Flyaway Woman
Flyaway woman with a blue ladybug for a heart,
I am not your firetruck, or the glass wishbone you break
in case of an apple emergency when you split
like the seedcase of an eyelid into the angelic smear
of an orchid of smoke with dangerous doves for hands.
Leave me alone to the night that goes on in the depths
of the praeternatural river that threads the eye of the bridge;
and the fish that brain the darkness with the constancy
of thoughts and emotional lightbulbs
that keep tripping over their hairtrigger traplines
trying to illuminate their destiny
in the palm of the sceptical lightning
who does a bad imitation of God. Flyaway woman,
I could love the way you smile as if
you had a mouthful of coffin nails
and wanted to board the world up with plywood
so you could live like a rose in a hurricane
without blowing the sandbox cities
of the peninsular children away. Flyaway woman, tell me,
is your heart an orange in the fridge with green sunspots,
your body a ship that left yesterday
riding low in the water with a hold full of broken jewelry
to trade with the illegal immigrants
who would sell you a continental gram
for a single bead of rapture? Flyaway woman,
why keep the past alive in an album of angry mirrors,
and grieve like a wounded doe
all tangled up in a constellation of razorwire
waiting for someone to put you out of your misery,
when there’s more silence
in one of the moist plums of your accusing eyes
than there is the space the galaxies
douse their torches in? Flyaway woman,
I am not an arsonist in heat
with a bouquet of wooden matches
and a ragged doll of gasoline,
standing on your threshold with the smile
of a late-breaking headline. There’s no doubt
you’re a foreign queen
in a tormented hive of black honey, but I am not
the sticky bear that’s come to maul your secret bees.
I have my solitudes and voices that speak to me
like cemetery shovels just like you; and I know the terror
of being suddenly overturned by a sudden squall
on an ocean of seaworthy love-letters just like you.
And it’s true that life is often an S.O.S. in a soggy bottle
the keeps washing up at your feet in the morning
like a dead octopus in a kissing booth,
and there are watermelons full of razorblades
who come on like the dawn
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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