In A Journal Of Blood
In a journal of blood that doesn’t exaggerate my breath
to the mythic proportions of distant nebulae,
I have tried to record my nights on earth
as an apostate astronomer with a two way telescope
embedded in the sexual cupolas of Venutian mountains,
the ultimate observatory, the only understudy church
ever built by the stars from the roof up, the split skull,
the nursing cotyledons of my white, enamel gun,
my mechanical shoot that wants to put out a vine
or turn into an insect. And the women have come
in a turmoil of hair, with their extraordinary ascensions
and terrifying declinations like commas, comas, and black comets
streaking across my field of vision
with its damsel-winged chromatic aberrations
smearing the light with rainbows, and I have held them
spectroscopically in a clock-driven parabolic begging bowl
benching butterflies with the dumb-bells of my intersection axes.
Maybe creation is a forsaken remnant
of apocalyptic extinctions so fine-tuned to the dimpled atoms,
one would have to be a tattoo on water
to equal the finesse of the outflowing; or maybe
there is an intelligence that sustains it from within
like a man in his shadow, or lipstick on the edge of doom
that any effort to define your place in it
is an immediate dislocation of mystical vertebrae such that
everything to the sidereally afflicted
looks like the limp of a three-horned god.
And it’s getting harder to tell the time, but when
I look at a star I feel I’m touching the skin of a woman
and just as there are laws that grow by violating themselves,
my fingerprints are enough to convict me of God,
but don’t bring on the diffracted zebra slashed
by the photonic swords in the ethical shadows just yet,
or the convents of the absorption spectra that will testify in court
to the true nature of my celestial propinquities.
I’m not the missing link between matter and mind,
the cauterized butterfly of my sensational antennae,
or a bishopric of ingrown ideals; I do not believe
the desire-pumped engine of my environmentally adapted will
is either supreme or real; but when I stub my toe, it hurts,
and the specious present is always the past tense
of a star down on the luck of her absolutes.
poem by Patrick White
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