AFTER YOU LEAVE

for Tonya, with love, on her thirty-second birthday

After you leave, a bell

deeper than the sea strikes once

and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire

and tries to evaporate; gusts

of the most graceful emotions,

eloquent clarities of the heart,

shake me free of myself

like leaves and petals and pages,

the tender radiance of nightskies,

and I am astounded in the openess

of an embrace without limits,

of boundary stones being hurled delinquently

through the windows of ice-age mirrors

that have wept so long and slowly

over the silver river locked in chains.

How easy in this solitude

to declare myself to you,

to undo the delusions and the fears,

to flip through the chapters of the onion,

take off this last layer of skin,

and shed the final masks of snow

in the warming recollection of your presence,

in the way your beauty exhilarates me

then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,

and my heart sets out by itself toward you

scintillant everywhere, gold

flowing out of the dark ore,

as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,

the legend of a secret constellation

behind the vital starmap of fireflies

that makes me want to shine for you so intensely

in this dark doorway of pain and passage

that the light hurts with the poignancy

of its longing to fall like a key

from the spirit’s lost and found

upon your planet;

to open gardens that have no word

for fence or gate,

to bridge your streams

with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.

My heart sets out for you all by itself

like a lantern on a road

that unspools with arrival at every step.

After you leave I am possessed of the will

of an anvil and a forge

to become a chalice for you, a sword,

an axle and a plough, a strong bolt

against the miscreance of battering circumstance.

I raise your reflection to my lips

like a cup from a watershed of wine

and in every single sip

swallow an ocean like a potion

from the tears of the moon,

knowing how dangerous it could be

to miss you, to become

an addict of your light at the first taste,

to wait for eras for the return of the dawn

that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.

No more than the sun from the vine,

the moon from the dreaming apple

the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,

could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines

undo the vision you have already mingled

like a nightrose of fragrant fire in my blood,

Not to drift again alone

like an empty boat

ferrying the corpse of the ferryman

through the fog to a cold shore

now that I’ve been washed up on your island

like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,

a frenzy of light and love in your tides,

a drowned lighthouse

coming to life in every wave of you.

I want to be brave enough

to risk the possibility

of listening to the night together

with the unveiled bride of the moon

in the bay of my arms,

I want to be the sail, the flame,

the gull of her breathing,

the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.

I want to swim like a mirror

the sea holds up to her face

to do her hair up with starfish

she tresses like galaxies in the depths;

I want to devote myself like a candle

to the shrine of the September moonrise

that saturates the far sky over the sad hills

like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass

when she smiles

like the wind over the abundant harvest

of the ashes I’ve stored against

this famine of passion

in the silo of the blue guitar.

I want to place my life

like a feather of fire

on the mysterious altar of lunar rain

that splashes like stars everywhere

in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,

and turn these deserts of space and time

back into grasslands

crossing her thresholds

in whispers of pollen and dust.

She walks into the room

to help me paint the bedroom walls,

as I try to cover the grafitti

of my vandalized soul with white,

and a dove in a cage

panics at her approach

before an open door.

She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush

like the moon over a lake,

behind a cloud,

through the branches of a leafless willow

and everything in the room

is enhanced by her shining

and I’m rolling new skies over

the scars and fossils of old stars,

worn faces with plaster patches

to rewrite the shepherding lies,

the myths and symbols of my solitude

in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.

Now it’s four a.m

and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room

like the pendulum of a heavy clock

that aspires to be a bell,

threshing words like wild rice

under an eyelid of peacock blue

to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,

the small boat of her hands,

with the eyes of a precious gathering.

And the tender snow falls quietly outside

on the crow limbs of the winter trees

like flesh returning to the bones of the dead

in a silent resurrection

more unsayable than a veil of white

that puts its finger to its lips

like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood

to hear what the hidden nightbird

under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE