A NICK OF THE MOON A nick of the moon. Thin smile of circumstance and the paint rags of the few, modest dreams I had left, are bleeding out again. Alizarin crimson leaking like lipstick out of a slashed mirror as my blood congeals glacially and gives my heart freezer-burn. Crazy alert. Three alarm anxieties. Loser brigade. Should I drown like a new moon in the calendar of my waterclock mindstream going through all these phases or rush to my rescue again and again and again, the lifeboat of a waterbird with oars for wings? I’ve been exhausted by mundane terrors. The man gets scared. And he sings in the face of despair. He waits for the night to heal. An injured wolf in the bone-box of his lair. And the stars like Arcturus for months above the dark roofs of the glaring town always the charm of a long, hard-won childhood lightyears away from this creosote of a life that gets left like the slag of a dragon that’s gone up in smoke like a short-cut through a chimney all over the inside of the dead furnace of my heart where I’m still trying to keep a few fireflies alive. Poetry, my sanctuary, my asylum, my chrysalis, my fortune-cookie of oceanic consciousness in a seashell, my Braille koan laid out like a starmap for my eyes only, my spinal connection to the blue guitar of my imagination in an ensuing phylum of Chordates, black box of my soul, anti-grail of my worldly aspirations, look how I’ve worn your lip down sipping from your elixirs like a devotee walking up the sacred stairs on his knees he’s blunted like a pestle and a mortar to throw his crutches onto a pyre of fossilized wing bones. My curse. My blessing. Inkwell, thorn, heart, pen. Could be a bad choice of metaphors or a pillowcase full of flightfeathers I wear like a war bonnet in my dreams when I’m ghost dancing off the reservation. Cowboy Zen art martyr from the lunatic fringe, I’ll make it cosmically through the Leonids somehow, if not by will, by a spiritual reflex of my imagination. I’ll walk barefoot over the ashes of my root fires like a rusty cedar down to the bedside manner of the lake. I’ll watch Jupiter bobbing like a lure in the narrow field of view of an atmospherically unstable telescope waiting for a bite and when the swim bladders of the northern pike mythically inflate like nuclear submarines surfacing off the Lomonosov Ridge. I’ll carve a barbed spear point out of the tusk of the moon and reign sovereign over the ice like a dispossessed Inuit hovering over a bubble. In an oblivion of heroic numbness, I’ll wear my laurels like razorwire proudly to the stake of my heretical desire to let the nightbirds return to the gentler nests of last year in the heartwood of a rootless tree, undisturbed by the unconfessed holy books of the leaves that burned in their absence like the sky burial of a snake in autumn that won its wings, at last, from the flames. I’ll climb the burning ladders of my own lunar vertebrae like a dolmen of moonrocks that stood its ground in a firestorm of solar flares in the Sea of Tranquillity. Even if my tears blister into glass, I’ll water this desert of stars like a dragon tending a garden until it blooms like an ocean of broken chandeliers. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 13:29:50 +0000