By The Time You Say It
By the time you say it, you're a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.
Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging
from this cold oceanic reflection, how good
to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,
your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash
of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.
A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.
Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart
mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge
and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.
(just so the peasants don't storm the moat again,
thinking we don't know where we're at)
I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.
Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void
and sticking your flavourless gum messiah
to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind's face
I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.
A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed
preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables
and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.
Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters
of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble
like constellations at a crossroads and then
got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,
fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else's hand. The albino sun
high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you
as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.
People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain
that pushes up a mad flower of poetry
through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet
hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a dropp of water
on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil
of your blood-weather. And now the vast night
crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows
and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light
experimenting with brown-out dosages of prozac
like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck
of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood
on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision
is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons
who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough
you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents
singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines
under the foundation-stones of untenable temples
abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars
a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.
Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last fifty years of my life
devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight
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poem by Patrick White
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