Lady Menagerie's Heart Tinkles Like Glassware
Lady Menagerie's heart tinkles like glassware.
I think of the rain as a musical prodigy
but Lady Menagerie listens and hears
little chips out of her tears. We walk
through a squall of spider webs suspended
like veils and bridges over the chasms of Capilano,
and she's lost in a fog of cotton candy
and I'm trying to get them out of my hair
like evil stars, black dwarfs in the deathtraps
of their slipshod constellations turned like dreamcatchers
to the dark side. Lady Menagerie is precociously precious.
She's a thermometer of sensitivity. She sees
the dew in the morning and breaks into a sweat
because she thinks the grass has got a fever
she doesn't want to catch. The world for Lady Menagerie
is never a crying three year old wandering alone naked
through the gauntlet of road kill some computer in Colorado
has made of her family, or, nearer to home, the neighbour's god.
There are no blackflies in Lady Menagerie's honey.
She's a cult of fanatical translucency and if
it doesn't smell like sandalwood incense and Patchouli
it's not the fragrance of a real flower.
Lady Menagerie is a starmap of chandeliers.
A one-eyed aesthete. If you tell her that the moon's
cratered like the pit of a peach, that every falling star
isn't a sign to wish upon with the benign intentions
of a celestial midwife, that sometimes, predictably,
they're astronomical catastrophes bent on her extinction,
she'll call out the thought police of the Vatican
and accuse you of molesting her pristine psyche
by painting pictures on the lens of her mind,
So you only point your telescope, hooded like a falcon,
at the robin's egg blue of the chicory growing by the side of the road.
You don't mention the turkey vultures in pathology
operating like undertakers doing an autopsy
in a seventeenth century Dutch operating theater
huddled around the cadaver of a dismembered squirrel.
Lady Menagerie says she resisted being mistreated
as a girl, and now the rest of us have to make up for it
because she's a wound in arrears to her psychiatrist
and if she's ever going to heal, it's important
to be hurt sincerely. Lapwing or judas-goat,
Real suffering is too messy an ore for her
to get her rainbows dirty, so she cherry picks the jewels
out of the eyes of her experience to go
with the flower arrangement she's made of her still life.
She draws a drape of tasteful discretion over the albino fog
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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