AFTER YOU LEFT

AFTER YOU LEFT

After you left your absence turned into more of a muse

than your presence seldom was. Sat at my desk

and fell on my pen over and over again like a samurai sword

until I got the knack of gutting myself properly.

Last of the summer’s late blooming poems,

black-eyed Susans and asters, monosyllabic tragedies,

dutiful domestic farces demanding a coven of doves

be sacrificed to the darkness I was remanded to,

my heart a cross between a spiny sea urchin and a voodoo doll.

And at night, the beautiful, September stars, my God

who would have thought something so distant

and impersonally uncaring could have hurt like that?

Loved you well and faithfully while you were around,

and gave you my assent when it was time

for you to go, blessings on your head and house,

you be the one who goes off down the road

to fulfil the promise of a new life without me,

and I’ll be the one, my last sacrifice, who

stayed at home and died because it would be

neo-romantically rude not to, without you.

Functioned by rote, the reflex habit

of a lifeboat drifting in the abyss. Too much

significance to everything, especially the things

your hands had touched, mythically inflated sublimities

that scorched my fragile equanimity with gamma ray bursts

to the third eye as my vision of life boiled off

like the last forgivable atmosphere

of the brutally habitable planet I was living on at the time.

I was precise and grateful for the hidden solace

in the ritual commonality of simple human chores

from feeding the dogs and the cats, to

shaving my face with a razor blade

and cutting my reflection a hair shy

of its jugular vein to see which one of us

would blink first. Freedom bound, I liberated

as many chains as I could. I kept the bird-feeders

full of sunflower seeds when colder nights

began to come on. Dusk was always the worst

between the prelude of the beginning,

with a couple of false dawns to start with,

and the epilogue at the end, like the last word

of the day in the twilight of the bardo state

in between when everything you are is behind you

and what you’re about to become is still nothing,

and you’re standing beside a leafless locust tree

that’s all thorns, and the stars are emerging

as the darkness saturates your mindscape like black lung

mining diamonds of adamantine insight

in an emotional tarpit with an occult sense of humour

that leaves you as bruised and numb as if someone

had just inoculated you against the constellation

you were born under like a pathogen that can have

a mystic effect on those who have not been exposed

to it before, and all you can do is stand like a fever

in an ice-age and gape, just gape through the gates

of separation at how immaculately lethal forever can be

when you’re still trying to cling to a relative state of mind.

Time can be ambidextrously ironic or it can

stare at you like a bad joke waiting for a laugh at the end

and all you can feel is something remotely eerie

and exhaustively incomprehensible about the way it grins

like the skull of the moon rising over the sacred groves

of unmummifying birch trees where we buried

the barn cats the fishers and coyotes got, placing

large boulders on top of their corpses to keep

the dogs from digging them up again. Bast

the cat goddess look over them and the white flowers

of the bilabiate catmint you planted for feline

and butterfly alike, keep blooming in the thickets

of the thousand small kisses you left them where they slept.

The dream’s moved on since, but one night up there,

I wept the stars out of my eyes like an ice storm

of glass splinters as if the plinths of the light

were all that was left under the brittle calyx

of the deft rose frost bit by the fangs and thorns

of the cold that sliced my lips like a paper cut.

For awhile after the last rose had died,

my solitude began to taste like blood on the snow

in a backwoods winter abattoir. And then the spring

and the long impassable roads of starmud

waiting for the rain to pack them down.

Love hurts most when it begins to thaw out

like the frozen fingers of a child with its hands to the stove.

Marrow aches like slush in the bone, the agony

leaves nothing to the imagination to play with.

Endured, it passes like the death of a favourite cat.

Meow. Hope I purred around you more than I roared

because there was always so much more

to thank you as I do than forgive you for.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOW ME THE CLOUD THAT BERATES ITSELF

SHOW ME THE CLOUD THAT BERATES ITSELF

Show me the cloud that berates itself

because it isn’t a rainbow. Sometimes

it’s a firefly sitting on the throne of the star

in your eye, sometimes it’s just a distant

farm light through the trees. Universe

in a grain of sand, one grain of sand,

the mass of the universe, who talks about

a feather’s weight of sky or two and a half

millilitres of tears when you cry? When

things turn toxic it’s often safer to drink

from the mirages than it is the water.

Illusions don’t always pollute your reflection.

And the truth doesn’t always set you free.

Sometimes it puts you under house arrest

for lightyears in a penal zodiac of required tattoos.

Ah, sweetness, this is the fourth time

in three months he’s left you half-destroyed

inside and you’re the strawdog he throws

on the pyre after the ritual reunion

when the water burns and you reach for

a magnum of fire to slake your thirst for love.

I know he fills your pillow full of doves

when you lay your head down to rest at night

but, child, every time you wake up you’re

alone again in a snakepit, flapping like a lapwing

to distract the danger from the fledglings

he’s already swallowed like a dragon the moon

to bring on the rain. You, weeping in despair.

All the songbirds of your most tender emotions

detected in a no fly zone of dove-seeking missiles

fired from a nuclear birthday cake offshore.

You’ve given him a lot more than much,

and he forgot you were born. What does that tell you?

His heart isn’t on you? It’s probably true

to judge by the watercolours streaming from your eyes.

I’m your older, groovy, mentor-friend, whether

I like it or not and I mostly don’t because

it’s a straitjacket. I’m not a bird net meant to catch you

on the fly when you fall out the nightsky

like an asterisk from the starmap where you’re

trying, Sisyphus would have been proud of you,

to shine like a constellation of votive candles

you were born under like the wing of a prayerwheel.

You’re a pudgy teen age girl but that’s just

patches of snow in the spring of global warming

and they’re dwindling like ice floes in the Arctic.

You’ll be a glassblower with an hourglass figure

by the time you get out of the kiln. You don’t

have to take a blowtorch to the roots of the rose

you’re becoming to thaw them out before their time.

You don’t have to take a crowbar to the petals of the flowers

to get them to bloom any faster. Summer’s coming

and the wild grapes won’t be too fat on the vine.

Leave him. Abandon his shrine to the scorpions

and snakes. Let the wind whine like a ghost

through that portcullis with lockjaw he bared

like iron teeth at your idea of turning him into

a rose arbour over a passageway that didn’t snarl

like thorns in the mouth of a siege skull.

Yes, pain for awhile, separation, severance, ordeal,

arbitrary lightning strikes that have nothing

to do with karmic retribution, but stop

standing like a phoenix in an urn of your own ashes

as if your heart were guilty of some hidden heresy

every time he accused you of witchcraft

for jumping naked through your own fire

like a tigress in a circus act with a ringmaster

who likes the sound of his tongue cracking like a whip.

In the unified field theory of love, men are relative

but women are still the high priestesses of the absolute.

Introduce him to your absence. Quit revising yourself

like the endless re-write of the first draft

of the loveletter between the bed sheets

of the empty envelope you’ve been inspired

to approach like a muse who thinks it’s dishonest

if she doesn’t offer the whole of her mystery up

like a feast of the harvest moon to the famine

of the seven lean kine that prefer their own

scorched earth policy, cooking in their own juices,

to the plenty you put on the altar like a bad bet

on your best ideals. Don’t you know yet, little moon,

love is subliminally darkest when it’s new,

and he’s suppose to make the sacrifice to you?

I’m not an artificial lung, but I’ve been

sleepwalking like a poet through this

long dreamtime of love like a poet lingering

in the doorway of several houses of life

that took my precession of the equinoxes in

like a zodiac of women who kept the porchlight on

for me to wander in out of my dazed homelessness

like a Luna moth crazed with a desire to singe

the witching wands of my antennae off

like burnt matchsticks in a raging forest fire.

That might not make any sense to you now,

but trust my scars when I say, inspiration is

the merest taste of your dark abundance,

the remote cachet of a nocturnal rose as

dangerously intriguing as the ocean of an afterthought.

Love isn’t a sunami. It’s an undertow,

the whisper of a distant nightstream that promises

to show you a way out of the woods like Beatrice

or a pagan water sylph that isn’t salmon farming

mermaids in the sacred pools love dies in

wholly gratified in the eyes of its own interior vision

like those who have been summoned to swim

through stone to the summits of the highest

from the depths of the lowest the mountain

casts like the shadow of the valley of it flows

down into from the source to the roots of itself.

So you’ve been rejected by a cult of indifference

like the rerun of a power play from the early sixties

that’s made it like the half-life of a radioactive element

as far as your generation to turn the milk of human kindness

green with jealousy you haven’t been curdled yet

by the b.s. that soured the cow that jumped over the moon

and ran away with the coke spoon? Everybody’s

going to fake the moment was more dramatic

than it was, if they were there, and you were not.

Generation after generation, the ingenues age

like waterclocks all on the same wavelength

as they make their way back to the sea like fingerlings.

As with love, what’s culpable about life

isn’t that slander about original sin, but

the perennial spontaneity of its innocence.

A dream without precedent, authority or experience,

strangers from the first encounter to the last,

no history of solitude to consult, no hagiographies

of the embodiments of the mystery when it takes a form.

Love is foolish to the wise, wisdom to the clowns,

a chemical to the biologist, a white plague to the cynic,

inspiration to the poet, prophecy for the blind,

Love moves, sometimes mountains, but it’s not a motive

anymore than a river is. Even less an alibi

for the criminal negligence of a negligible heart

or even one as full as yours is, that vow of apple bloom

you made to the windfall to come, punishment

for trying to love someone so much you believe

their sins of omission are the faults and errors

you’re deceived by in the mirrors of the nightmares

you’re playing solitaire with in an isolation cell

as if the terrors of paradise were your only solace in hell.

PATRICK WHITE