Still Life With Clown Poem by Patrick White

Lost, but deliberately so, and every bridge a contradiction,
the water walking on me, and the stars
fingering this abacus of planets with emergency dial-tones,
celestial spheres with lunar polyps on their vocal cords,
how can I tell the comet with the black hair,
portents of carbon at noon
as the shadows disappear into their coffins like wedding-rings,
that she can’t sing, that the moon isn’t in the corals,
and if I were to touch her, slip my hand over her breast
and whisper clefs of adoration into her dangerous labyrinths,
enrole the sphinx in my riddles, I would still be a stranger
when we woke up in the rain?
And even if I knew, how could I begin to explain
that eventually reality thaws like a bar of soap,
dissolves like the flesh of the drowned
whose bodies were never found,
and jams itself into the mouth of the morning
to disinfect the exuberance of probationary heretics
who have fallen into a cult of birds? Is it spring, again; what year,
what universe; are there buds on the coat-hangers,
swan-necked question marks above the pyramids
in the deranged maelstrom of the closet, hoping
the afterlife of a new wardrobe will convince them
they’re not dead, not the final hieroglyph
of an indecipherable suicide note? Wrapped
in the sarcophagal bandages of an old movie
yesterday, years ago, tomorrow
I came back as a grave-robber, unhappy with the ending,
and unspooled myself like a fiction of wind
to live in the open again, one human shy
of eternity, every moment screened in the dark theater
I mistake for a mind of my own. No exits, no entrances,
and the fire-door, a phoenix in chains,
witness and projector both, I live this beam of images alone,
an uninhabitable planet in a restricted star zone
where all the celebrities are pariahs of light
trying to prove their autographs. Is it so hard to understand, then,
the futility of the gardens that flare from the wings
of your shining? Your poppy of blood
would freeze in this homelessness
and there hasn’t been a rose for years
that wasn’t a journal of crosstown sirens.
And yes, I can see that your passion is perfect,
and lovely among descents, and there is a taste
of disgraced orchids
in the last bell of your innocence to fall
toward more brutal excavations, but what lives
that isn’t already the farce of its own ruin?
What breathes that can carry itself
like a tune it can keep all the way to the grave?