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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476492" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles, <br>annihilation's easy enough. It's carrying on <br>that's hard. All my emotions are feathered <br>like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese, <br>and the occasional humming bird but that doesn't mean<br>they're perched in an aviary, or forgotten <br>what it was like when they had scales. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I've softened as I've aged. Molars and mountains <br>worn down like a planet in the tides of time and the stars. <br>I used to embroider my emotions in blood <br>on pillowcases full of razorblades that had <br>as many phases as the moon has thorns, <br>broken stained-glass windows, the shards <br>of shattered mirrors. I lived like stolen <br>radioactive material in a black market <br>with no flower-stalls, though I was raised <br>in a city of gardens with hanging baskets <br>dripping from the lamp posts outside the pawn shop, <br>with three full moons of leprous white globes<br>cloned incommensurately down the main street. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I buried my emotions at sea on the run <br>like depth charges deep within me <br>where the sharks and submarines cruise<br>for targets of opportunity. Boom.<br>But on the surface all you'd hear <br>in polite company, was this muffled wump <br>like a boxer connecting a right cross meteorically <br>with an entire species. And I'd tuck myself in at night<br>under the chained blankets they use <br>like straitjackets to discipline dynamite.<br>I'd dream like a junkyard dog with its head <br>on its paws in between thieves of one day <br>winning my colours like a moonrise in a wolfpack.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ask me what the nights were all about back then <br>and I'd immediately say black. Intense, <br>voracious black. Black matter, black holes, <br>black energy, black dwarfs, black diamonds<br>on the coal road they took like the wrong path in life. <br>I'd look at the traffic lights, the colour of lifesavers, <br>and I'd see three eclipses, two for the way <br>I looked at things, and one indelibly patched <br>over my third eye like cataracts on the windows <br>of a black out in a blitz. Not brutal, not cruel. <br>But it wasn't often anyone looked at the ore <br>and saw a jewel. I was a chip off the old block <br>as my mother used to say referring to my father, <br>and I'd go away for days at a time feeling <br>like Charlie Manson in a nuclear winter <br>for carnivorous losers like Smilodon <br>in the last ice age who would never know <br>what it was like to be petted under the chin and purr.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I may have been evil, but I was smart. <br>And is that man good, who likes you, <br>and tells you to get away from him to keep <br>the infection from spreading? Any merit in that? <br>If the plague rat jumps ship before docking in Genoa? <br>Who knows why things change the way they do? <br>Maybe everybody's got a quota of mutations <br>to go through before the world shapes up like a pear, <br>the snake sheds its last skin, evolution <br>gives you a break on a long, lonely highway at night<br>and the prehensile grip of your thumb gets you a lift <br>from a stranger with cigarettes the rest of the way.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Even as a cold furnace of a kid full of the ashes<br>of the tree forts I built from stolen lumber<br>like eyries where I could shriek on the wind <br>like an eagle with an arrow in its wing <br>and nobody could hear me but the wind and the leaves <br>and at night when they came out like call girls, the stars. <br>That did the trick, I think. When they weren't <br>mean and stupid, they were wise as underground cells<br>of a compassion as tangible as honey on a burn. <br>I loved to hear the stars roaring like dragons in the abyss <br>without anyone catching fire for heresy<br>and then watch them fixing chandeliers of fireflies <br>to the lobes of their ears in front of the light bulbs <br>marqueeing the fragrant make-up mirrors <br>that told them no lies, as if it were raining light out. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">You could burn, you could burn, you could burn, <br>you could burn like a clear blue white star, <br>pure acetylene hotter than the indigo petals<br>of the wild irises with their tongues hanging out <br>like Sirius A in the Big Dog because of the heat.<br>You could know them all by name and still, <br>and this is the best part of any art, have no power <br>over them, even when you knew the secret name <br>of their god, and kept it to yourself out of gratitude.<br>Even when they were grasped by the throat like swans<br>by a john as sometimes happened, it only <br>went to prove how unattainable everything is<br>you think you've got a handle on, as they'd <br>slip through your fingers like water and clouds<br>and seductive perfumes with the names of romantic novels<br>billowing like mustard gas in no man's land.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As vivid as the lilac dot of Mercury dancing in the sunset <br>of a modest telescope that can see light <br>at the end of the tunnel of death, like a fun ride <br>in a circus of horrors, I remember looking<br>through the plumes of smoke from the pulp mill<br>through a glass darkly on my mother's back porch <br>just to get a glimpse of Wednesday's planet, <br>exhilarated to see what Copernicus hadn't, <br>this tiny seed pearl that never turned its face <br>away from the sun, intermittently revealed <br>through a parting of the ways between me <br>and the black ghosts of an ongoing exorcism. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I began to understand the dark wisdom of shining <br>isn't so much a matter of what you put out <br>as what you take in when the light turns you around <br>like stars and callgirls and says, here, in this black mirror, <br>take a good look at yourself. What constellation is that? <br>Black dwarfs on a starmap, or a cabal of fireflies<br>cauterizing the lightning roots of your myth of origins<br>like bad wiring on the electric chair of Queen Cassiopeia<br>shorting out the fuses of the old asterisms <br>with the creative possibilities of less terminal visions? </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Even today, after fifty years of poetry, <br>I can't look at the Pleiades without feeling<br>I'm in the boudoir of the sibyls trying to make <br>a decent man of the boy in me they adopted <br>as one of their own and taught me how to burn <br>the darkness out on the pyre of a sky burial <br>devoted to nightbirds like a dragon that emptied<br>its furnace of a heart out like the skull cup of an urn <br>or a coal scuttle pouring its ashes out like diamonds<br>of Zen costume jewellery from the mended tea pot<br>of Aquarius on the cold side of the moon <br>to warm things up a bit like a compassionate heretic <br>with a cosmic emergency exit at either equinox.<br>That's when my tears began to thaw like glaciers<br>on a long inter-reflecting firewalk of waterclocks.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476492" data-title="At The Crossroads Of Martyrs And Reptiles de Patrick White" data-description="At the crossroads of martyrs and reptiles, 
annihilation's easy enough. It's carrying on 
that's hard. All my emotions are feathered 
like crows or osprey, hermit thrush, Canada geese, 
and the occasional humming bird but that doesn't mean
they're..."></div>
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