I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES I could look at it with sweeter eyes. The way boys and cowards romanticize war. I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies. I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh. I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors and have them placed in all the best cafes so when you put a quarter moon in they reflect anything you ask them to. You’ve got a beautiful face. Man are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa. And every occasion I can with integrity I try to praise the larkspur. I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies that have almost come to mean as much to me as the stars on a summer night. I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events between people, I don’t expect to experience again the way he walks beside her like a green crutch coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter trying to be a strong tree she can lean on, and so much is so crucial to a blessed few or a father walking down the street, listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight. Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic, though there are days I live like a dog, and I know that denying this suggestive reality is to summon its affirmation as if something in the context of life heard you and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong. And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial. This is the middle extreme and it should be lived immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night and your heart is a bell of shadows or you’re one of the good sugars of life fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder, they’re all out of tune with each other, this one a bass run and that an arpeggio on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to. When the long wavelengths of its tears aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses. My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars, love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it, and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales were beached overnight and crushed their lungs under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at. If your passion for anything is ferocious enough sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings, and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes as if you had to go through this ordeal to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real. Today I lived like one long mouthless scream. I could have kicked stars in someone’s face. Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music. Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium at two in the morning with three goldfish hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds gone back to the sea as we all do eventually. And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream, maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water, and though it’s impossible to assess the worth of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 13:59:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015