The Painting Finished
for Sally
The painting finished, I sit at my desk
and go on painting windows and computer screens.
My body is grateful and my heart a submarine.
I don't know if I expressed what I meant to mean
but there it is and that's an end of it for the night.
Time now to rely on my resident metaphors.
Stop looking at things that flower in space like stars
and coercing the light into compliance.
Sit in my apartment and watch the weave of the rain
unravelling the loom of the window in tears.
Feel like a seance trying to talk to an exorcism
when I address myself in my solitude
at cruising altitude over the sirens and car horns,
the wailing of long distance freight trains
like graffiti art shows on the road all the way
from North Carolina, the land of talented spray bombs,
and the gleeful shrieking of a gaggle of girls
as shrill as apostate nuns of narcissi in the rain
that have just broken their vow of silence
and are making up for lost time impishly.
Relatively serene, the composure of chaos,
I let the starmud settle in the puddle
until my mind becomes as clear as
a refracting telescope without chromatic aberration.
And then you show up in a blur of stars
like the Andromeda galaxy,
a smudge of shining, a gust of wavelengths
and what had been unfocused in me,
like the cosmic background hiss
when I'm sitting here like this,
the afterbirth of a man wondering
where the rest of me is, and suddenly
I'm whole and focused again on an old wound
I had thought was scarred over forever
some time ago by the moon
that keeps re-opening every spring like a rose
as I realize that love isn't done with me yet.
And I say to myself, here comes the mystery again,
the fire, the desire, the moon with its black pearl
and its white, its eclipse and its harvest,
and the one blue one that's too shy to come into the light,
but everyone sings and dances under just the same,
the harvest in and the labour done.
With love. That valley of a word that can wound mountains
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poem by Patrick White
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