Someone To Rejoice In
Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.
Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing
for a treasure, a happiness, a companion
I'm not even sure I deserve, is agitating
oceans of emotion again,
and wants to run before the wind,
wants to raise up apple blossoms
like sails with the skull and crossbones on them
and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes
that once served as lighthouses in the distance
when I was island-hopping
like an infidel among the angel fleets.
The dragon's howl in the dead skull.
Moments when my heart shrieks with life
like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.
I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.
The night flows into my bloodstream
like an atlas of arteries.
As time has passed, the pain in me
has shifted wavelengths from the ultra violet
to the infra-red of a less lethal frequency.
I'm at the wide-eyed end of the hourglass,
but I can still bare my fangs
like the moon when I need to.
I can still come down off the mountain
like a hashashim and run the shadow of my knife
like an eclipse across the dreamscape of anyone
who takes too much for granted in their sleep.
So why is it after refueling and buying
a well-upholstered cheesey sandwhich in plastic skin
at the all night Kingston Esso just before you cross the 401
at one thirty in the morning, and begin to enter
the long, dark way home up the old Perth road to Westport,
did I begin to miss you
as if you had sat beside me my whole life?
And I pondered your absence like a hitch hiker
I had just picked up for the first time
and the impact of the encounter
left an indelible impression on my emptiness
as if someone had written something
so eloquent and intriguing as a ribbon of blood
letting its hair down in the water
I couldn't help but feel like a flying carpet
that was unravelling mile by mile of asphalt
like a glacier that couldn't wait to get back to you,
thawing time into rivers to speed things up?
And the night sang as I hadn't heard it in a while.
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poem by Patrick White
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