I Circumnavigated My Eyes Poem by Patrick White

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

I Circumnavigated My Eyes



I circumnavigated my eyes
to wash these ashen rags of grief off
like the torn sails of the Magellanic Clouds.
I knew how deeply I was lost
when I set my starmaps afire
because they got in the way of the shining,
to give them a first hand experience
of lighting things up for themselves
like arsonists playing with draconian desire.
Took me years to get the last shadow
of your misdirected spearhead out of my heart,
make white noise out of the snarling chainsaw
that accompanied you like a seeing-eye dog.

At first the intensity of the pain
clued me forensically into thinking
the sheer immensity of your crime of passion,
the number of times you stabbed me through the heart
meant you loved me more than you cared to let on
but then I noticed all your knives were smiling
like scalpels that had just blooded the moon in my eyes
and I could see the savage delight
you took in my Orphic dismemberment
like an artist in a surgical theatre of vivisected hearts.
Incisions I'll remember for the rest of my life
like paper cuts from a black belt in loveletters.

I forgave what I could and deliberately
misunderstood the rest to let you pass
without being noticed by the demonic lighthouses
that kept watch along the coast like candles
at a black mass for a continental shift in perspective.
I think I was still half in love with you
when I was assessing the drift of our separation
in light years, and the grief, at times, when it didn't seem
potentially lethal, was almost suicidally beautiful,
but as my afterlives dragged on like retrogressive epicycles,
as you did when you pulled the stars out by their roots,
I let the garden return to the wild
and laid out a defensive position of black holes
the dead who once bloomed here
never need worry about being exhumed from.

And I remember standing on the trajectory of a bridge
throwing the bones of my body parts off
like the pages of a calendar scored by a sword
in a cutting edge experiment with oviparous clones
born like mystic comas from spiritual replications
of the same cosmic egg you could never break out of
even after I defused myself like the supernova
of an unexploded terrorist who was once wired to you
like the memory of an old risk that wasn't worth the cause
or the collateral damage it would have done
to the startled innocence of the bystanding stars,
not to mention the traumatic disheartening of the sun
in having to realign its shining with midnight
like a firefly in a dream on a flowerless, terminal ward.

You were the anti-enlightenment that occluded my identity
as if I'd never been there in the first place,
and that would have been fine, I would have
happily lived for you as a better lost cause
than the one I was waging like an unholy war of one.
I would have burned in my inexhaustible solitude
like a discipline of devotion refining my passion for you
into a sword worth falling upon in the name of your integrity.
It would have been a privilege, a tribute, a blessing
to have had you there to give it all up to,
knowing you can never lose what you freely give away,
to get behind your dream like a demonically fulfilled familiar.
Capo, and consigliere, but the power went to your ego,
forgetting that arrogance makes you unguardedly stupid
and stupid will get you killed faster than evil,
but you didn't need my advice to assist you with that.

Not to be. That's the last plea of exoneration
from people who don't know the damage
they've done to each other without even trying to.
The inert delusions of neon gas that highlights
the stations of the heart where we stopped
along the way for a garish night
of PyschoBabylonic heartbreak gone berserk
and solar flares ionized the gun-metal, electrical fragrance
of flowers going supernova in space as if
they were ripping the veils and spiderwebs off
the gutter wisdom of the upper atmosphere gone slumming.

Even if I didn't need to, from playful firefly
to dragon sage with dusky yellow blood,
I would have transmogrified myself for you,
an oracular shapeshifter delighted to accommodate
the most delicate lineaments of protozoic desire
to keep you from bottoming out like the Burgess Shale
into a motile labyrinth of genetic cul de sacs
waiting for your traffic jam to turn green again.

Not to be. The gavel of whose will?
The officious seal of whose blood?
Better to be loved than righteous, feast the heart
among friends and lovers rather than
nibble on the bitter weeds of your isolated sanctimony.
You were always trying to salvage
perfection from its flaws, dehumanize it somehow
into nanodiamonds you wanted to genetically replicate.
Pollen of crystal flowers in a menagerie of bees
that turned their hive into a kiln of glass honey
that shattered like tears at your feet when you wept.

Who isn't an approximation of the person
they hoped to achieve, who isn't the fraud
of their own accomplishment, more disbelieving
in themselves than those who applaud with envy
the strawdog that gets thrown on the fire
after it's served a ritual purpose no one
quite understands? Hard to find a rose in the wild
that isn't supple and pudgy, blighted and marred,
soiled by life, armed and scarred, dust on its leaves.
You wanted to excise the imperfections
as if you were editing my emotional life.
I was always the diamond in the rough
you were going to send like a foolish jewel
to a multi-faceted finishing school
where they scrubbed your ancestry out of you
like bituminous coal off your immaculate, adamantine record.

Trouble is when you let that happen
you're not rooted in life anymore,
you scrape the poetry of living
from out under the moon's fingernails.
And there's no way you can plough a mirror
and throw a seed in it and expect it to sprout
however you exalt and weep over it.
Life may be a black hole,
but it's not an infertile ditch
of mercury trying to pass
for a thread of silver in the moonlight
through the eye of a needle wider than the Hubble
popping bubbles like worlds in the multiverse.

I offered you dragons, but you wanted me to be
a hyena with great table manners whenever
we were eating the leftovers of a lion
at your mother's place, and I was always
the savage you picked on to say grace
as if the words would somehow burn in my mouth.

And I suppose I could have been seated
at the appropriate place at the table below the salt
and not eaten before those you considered alpha dogs did,
and torn my share of meat from the spoils
of the psychological leg-hold traps set for everyone,
and honed my night vision to take down
an albino baby rhino on a National Geographic documentary
to reveal that scavengers know how to hunt on the sly
nocturnally. Maybe you would have seen me
in a different light, maybe it would have become
easier in time to become what you had in mind for me
but I can shift hearts and minds as easily as forms
and when I assumed I was you for a moment
I could see, after the hyena, you had me
lined up like a chimpanzee in a cage
with needles taped to my shaved head
as I expired in my solitude like visiting hours
with pain the only nurse on the night shift
working over time in the lab of a perfumery
to make the abattoir you made of the roses
I used to bring you, smell more like blood than flowers.

And that's when my sense of empathy
began to grow eyelids so I could turn it off at night
to identify with the dream figures
that didn't wake up with me when I did
and I began to evolve an affectionate sensitivity
to the exquisite features of compassion inherent
in painting life masks on the emptiness
to amuse my own inconceivable sensibilities.

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Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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