The Willows Adorned By The Return Of Their Old Hair-Dos
The willows adorned by the return of their old hair dos.
I've been mud-mashing my way down to the banks
of the Tay River lately through the primordial ooze,
now that the weather's turned round, just to feel
with an overly sophisticated sense of childish anticipation,
Venus bright in the apple-green gloaming of the swallow-swept air,
as if I were playing with fire again, the flaring
of the wild irises of the spirit burning hot and blue
as hydrogen in the heart of a needle-shaped flame
that can see right through me into what goes on
behind the curtains of my theatrical third eye
when I come like an amorous arsonist,
bearing bouquets of dried flowers
I've pressed between the pages of a matchbook
as a token of an old love affair I'm annually immolated by.
Not as a martyr who takes things lying down
but as a heretic who does his time standing up at the stake,
though I've always been a little suspicious about the heroism
implicit in that. Even in the fires of hell
I've tried to avoid posturing. But there again, you see,
I'm assuming a virtue I may not have, I'm blooming in fire,
I'm shooting clowns out of cannons without safety nets
as the heavens come down around me like the circus tents
of the empty envelopes of day old loveletters
who've lost the scent of what made them so flammable
in the first place. Just because I'm waiting for wild irises
to break ground along the banks of the Tay
doesn't mean I'm not a spiritual disgrace
that's as hard to fathom as a shipwreck
in my oceanic consciousness as it is
to see myself raising the skull and crossbones
like a condor among the angel fleets of heaven
at anchor in home port just to give them a good run for their money
like the wind in an orchard in bloom
impatient to get beyond the first fragrance of things
and taste the fruits by which everyone of us shall be known.
Either that. Or I've got more of a river nature than I thought
and that could explain why I'm always talking to myself
like water in passing that no one's listening to
in these solitudinous out of the way places along the river
I seek out like natural shrines in the woods,
trespassing against obstacles in the way of my pilgrimage
securing its footing on the bones of those underfoot
laid out like crosswalks and the rungs of ladders
stepped on like thresholds that stayed well within bounds
as you would expect any mystical stairwell addicted
to its spiritual vertigo like a Sufi at a crossroads
dancing with a dust devil of blue hydrogen stars
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poem by Patrick White
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