Blue Fire
Blue fire in your eyes, for years
I've watched you smiling everywhere
against the odds
of the secret you carry within you,
the pain you carry within you
like a broken mirror
waiting for the moon to rise
as if you were a thousand lakes, each
waiting for the pearl
that would answer their darkness from within.
I was always afraid of your edges,
the way you pretended
to mistake my face for a mask,
as if I was always up to something,
as if you could hear the whisper
of the assassin behind the door
before anyone else could,
as if your pain had taught you
to be quick and clever,
to double-back like a choir of tigers,
the ghost of a supple cougar,
and ambush the hurt
you were certain would follow
any overture of flowers,
the waterlilies rigged to go off
like dismembering mines,
and the globes of the cherries
that hung like streetlights and chandeliers,
like tears long held back,
covert bruises, and kisses long denied,
small, black, radioactive planets
charred by the wary shadows of Eve.
And I never thought
you could see more in me
than a passing newspaper
hurled at your door
like another bone of the world,
another slug-line, another playbill
sporting the plague-mark
of another macabre extinction.
And you almost convinced me I was,
you were so curt in your convictions,
so ready to diffract the light of the stars,
to bend their shining
into their emission and absorption spectra,
to show under the lens of your polished glass sky
the subtle skeletons of death
that proved their wings were ladders.
It would be obvious
to compare you to a field of burning wheat,
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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