I Want To Take The Moon Out Of The Sky Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

I Want To Take The Moon Out Of The Sky



I want to take the moon out of the sky
like a cup, like a rose of black wine
and drink it down to the last shadow of a mountain,
the last, lost eyelash of the light
that floats on the surface, the final crescent.
If I could inhale fire, or snort the stars
like a rail of radiant coke on a black mirror
and pull the darkness up around me
to keep me warm in the night
against the cold drafts that barge through the window,
if the darkness were a woman
I could throw my arms around
and hold her back against my chest in the bay of my body,
a shore I liked to wake up on
still drunk on the moon
and walk in the morning as she
dazzles me with her nakedness and veils,
the litter of the broken jewelry
she arrays in the sprawling waves, I would, o
believe me I would. I would
take this paint rag of a life
this hard, dirty smear of leftovers on the plate
of so many paintings, this injured towel
that has wiped the blood and tears and clouds,
the wounded sunsets from so many faces and rivers,
from so many brushes and knives and tongues
leeched off the rotten rainbows, the flags,
the bad water in the dark well, I would
take this skin of dirty flowers,
this Joseph’s coat of colours,
this blighted, blotted pelt of soiled skies
and corrupted trees, eyes that have dried
into blisters and scabs, lips
that crack like dry peonies, I would take it
and give it a decent burial, already
the poor, leather shirt
of some archaic Indian from the book of changes
lying in the yarrow of his scattered bones.
Or maybe I could acquire the thunder
of a large, rusty oil drum and burn it at night
in the backyard, cremate it and smudge
the evil spirits out of the house
of my prevailing stars, smoke
the adulterous virgin’s disease away,
like clothes after someone’s died of the plague.
There are days, and this is one of them,
when life seems kinder than I thought
to everyone else but me;
mornings and afternoons, but seldom the nights,
that seem like dead dogs
lying at the side of the highway,
ants in their eyes dissolving like soap
and turkey vultures unravelling
their organs and tendons
like the yellow and scarlet yarn of old sweaters
that will be reknitted into something else
that doesn’t fit, days
when I realize I was born middle-aged,
how homeless my heart is,
and how my voice,
though it’s been hurled into the dawn for years,
is such a lonely bird, not even an echo
disappearing into the silence
of the vast, unanswering spaces that overwhelm it.
I write in the air with the wind for a pen
like a madman who gestures at things
no one else can see, believing against belief,
he’s doing his part to better the world
though it comes with asylums
and bills to his door, demanding
mechanical birds on iron boughs,
and revisions not his to give.
I feel like a cinder in someone else’s eye,
a crumb of sleep shaken out of a dream,
a thread of smoke that stings people
into rinsing me out with anger and tears,
the stone of the new foundation cast away
though all I wanted to do
was astound the blind with stars,
make the dark flower with the wild orchids
of a more luminous fragrance,
arrive with islands of wheat and roses and wine
and lay the cool sage of the moon down
like a silver herb on a scalded heart.
I’m a brilliant hoodlum from the late sixties
as one of ex-wives called me, leaving,
and we thought we could heal the world
with love and music and art.
Hearts change, times change, and maybe
I’m the casualty of a slow accident
and this is my coma, these days I spend
witching for water in hell,
for signs of life among the corpses
that fell en mass from a terrible height,
going from one to another,
lifting up their pale arms,
the limp necks of broken swans, looking
at my watch to time the indifferent heartbeat
of the pulsing cursor on the computer screen.
I’m a habit of buoyancy
drifting through dense fog,
an empty lifeboat crying out
to a ship that may have gone down years ago:
“Is anyone out there, is anyone alive? ”
And no one answers
but the gargantuan vacuities
of the atomic distances between us.

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946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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