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
