I Won't Turn The Shadow Of The Sundial Back
I won't turn the shadow of the sundial back
to replicate the asters that bloomed yesterday
and were lovely as the wrists of a child
playing with perfume in front her mother's mirror,
I remember, without wanting to turn them
again and again and again into a template.
I don't mind grinding the past
into a parabolic mirror to see where I've been
in the last fourteen and a half billion years
but as I get older, that isn't going to give me
an insight into the future of darkness
I'm rushing into like an accelerated fool
where the angels are not self-destructive enough to pass.
The most beautiful songs are sung in the dark
by the loneliest of creatures endangered by the night.
I've been a jumper for as long as I can recall
and sometimes it's sheer suicide, and others,
even though I don't pack a parachute for the fall,
it's paradise. No risk in your next step
you're just crossing a river on a bridge of skulls.
No real Apaches in the Black Hills you're just
collecting postcards of the massacre,
buttons and bullets in a garden that went bust.
How can you keep your wits sharp
and hone your instincts in an arboretum?
Drug-store explorer with a library of roadmaps,
you've feathered your heels with lapwings and poultry
and flutter around like butterflies in a barnyard.
You ever tried firewalking across the stars?
Or put a match to a poem you loved like a storm?
If you're not proceeding at your own risk
the journey's not worth it. It's someone else's path.
It's only another threadbare carpet under a window.
May the rose always have thorns. May your lovers
always be able to kill you without a moment's notice
and your fireflies revert to dragons when your comets
are flying blind too far from the sun to shine.
You be the one that's missing from the family album
for a change.You be the one who's moody and strange.
The blasted orchard that isn't known by its fruits.
Stop revising that diary of event horizons
you've never violated once, and instead of
dumping your dirty sheets down a laundry chute
into the basement, go skinny-dipping in a black hole
to wash the stink and stain of useage off.
You keep listening for choral arrangements
of mellifluous honey in swarms of killer bees
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poem by Patrick White
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