I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

The long, dark night, more anthracite

than bituminous. And one star, alone,

fierce above the town, burning, as a jetliner

blinks its way down to landing in Ottawa.

Pythagoras’ transmigration of souls

in the body of birds, Iranian angels

with lives like messages for loved ones

and strangers. But I’m deep in the valley

where the Algonquin and Ojibway

got here first, and the Canada geese, though

they’ve flown away, bear the deceased

after their bones are dust to the south

and the west of the dawn they watched

lest they forget where things rise again

and set, through the eastern doors of

their burial huts as if death were a kind of love.

Samhain, soon, Festival of the Dead, witches’

New Year, All Hallowed Eve, where the dead

are allowed yard time free of their isolation cells,

or wherever the waterbirds took them,

ventriloquists behind the mesh of their

electric veils, the hand of the living

pressed against the hand of the dead,

let the witches jump naked through

the sun at midnight, half way between

fall and winter. Let the prophetic skulls

whisper something old on the nape of poetry.

Aldebaran and Capella to the north, one week

until the Pleiades breaks the horizon,

the moon and Jupiter rising in the east

after midnight through the denuded trees

in the park. Perfectly still out, not

a human in sight if I don’t put the emphasis

on myself. Just me and the streetlamps

and the last of the flowers wondering

what’s happening to them as their dyes

are charred by the frost like a bonnet of warpaint.

The more I study things as I get older,

common things, obvious details, the more

I am estranged by my own knowledge.

The leaves are making silkscreens

on the sidewalk. And what I thought

I knew, I’ve shed like the last skin

of the moon’s original totem before

I go into hibernation like a wavelength

with cold blood. A red shift and then oblivion.

More calm than morose, there’s not much

left to lose. The flames of the daylilies

have all been snuffed and they’re up

to their candleholders in the leaves

of yesterday’s fires like a brown out

of a dragon in a crematorium, a pyre

trying to make its bones disappear

in perfect combustion, not a scale

left unincinerated, dust to dust, ashes

to ashes in the subliminal holocaust of the heart.

Things pass, things perish, things die away

like a woman back lit by a window

more than once. I carry on to nowhere

I know I am, not in the mood to stare back.

I’ve made this town the nave of my spoked wheel

of birth and death for the last thirty-five years

writing and painting the mindscapes

of the tourist traps that think they’re here to fish.

I’ve hot waxed and laid my life out

like a glossy brochure without a computer app.

More the picture music of the way things are

than a photograph or an advertisement

to sell you terra firma in the winter

than starmud that will flood you out

in the spring when real estate begins to thaw.

I haven’t exaggerated the longing

of the nightingales or hermit thrushes

that sing unseen in the woods at night

with more hope than I have that something

will answer them back out of the pitch-black abyss,

for reasons of its own. The La Brea tarpit,

or a nest egg quilted in goose down like

moonlight, or hobby farm wives cutting

patches out of a working starmap gone

at the knees, with too many black holes in it

to mend anymore, the sail of the pirate

fired upon like a mailbox at the side of the road,

commemorated as the death shroud

of a colourful bedspread empowered

like a mandala to lead you astray

by following your dreams wherever

they may lead, a heritage cemetery or buried at sea.

Or maybe, if you’re nocturnal and rustic enough,

just roadkill somebody put a blanket over

so you didn’t have to see their face

or the shock in their eyes this isn’t such

a petty place. It compares with a tole-painted urn

from anywhere and the fire masters

scry by the rings and the cracks in your heartwood.

Things heat up in the winter, in the summer

they chill out by the doe-eyed lake caught

in the highbeams of the moon looking for

a blue number they can relay to the ambulance

on its way to pick the corpse of another workhorse up.

“Gonna die less than a hundred feet

from where I was born. How many can say that?”

Buried deep enough in his own starmud

the bush dogs don’t dig him up again

like grave robbers to see what a pharaoh

wasted his life on thinking it would distract

from the pain to build in stone what

he rocked from the starfields and tongue depressors

of the graveyard to see what he died of

without ploughing his body up like a tractor

gone crazy on the moon he seeds with cattle corn.

Or the mad farmer they found sowing the woods

holding onto the tail of a huge black bull that led the way.

What do you think? Is there as much moisture

in the soil at the new as there is at the full moon

because gravity pulls the tides one way and then the other

under the influence of the dreams of a sleeping child?

Is it a boustrophedon or a labyrinth? Is it a good time

to plant new ideas like stars in the dark matter

that clings to our rubber boots like the heart

of something that has remained stubbornly true to us

without making a big fuss about it? Or not?

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE

MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I'VE NEVER BEEN

MORE AND MORE I REALIZE I’VE NEVER BEEN

More and more I realize I’ve never been

who I thought I was when I was nineteen

to sixty-five, but to believe I did was

a useful delusion to get things going until now.

It’s a mask to rub the mask off your face

and say you’ve improved the complexion

of the moon. You have to include your wrong

in your right, your ugliness in your beauty,

to be holistically accurate about being

nobody you’d care to meet as well

as somebody you can’t tear yourself away from.

Isn’t it so? Would you want to have a coffee

with you? Or would you make an excuse

and forgo the encounter? Or maybe

you’ve been dying to meet yourself for years?

Would you ask yourself for your own autograph?

Give somebody a crystal skull and a Nazca terraglyph

and they’ll come up with a meaning of life

that’s as good as anybody else’s good guess

except they heard it from an alien they were

listening in on like the NSA to a cellphone.

I was always a diamond in the rough

education, art, poetry, women and teachers

who marvelled at my anomaly, were

going to cut and polish every facet of

as if I were having crowns put on my fangs

like the first and last crescents of the moon,

and I don’t say they weren’t motivated by love,

for the most part, but enough was enough.

If you want diamonds that flash like the moon

on water, you’re going to have to put up

with the darkness of the ore they’re derived from.

Everybody’s the collapsed parachute

of how high they’ve fallen to ground, shooting star,

withered daylily in the autumn, dandelion

or milkweed seed trying to land on good soil,

some do, some don’t, but it once was

very different before they paved the starfields

and the comets had to root in the minds of humans

like comas and commas, rat tail combs

sticking out a back pocket, like a sign

of what could have been, with a precautionary warning

you can’t exorcise all the ghosts and still

have someone to live for. You can’t

white-wash a wanted poster over and somehow

pretend you’re in the clear. Sooner or later

you’ll catch up to yourself and shoot first

and ask questions later. You’ll hang with horse thieves

though you were only along for the ride.

There’s a force driving me like a spy satellite

around a shepherd moon to greener pastures

where I’ll graze among the stars like the first time

a man goes down on a woman to give her

as much pleasure as he’s possessed by

as the crumpled surf of the bedsheets

have to open at the same time for a safe descent.

Skydiving is an erotic experience. Time and again.

You see two snakes copulating and modesty

makes you go prophetically blind as a planet in transit

across the sun that shines at midnight, while the moon

opens flowers like loveletters on the sly.

It’s nice to be admired for the things you hope

you do well, but you’re never admired, except

by maybe one or two, for who you are if

somebody out of your mind not theirs were to ask you

about your masterpiece. The colours of

the Jurassic waterlilies don’t fade for

three hundred and fifty million lightyears,

but the grey on your head has gone to seed

with the Scotch thistles who once stood armed

and violet. The bones in your starmud

are scattered like a wetland of dead trees,

yarrow sticks of a moonrise in

the Book of Changes. Nine in the fifth place

will never be a nightclub where women

fight over you again. And you got to meet

the Byrds just as they found Jesus and the music

was never the same again. Here’s

to the tinny guitars of the sixties lest we forget.

Anybody remember what that was all about?

There was a boom of ghost towns we called ideals.

Revolution became a hot commodity on Wall Street

and it was a lot easier to sleep around like Leonard Cohen.

I didn’t believe all the flowers I saw

in everybody’s hair just as I don’t place

much faith in the flamethrowers that are the rage

of today. Eventually it all goes up in smoke.

It flares and dies away like a supernova.

Flowers grey, hair grey, and the dragons mere

warm breath on cold air. They ran out of natural gas.

Smoke, smoke, smoke, a chimney spark,

a firefly, a flash of lightning and then we

go into the dark like a poppy or a matchbook.

The savage rose is dry blood on the snow.

So what lasts? The colours of the lilies perhaps.

PATRICK WHITE

WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

WITCHING FOR WATER IN HELL IS LIKE

Witching for water in hell is like

trying to drink a mirage from an hourglass.

All lightning, no rain. More axons than glia.

Hazel yokes might break like wishbones

but you never get what you want.

I wanted you like a madness I never

wanted to get over, I’d have to make

a truce with to live as if it were worth it.

Nothing’s true but that’s beside the point.

Take true from false and there’s nothing

left to go wrong though the fools play

one off against the other like razor-blades

at a cock fight. Cock-a-doodle-do, who

are you? King of the dawn with a Zippo coxcomb?

Witching for water in hell is like

reality living the afterlife of theater.

You just don’t know who to believe anymore,

the writer or the actor. Or you’re gulled

in the wake of a B.C. Ferry by your own ideals.

Your audience hides behind the wavelengths

of the curtain that you’re parting like the veils of Isis.

If you can do that, if you can pull back the rain

to see there’s nobody at the door, you’ve

already amounted to nothing. Significance

becomes a bore. You do things for the hell of it,

knowing it’s only a staying pattern until

you’re given permission to land in the cemetery.

Witching for water in hell isn’t

an ingenuous man trying to live

like a fire extinguisher mounted on a wall

while above him shine the green-eyed banshees

that go off as if somebody were trying

to steal his car and he wasn’t enough of a heretic

to burn at the stake and have it done with.

Hell, I mean. As if suffering were

the antecedent to everything that’s perishable

about life, the way you wear holes in your dream

pacing under the window, more to lose

than win as if sleepwalking weren’t part

of the delusion. And waking up

weren’t a breach birth of broken glass.

I had both hands on the prayer wheel

of birth and death once, at eleven and two,

navigating between the clashing rocks

so I didn’t get smashed between the opposites

like a bird with no wings and a sky that’s waiting

for it to fly. You can only touch as much

as you can imagine your senses are trying to tell you.

Witching for water in hell is like

a man with eyes that can see learning Braille

so he can track himself like hierogylph in the mail,

a triangular planet that passes like a kidney stone

through the urethra of the zodiac, the slime path

of a boneless morning snail adding

its ribbon of shining to the garden while

the sidewalks are still cool enough not to blister on.

I live in an air conditioned shell with running snot and water,

my body a bag with nine orifices like a sprinkler

on the lawn pretending it’s a galaxy, a sunflower,

the golden ratios of the conch shells of eternity

fossilized in the Burgess Shale, and all

the armies that they called, terracotta

in a lake of mercury that will make me live forever.

But witching for water in hell is like

an action figure with a sword of dry ice

that cries like a ghost of itself it’s dying to return

like a river to a forbidden watershed on the moon.

I loved you once and maybe I’ll love you again.

I’ll greet the snow in your hair as you stand

in the doorway as it adorns something warm

and incorrigibly human that looks at life

as more of a furnace than a fridge. Fire and ice.

The way the world is destroyed in the name

of a madness inspired by the fossils of the fountains

of love, witching for water in hell to amuse the insane.

PATRICK WHITE

BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

BRUTAL, COLD NORMAL LIFE

Brutal, cold normal life with a few

familial affections to warm your heart at

as if you held your hands toward a fire.

The heart goes blue, the heart goes red,

two-thirds of a triune traffic light.

I’m not shedding, the way the autumn trees

are, there’s still hair on my head

though its the urn of somebody’s ashes

I never met. I try to treat it with respect

and there’s a smile on my face the colour

if my eyes I use for default when there’s a glitch

of good luck that makes a grey day blue.

I’ve forgiven my lovers and friends

their careless infidelities. The match

thrown from the car that started

a forest fire of sensitivities that didn’t

like to be criticized. I only know one

who keeps his word like an exotic bird

in his rib cage he’s teaching how to escape.

If I ask it’s precious, little enough

compared to what I’ve given, though

most of my gifts remain unopened,

I’ve dropped my pine-cones like time capsules

on a seabed of compass needles to soften the blow

when I root in the conflagration to come,

take hold, and show you what it is

to be Slavic and stand up to the wind.

I don’t ask for much so I’m never disappointed.

There are verities. And then there are

perennial truths. Sooner or later you get

sick of them, their relentlessness, almost tyranny

and after that there’s nothing but oblivion

to look forward to exploring, as if it

never mattered which boot you put on first,

or if your toothpaste tasted like a blessing or a curse.

And you don’t know if you’re eloquent Aaron

or recalcitrant Moses when he faced his snakey rod off

against pharaoh’s magicians. Big snake

eat the little snake and the little snakes go down

easy, like wet noodles, the wrong way.

It’s hard to know whether to resign yourself

to life, or celebrate like the clown who

believed there was something sacred

about his calling, making the mourners laugh

at their own funerals. Haven’t been that way

since Grade six when an award taught me

the Book of Changes begins with a logjam

of yarrow sticks, a sloppy job of clear-cutting

everything that goes on in an old growth forest.

I got as far as the Book of Total Knowledge,

volume L, and gave up cramming my drawers

with the old wind socks of flights I’ve never taken

because of the rain and poor visibility.

Pick a loose thread from the shoulder

of an oil spill and you’ve got a total eclipse

of everything you’ve ever tried to understand

blacked out like London in the blitz.

Lightning wars that freed the slaves like rain

when one or the other got its feelings hurt

by witching for water in hell. By now

the grail is a skull full of stardust that won’t

slake anybody’s thirst in this mirage of a desert.

I don’t blame anyone anymore for the things

they did or didn’t do. History’s an old menu

for blood and the peasants are always

caught off guard like the Newfoundland cod banks

when the Catholic church passed an infallible

papal edict that said everyone had to eat fish on Fridays.

Ichthus. Good Greek word. The sun is in

the vernal equinox. A hunter’s moon in Virgo.

Why not? Is quantum physics any less superstitious?

Everybody’s good guess must be tolerated

though the wilderness is more of a natural antidote

than a pharmaceutical fish farm. But wouldn’t it be

a bummer if they learned how to make

everything live forever thirty years from now?

Bad timing, as if we had anything to do with it.

I’ve grown nostalgic for the waterclocks

my youth knew before I started wandering by myself

by the Tay River late at night when I might be

somebody dangerous, when, in fact, I’m just alone

with my own thoughts and memories as if

it weren’t anybody’s business but my own,

though it’s not wise to freeze up in the highbeams

of an inquisitive squad car that thought it saw

a raccoon with a balaclava instead of a mask

on its head. The terrorists have infiltrated

our genetically modified, corn-fed gardens.

Darkness and anonymity are my close friends

though I’m sure they know who I am.

Solitude is my longest standing, undemanding mistress.

I can’t understand most of the follies of people

anymore than I can any longer distinguish

the gaudier feathers of the strutting peacocks

compared to the dowdiness of the hens

when it all comes down to whether you want

to enjoy sex with me tonight or not. I’m not

shocked by anything except a virgin at forty-one.

Or a nun who knows the Pierian spring is between her legs.

I walk like the old bull who’s been led

to the altar many times before strong enough

for the slaughter and the sacrifice, but bored

with the details of why it must be so.

Didn’t I look far enough into your eyes

to make course corrections on my starmaps

before you started shining like a moonrise?

Don’t tell me it wasn’t love at first sight

when you looked at me like a slumlord

and you saw the rent like a matador in a tauromachia

of the sun and the moon on the hoofs and horns

you draped in garlands of gored roses?

The scorpion jumped on the back of the frog

and the lesson was on him. Too bad a dragon

stopped to give you a ride you couldn’t poison.

Misplaced compassion isn’t always a mandate

for extermination. Or a good deed the onset

of a rebuke by the devil that feels like punishment,

or the truce of love, surrender to a creature

that can’t help being what it was meant to be,

but it’s circumspect to note the stinger at the end

of the question, when the sphinx looks forward

to the interrogation as if the future of the answer

lay ahead like the one voice for the three ages of man.

PATRICK WHITE