Cocoons
Weary of lies and the soap operas of fruit on the verge
of their due dates, weary of men and women and breezy friends
with smiles like illegal fishing nets across a river, bored
with the multiple personalities of stale bread growing pools
of blue-green bacteria like a bad imitation of the moon, the people
who landed safely from a long way up
but drowned in their parachutes, the earth-bound
curb-worn excuses that never learned how
to park a star without getting burnt; and nowhere to go
with all of this unspooling of an old documentary
that isn't me anymore than the echo of a diamond is;
sick of approaching the vital signs of every oceanic dilemma
with the heart of a well, the mind of a winch
and the balls of a bucket, without malice
and I repeat it, without malice
because my mind is not a shoe full of interrogative scorpions
and my blood has never gone white long enough
to call itself an ice-age and there's always a clown
to warm things up with sad defeats and comic thawings
and most things are just old bottles in a barn anyway,
tired of witching the watersheds of mystic sublimities
that are always flying away like herons startled in the moonlight,
or stars with the eyes of fish, lovers
washing the doves of their hands in the blood of a rose,
jaded by the black translucencies of hell
that smell like cordite and lightning
and leave ambivalent messages on a storm-coloured mirror
lustrous as the eyes of a horse from a paid familiar
amused by the fool he courts, I write this
to no one in particular knowing it's a way out of the stone
I'm swimming through like ore, a dream key
to a cormorant fountain of elegant transformations
that haven't been born yet, faces that return from childhoods
yet to come, roads to go down that aren't roads
until I walk them, all here now in the lifespan
of a heartbeat, singing like sirens of oxygen
to seduce the wind away from paler tresses
and rattling windowpanes. Little matter
who the return journey is if it ever gets there, finds its way back,
there are fires along the way so intensely
beyond the last farms of colour
their serenity is their fury
and all this world of discernible form
in the light of that light,
a pilgrimage of shadows. And by that, do not think
there is a secret eclipse up the sleeves of flame
that rise from the candles of my adoration
because it was the world in the profundity of its playing
that lit them in the first place to celebrate
the way it hides from itself when anyone's looking
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poem by Patrick White
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