YOU, IN TEARS AGAIN

YOU, IN TEARS AGAIN

You, in tears again, broken chandeliers of pain

that came crashing down upon you just as you thought

he was asking you to dance. Save the moment for me

but you got caught in an ice storm of crystal candelabra,

your heart slashed on flint knapped glass

and the moment, brittle and clear, shattered

the mirage of the window you mistook for a mirror

in this desert of stars that keeps passing through your life

like a squall of serpent fire in an hourglass.

You, in tears again. Your eyelashes coming unglued,

and your Medusan mascara running down your cheeks

like the wavelengths of watersnakes in eclipse.

I know your suffering isn’t face-paint, but, little sister,

you look like a sacred clown in a circus of grief.

No. I don’t mind you showing up at my door

this late at night. You’re not a thief, you’re not

junkmail, you’re not a bill, or just as bad, the landlord.

You’re a friend of mine. My heart’s your heart.

Let’s give it shelter and lots of sacrificial space

because I sense it’s just been ripped out of your chest

like a strawberry and stepped on. You take

the black futon and let’s forget about the altar for awhile

and the strange gods you light candles to

as you grow increasingly blind to your own beauty

like a bruised orchid trying to bloom in the shadows

of the outhouses you keep falling in love with.

Nothing to say to you that I haven’t said before.

But there’s no told-you-so in the tone of my voice.

I’m not a self-righteous boor. And you’re not a penitent.

There’s silence. The crazy wisdom of my interior

dream mondos remembering the love affairs

of the ghosts that got caught in my highbeams

one foggy night on a lonely dirt road going nowhere,

or you could let the scorpion out of your medicine bag

and we could talk about your life as it is now

until the eyelids of the rose started to droop like bells

and the watershed of sleep began to heal your wounded housewells.

Up to you. Which would you prefer with your coffee

and cigarette? Here’s a towel. Your lipstick’s messed.

You look like you’ve been French kissing a poppy.

When you’re down like this, it helps to look your best.

Vatic in your sorrows. A little more oracular erotica

than abstract expressionist. A priestess with a python

wrapped around her shoulders like a rafter in the snakepit

of a volcanic caldera. We’ll take shelter under

the same lifeboat on the moon together and pretend

we’re a hydra-headed turtles willing to stick our necks out

for one another for awhile. Don’t want anything from you

as usual. I think that’s why you always turn to me

like the last recourse you have to fall back on by default.

Flattered. Glad my emptiness can be of use to someone

and I’m not wasting all this compassion on myself.

You know I sit here some nights, my hands idle

at this wheelhouse of a desk I’ve turned over

to the night sea of my awareness of being alive,

knowing it has more buoyancy than me, and I stare

out into the darkness above the rooftops of the town

as far as my eyes can shine, and all I look for

is a star I don’t have to follow if I don’t want to.

Sometimes it’s Venus going down in the west,

sometimes it’s Arcturus tangled like a kite in the powerlines.

And I rue the light pollution of Mac’s Milk,

and the shapes of the buildings occluding

my field of view, so sometimes it’s hard

to know the name of the star that’s caught my attention

like a splinter of light in my third eye without

seeing the rest of the constellation. But I guesstimate

it’s not a mystic revelation, more a match

of spiritual elation I’m playing with to see

what might catch fire in my imagination.

I don’t expect anything. Don’t feel I have a right

because I think I’m an expert about things in the night.

I just sit here like a lotus on a helicopter pad

waiting for a dragonfly to return like the air ambulance

over at the Vet’s Hospital, dreaming the world

on the nightward among the morphine drips

falling like the tears of Etruscan gods in a dead sleep,

and more rarely now that my prophetic skull has aged,

a waterlily on a platter served up to a dancing girl.

If you’re alone long enough, you come to feel

your solitude is an affable companion that knows

more about the world than it’s got the good grace

to let on. My silence comes on like an anonymous muse

and I’m inspired to ask, like a fly with a starmap at the window

what space-time continuum does the human divinity

of my starmud inhabit like a planet, or even a shepherd moon

in the inconceivable vastness of what I’ve become

just by wondering my way in and out of it

like a labyrinth of blackholes digging their own graves.

Undertakers in winter with back hoes. It stings sometimes.

Sometimes it’s nettles and wild parsnip to know the roses

with their thorns, the sunflowers with their bluejays,

and the lovers like you, in tears again, who come in

off the street like dream figures that have woken up too late

to realize the new moon’s waning like a deathmask deeper into life,

and the night’s bleeding out through a crack in the door

that’s been left ajar. The candlepower of supernovas

melting down like the hemorrhage of a star, and all,

without exception, however viciously they cherish

being possessed by a seance of the hungry ghosts of love

feasting on their bodyminds like wafers and wine,

all perish alike when the honey stops flowering

in the beeswax of their flesh, and their spirits

are the paint rags of an art theft that got thrown on the fire.

An encaustic masterpiece of ashes in a macabre museum.

But don’t abandon hope, even if you enter here.

Look directly into the eyes of your horrors

like a sparrow staring down a rat snake and see

for yourself what everyone fears blink

without eyelids as if it were carved in stone

by a waterclock with a wavelength as long as your tears

as if it were raining on the Sphinx again

as it has been, little sister, for more lightyears

than a mirage has eyes and irises the colour

of the waters of life greening the Sahara

with the flood myths of the grasslands I can see

are beginning to take root in your vision of love

like climate change among those estranged

like watercolourists by the loss of their own lunar atmospheres.

Here, a pillow, you can lay your head on for the night

softer than the stone of the world, the down

of a thundercloud passing like a storm over the treeline

of the echoless valley of death in your heart

the low hazard fireflies will reoccupy soon

like a chaos of lighthouses on the moon arguing

when the next tide comes in, and you can wrap

yourself up in the metamorphic cocoon of this old tattered

comforter of a dreamscape you can terraform for yourself

like the barrow tomb of the vernal equinox,

or the winter solstice in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,

or the garden of Eden if you prefer crying

yourself to sleep on the shores of the four rivers

pouring out of you into the forbidden zones

of human awareness where sulphur butterflies

immolate themselves in the flames of the wild irises,

and milkweed is the wet nurse of migrating Monarchs

and the bull gates horned by the crescents of the moon

that sometimes gore the rose on its own thorns

are glazed in lapis lazuli like star sapphires of cool bliss

and bricks of starmud baked in the kilns of the Pleiades

I’ll show you one night just over the top of the bowling alley

like a mobile of glass-blown tears recycled

from broken mirrors turning pendulously in the wind.

PATRICK WHITE