It's Writing Me
It’s writing me.
I’m not writing it.
It’s got nothing to do with obedience
and there’s no chance of betraying it
even now that I’m three thousand miles
and forty light years away
and all the fireflies and lightning bolts
in my mystic cloud of unknowing
have turned into a frenzy of fanatical killer bees.
I’m swarmed by anxieties like mental space junk
and snakey wavelengths of yesterday
still trying to shed the sky like sunburnt skin.
Like the mythic names of old lovers
tattooed on our foreheads and firearms forever
and the obsolete starmaps in braille
that we followed like the magi
across this friendless desert of stars
as the signage of something divine.
And it isn’t the ironic sublimity
of the implacable circumstances of fate
that dictate whether the gate to the garden
is shut to me or not
that I fear the most
but the caprice of cornerstones
that turn into quicksand just to preserve the past.
I’ve grown more ruthless with my memories
over the past four decades.
I splash acid in the eyes
of those who are learning to read me like a book.
Others I send into exile
for trying to desecrate the image I have of me.
They write long sad poems
on the shores of the Black Sea in winter
and they’re never coming home again.
There’s more Tristes than Amores in the depth of my pain.
The rest I keep like lighthouses and lightning rods
to remind me what it was once like
when schools of silver fish swam
like poplar leaves when the wind
turns them all in the same direction at once
through warm water on the moon
and I had an atmosphere I could rely on.
Now some days I open my third eye
to the lucidity of the morning
as if it were a security camera
that took the picture of the thief
that stole the moon from my window last night.
But here you come again this morning
despite my priestly efforts
to exorcise your ghost
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poem by Patrick White
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