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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
and toads of lust who ask you to lick their backs
to craze you with a vision of angels rotting like sheets.
I can’t deny the world’s a house on fire
and there are slimy organizations of algae
that go from whore to whore,
asking you to write off your life
as a charitable donation
to child pornography; I cannot say the world’s a nun,
or there aren’t scars and skidmarks on the moon
from previous landings, forks
that strike like vipers at the olives in a nest,
but, flyaway woman, I am not your nemesis,
I am not the intellectual coathanger
that wants to tear the embryo out of your belief in me.
I live in the dark with terrible imaginings
and a raped ambulance that asks me
to get the lily of her siren to the hospital
for a blood test to prove we die in jest,
and I can’t recall how many dreams ago
the surgical swans and torn peonies
last came for a change of dressings,
the effusions of neglected roses
bruising the return addresses on their unbound bandages,
but flyaway woman, there’s an eclipse in my chest,
a crow in a furnace
trying to peck its way out like a spear,
and small scorpions of doubt
rehearsing requiems of bleached fire
on the keyboard of my feelings like treble clefs,
and I am without wings
in the eternal pause of a comma
that wants to create the world anew from a maggot of light.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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