I SEE THE NEW MOON OF A BLACK PEARL

I SEE THE NEW MOON OF A BLACK PEARL

I see the new moon of a black pearl

stuck through your tongue like a sacred syllable

in a cult of one you only whisper on your knees

when you’re giving head to the false idols

of the gods you worship, the jewel in the lotus,

hoping they’ll love you back because you pleased them well.

Your eyelids smeared with bruised mascara

like the petals of a black rose, o my poor flower,

my battered teen-age friend, my heart breaks

to see how you squander your devotion on men

with feet of clay, who envy you that flesh and blood

you give away so readily like a bride of Corinth

or a beatified prostitute outside the gates of the Iseum.

I hear the faint music of the bells of the columbine

growing on a mossy rock like a hair transplant

and I want to hang earrings of rain from your lobes

like a shower of stars that wash you clean of yourself

in the light so you can see how beautiful you are

when you’re not dressed up like deadly nightshade

in fish net stockings to catch the dolphins by their fins.

I could delight in you, not just for your breasts

and your lips, or that desperate disappointment

in your occult eyes as if someone had just cut down

all your sacred groves, amputated the limbs

of your mistletoe and apple bloom with a golden sickle

of the last crescent of the moon in hypocritical reprisal

for making a human sacrifice of yourself to them

outside the Colosseum. My God, what a body rush

of mystic oblivion and carnal ecstasy would sweep

this man’s island galaxy out to sea if I were ever stung

by the toxic elixir of that weeping ruby hanging

from a blade of stargrass like a lantern in the red light district

of Scorpio. When the music’s in the flute of the snake-charmer

who wouldn’t want to be bit by a young cobra in training

that sways like a river reed in the mouth of a sleazy oboe,

or a mindstream smothered all over in the albino kisses

of nocturnal waterlilies opening like poems and loveletters

addressed anonymously to the stars that gape in astonishment

at the power of black magic rooted in the starmud of a swamp

to bring them to enlightenment by blooding their vision

of night and love that shudder through space like the wavelengths

of these human intimacies that feather snakes in the flames

of the fires of life dying on the pyres of their sky burials?

In the name of lust and love, rapture and denial, sorrow

and the panaceas of snake-oil that make liars

of all those tomorrows that disappeared like smoke and mirrors

when a real witch approaches the frauds with a longing

in her heart that subjects her like a black star

to the tinfoil luminaries of all her bad imitators.

You hear me, sweet one, even this many lightyears away,

I’m tempted to double-back on this martial discipline

that restrains my demonic soul and faster than an enzyme

can outpace the speed of thought, go retrograde on myself

to meet you like bad timing in the spring run off

of a waterclock that knows it’s not long before

it freezes up at the end of autumn like the lens

of a telescopic contact on the third eye of this

longer view of life I take like the shadow of a mountain

cast by the earth like the cursive script of a poet

flowing like a garden of underground rivers on the moon.

I’ll be your wise apple with no worm in it,

your big brother, with no emotional espionage

going on behind your back like a street camera,

a grey-haired familiar you can beat like the stump

of the green bough I used to be in orchard time,

to see what pops out of it like a sacred clown

in a jack in the box, a warm mammal or the usual reptile.

I’ll be your substitute anti-father who isn’t trying

to cultivate you like a weed in a soiled flower bed

that doesn’t feel like a grave everytime you get up from it

and try to bloom again, despite the pain, I can feel it,

boiling in you like acid rain thrown in the eyes of the stars

trying to read you like the subplot of an enigma of tears.

Forget your heavy metal father corroded like an alloy

of black mold and bubonic plague who seeded you

with the fleas of a disease he could treat like a slut

he could carry around in the medicine bag of his loins,

hexing the love you still long for like a bad drug

you seek from all these other dealers as if love

were a taboo you had to violate to get fixed up.

Or do you really think you can overcome

this hemorrhagic fever of love like an antidote

you can milk from the fangs of the venomous

unkindness of life that raped you in its underworld

like a paradigm of the power of death to make the spring bleed

like the jewels of wild columbine a grave-robber couldn’t resist?

Anybody ever made love to your mind, or have you

dumbed the gnostic gospel of your intelligence down

to make fires in the morning that smell like the ashes

of old urns for a meathead that wants his cosmic eggs

overturned without breaking the sunny disposition

of the way he flares at you like the ingrown hair

of a black dwarf with no light to shine on anyone

that doesn’t fester like ulcers in the frying pan

you jumped into like the caldera of a dead volcano

at the expense of the fires that once bloomed in you

like passionate sunsets in an archipelago of Polynesian islands?

Prudentia might have been a fit remembrance

for the lack of sex behind the pews of Thomas Aquinas

looking for a flying buttress for the cathedral

of his Summa Theologica, but I’ve got no tomes of wisdom

I can feed you like the staff of life turned like flesh

into books and bread. No carnelian dot of blood

to mark your pineal gland like a poppy catching

your third eye burning among the starwheat like Antares.

Nor can I answer you like the male principle of the world

that abandoned all standards by excising

the mysterious matrix of the female from

the headwaters of its distant source overgrown

with screening myths that give birth through

the skulls and thighs of the mutated alternatives

that amuse themselves like pseudomorphic stem cells

ravaging mortal women like bulls, swans

and showers of gold as if they were fecundating animals.

But I’ve swept up more than one new moon

in the arms of the old before as if I were dancing

on my grave with fireflies that lit me up

like the ghost of a constellation glowing in the dark.

I know the mystic terror of falling in love with a woman

like Johnny Appleseed ploughing shepherd moons

like the tree of life in a Medusan snakepit of crazy wisdom

that holds the grail of everything that ails you

up to your mouth like the breast of the dark mother

that suckles the dead like the Milky Way merciful

as an aberrant phase of Kali on a rosary of prophetic skulls.

And it still seems after all these eras of ashes

I’ve scattered like doves and crows from the aviaries

of my voice-box, to scry my own signage to see

if the stars were propitious or not for me

to open my eyelids like dawn again without fear

of being blinded by the blazing of the light

at the end of the tunnel that never fails to amaze me

like the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades glimpsed

through the leafless branches of a winter birch grove

and two illegitimate muses of memory that inspire me

to burn brighter than a lightbulb in a housewell

or a night light in a morgue, like the dark genius

of a root fire not even life with all its tears can put out.

This thief of fire wasn’t born like Prometheus

when Metis cleft Zeus’ skull with the double-headed axe

of the moon for wanting to consume his own progeny

like food in defence of the realm he’d become

accustomed to like a shoe that had wearied of the road

he was on like a cannibal eating everybody out of house and home.

If I hold these myths up to you like a starmap

can you see the dark abundance, the bright vacancy

of the darkly profound and sublimely shallow

this business of love is when it takes you more seriously

than you’ve been in the habit of listening to yourself?

Homeless as a rogue planet making pitstops at the stars

for an occasional taste of honey from the hive,

I’m not on the make as much as I used to be

when I looked for fertile crescents in the deserts

of the opposite sex that kept their oases under wraps

for the good of us all, though we shared mirages for awhile

that are harder to forget than my first sight of Orion.

I know I must sound like I’m talking like a field fire

out of a burning bush with New England asters on my breath

in the valley of Tuwa, that there’s madness

in the medicine of what I say about the short straws

of the bad magicians that have thrown the dead heartwood

of their dozy wands like vipers of bad luck in your way.

And I’m not preaching about anything I wasn’t

the spell bound victim of once myself, as if no sword

I’d ever drawn like a blade of moonlight out of the stone

could ever come between me and the women I’ve loved

more like Merlin Morgan la Fay than King Arthur, Guinevere,

but, goose-bump, I never gave all my magic away

like Prospero at the end of the mystery play

taking a step back into the cowardly world

that isn’t so new or very brave to anyone who’s been

exiled by it for not short changing Ariel at the expense of Caliban.

Life still sits at my table like a lonely autumnal equinox

in this thirteenth house of the zodiac where the angels

come to slum on the wrong side of the tracks

when the midnight sun is at the zenith of a total eclipse

or just relax like a black swan that’s given up

looking for its reflection at night in the negative space

of a white starmap that tarred and feathered it like Braille

or binary snake-eyes on the cube root of a bad throw

of the dice. No false idol of love embodied like a dung heap

covered in snow, until things start to get hot is ever

going to come down off the pedestal you put it on

and raise you up eye to eye out of this lower ditch of hell

you’re digging for yourself like a grave so deep and wide

you’re never going to fill it in with the vacuous absence

of all you abide as if the crumbs of the dreams

that fall from your table were loaves and fishes on a hillside.

Stop masticating your own heart to make it easier to feed

like a dirty pulp novel in the shadow of the Tower of Babel

to all these illiterate thugs you apotheosize in their high chairs,

spoon-feeding love like crack over a candle flame

in the middle of an ice-age shrink wrapping the larger mammals

so they don’t burn in the freezer like the body parts

they keep dismembering from you after bleeding

that hapless heart of yours in the bathtub that won’t ever

wash the stain of your snarling father clear-cutting

the orchard of your sex like Eden with a chain-saw.

Say screw it, lady, and throw gasoline on the snakepit

as you head for the exit before this snuff flick’s over.

Go ask the albino crows, nothing’s indelible not even

these oilslicks that are killing off the marine life

in the gulf of your sex in the fathomless depths

of your sea of awareness so the whole world looks polluted

through the same eye you look upon it with

at the small end of the telescope that’s stuck

its head in the sand like a field easel in a Buddhist hourglass

where the wind paints like the blowback

of the dust storm that’s grinding you down like a lens.

Try something new. Learn to be kind and compassionate

to all those voodoo dolls you keep sticking pins in

like effigies of yourself on a terminal psych ward

off its placebos like meds. And, yes, it’s hard

to respect yourself when you’ve never known how

but even so little as an atom nudged in that direction

can start a chain reaction of photons jumping orbitals

in a nuclear liberation of heat and light in the core of yourself

that changes the elemental nature of how you’re put together

whether you melt down like a candle at a black mass

of your inverted passions in insincere tears

or empower yourself to burn like a star for lightyears.

If you just stop trying to shine down on these eyeless slag heaps

trying to burnish the fool’s gold in their played out souls,

I swear there’s a habitable planet out there somewhere

waiting for your light in a dark cold abyss

with flowers in its eyes, o yes, chicory and cinque-foil,

wild poppies, enamel buttercups, marsh orchids

and white sweet clover in its voice when it rises to greet you

when you enter the room at dawn, and it’s not false,

and all your clothes are on like apple bloom that knows

when to take them off like a nebula on a summer night in the starfields

and shine, sweetheart, shine like fruit on the bough

of the evening star in the gardens of the Hesperides.

PATRICK WHITE