In Certain Moods I Think Like An Ice Age
In certain moods I think like an ice age,
relentless, every insight, the glacier
of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.
I'm not sentimental about baby mammoths
falling into cryonic crevasses for twelve thousand years.
I could gouge out the eyes of lakes, bully the mountains
like a mile high waterclock with its pedal frozen to the metal of time.
Something brittle and cold as broken glass in my seeing.
A clarity that burns like dry ice born without a personality.
I can still stand in the bottom of a snakepit
and see the stars like the fang marks of so many strikes
at the scared rabbit of my heart beating like a strawberry,
palpitating like the sump pump of a toxin
trying to drain the sweetest of watersheds
like quicksilver from the mirrors of my brain.
Sometimes I feel I've been harbouring
the skull and crossbones in the piratical bay
of a subliminal childhood that washed me up
out of a fire storm onto a more ferocious shore
of civilized savages that take their time eating each other.
I can see as supraobjectively as a reptile from the late Triassic
the asteroid that's heading this way
to shatter the window of opportunity
like an atmosphere that doesn't encourage
growth in a greenhouse, but doesn't mind
genetically tampering with cell tissue
as if agriculture had given birth, not only to war,
but to a mutated child that would redesign her.
Too many nuances are left out of lizards and lenses
for me to look at the world through their eyes
too long. My third eye begins to crystallize like a jewel
instead of a black pearl of a new moon
on the tongues of the waterlilies walking on the water
like the pale flames of the constellations burning their starmaps
like passports to anywhere they're not as homelessly here
as they are now. And there are strange viruses
that can be transmitted from telescopes in port
like heresy through the gullible angel fleets.
People begin to see that the crystal slipper
fits the darkness better than the light
the way a star fits the winged heels of the night
like the Great Square of Pegasus, or Albireo in the Swan,
Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the Lyre,
as if one size for a shapeshifting universe fits all.
Time eventually sands the hardest edges down
like a dentist drill trying to put new crown on the pyramids,
triangular sun dials get rounded out into circular clocks,
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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