wishing
happy contrails to the underwhelming
grandson of Sisyphus.
PATRICK WHITE
