NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR
HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN
Narcissus lost his face in the mirror
he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace
over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing
ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in
it for an emergency exit.
The holy men who couldn’t speak our
language
without trying to fix it with an accent
of their own
were recruiting for an army on the moon
to start a new crusade against
futuristic infidels
who didn’t share the same direction
of prayer
as the wavelengths that reached the
ears of the extraterrestrials
with high ideals encoded in a scripture
of esoteric starmaps
that spoke like oracles stoned on
volcanic gas
so when you asked how things were
going,
they always answered, perhaps, in an
ambiguous tone of voice.
I was sitting in the window of a
burning house
trying to write poems that smelled like
smoke to the Holy Ghost,
when you showed up like a stranger’s
doorway
out of my solitude like the bell of a
three alarm death knell
with the smile that lingered like
junkmail on the threshold
of a black hole that said jump right
in, there’s light
on the other side of sin if you go
through this
like a death in life experience in love
with cosmic bliss.
Who could forget that day you came like
a muse
up the leaf strewn stairs of an
abandoned orphanage
looking for a heart you could inspire
with the ruse
of the poetic refuse you left in the
wake of your pilgrimage
like the desolation of your absence
from the earthbound
that languished in the eclipse of your
innocence
like a spiritual lost and found trying
to make sense of itself
like a horse with a broken leg on a
zodiacal merry-go-round.
I felt the fangs of your crescent moons
pierce my flesh
like a staple gun under a rosebush in
league
with an alliance of thorns that liked
to see a poet bleed
as if the great mystery of love were
nothing
but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword
dancers on drugs
though I did everything I could to
prove to you I was wrong
about the moonrise, you weren’t
strong enough to be right for once
without starting a pogrom that
interrogated
the light in my eyes for all those dark
winter months
I never confessed, I never cried out as
if ice were my only alibi.
I sat in the corner like a left-handed
guitar with a dunce cap on
and wrote out lyrics that sang like the
stars with a lisp
on your celestial blackboard until I
felt like Sisyphus
a note shy of pushing my heart like a
moon rock over the top.
It was the immanental sixties on a
grailquest
for the objective correlative of a
universal paradigm
it could fight under as the sign of a
revolutionary new design of chaos
that made love not war to the thunder
of home-made sonic booms
in a battle of bands with saturation
bombing riffs and rimshots
that urged us to surrender to the enemy
as if
they were dragonflies and
quarter-notes of music
in a riot of helicopters dropping tear
gas over Watts.
Even the madness wasn’t enough to
mollify the sadness
of what we lost when everyone turned
the lightshows out
in the concert halls and went back to
the their atavistic law schools
to get a grip on the necks of the
things they had let go of for a lark.
And the last time I saw you, before
things went totally dark,
you were trying to set fire to my
voice-box
like a lightning rod with bad wiring
shorting out
like a bass amp on the stage of your
burnt out farewell
to the audience that made a gracious
bow to your frantic id
and headed for the exit like an
arsonist long before you did.
PATRICK WHITE
