Promethean Contentions
My life the wardrobe of a shabby star; here,
take this carnelian pomegranate
that has hardened into a heart
and appease what blood you can, take my tongue
that turned yellow with arsenic in the fall
and was torn down like the flag of an ancient catastrophe
by the denuding expletives of the wind.
I'm tired of the ashes and the cemetery wine
that pollutes them; I'm weary of the view,
this worm-eaten map to nowhere
and the lies it must live to fulfill.
I've exhausted the patience
of the bookish rain,
waiting for my shoes to stop talking
about journeys they'll never take,
so that I can tell them I was a man
with a tarnished direction
that led me off the known roads
to taste the wild blackberries
that ripened in brambles of razorwire.
Here, take the petrified paperweights,
the mephitic moons of my eyes, still stained
by the dead seas that wept themselves empty
to the end of seeing; I once mistook them
for summer sapphires in a mountain crown
but things have been rubbled since then,
and my sidereal aspirations have toppled
to graze on the mannered portion
of the crumbs of light
that survived the avalanche
at a foodbank for wheelchairs and thrones. My mind,
gum under a desk
in an abandoned schoolhouse
and my voice, the graveside elegy
of an extinct species
that couldn't attune its maverick genes
to the suggested forks in the path of an eloquent serpent,
I am unspooled by my own undoing
as frame by frame
I marred my life with perversions of salt and light
to contaminate my bruised confessions
in asylums of lipless inquisitors.
I am still the ore of the sword in the rock
they couldn't extort from my ambiguous impurities,
even after the stake and the fire
that moiled the gold of my bones. Blighted by the truth
of a heresy of wounded water,
I was true to the rain
in a holocaust of cabbalistic arsonists
and even here in this fetid ditch of time,
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poem by Patrick White
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