Friday, June 22, 2007

AND IF I WERE TO CALL TO YOU

for Alysia who fills the firebells

with the ancient wines of a prodigal spring

standing at the gates of the moon

And if I were to call to you

like a bell of blue water on the moon

from which I am continuously born

to be scarred by the mother of darkness,

every leaf of my shining, a farewell

and a crossroads in every step of the journey,

my heart an endless shedding of faces and skies

that have withered and fallen away

like the petals of a black rose in a dark mirror,

the strawdogs and homeopathic masks

of abandoned rites of passage

no longer crucial

to the eye of the lamp

that held itself up to the world

like a flame astounded by its own seeing.

If I were to call you, solitude to solitude,

an echo in the abyss of a longing moment

to embody the dark matter in robes of light,

could you hear me, would you listen,

would your own blood flow like a poppy

from the untended wound

of the solitary nightbird

that answers its own loneliness

when it is urged by the saddest harps

of the most distant stars

to give up its burden to the darkness

that floods its heart like a tide of black comets

and drunk on the shapeshifting

sing softly in gratitude

for these gentle suggestions of being?

The river mingles what it will,

and the leaves that ride the current,

scriptures of the autumn tree,

are neither rudders nor pilots,

but paperboats sent downstream afire

by the brief shadow of an inspiration

to return life to life like rain and stars to a well.

If I were to call to you

across the pews of these windows and waves

of unsummoned passion and thought,

like the first church

of a sea on the moon

full of drowned messiahs,

what would be the odds against you

feathering the miracle

with electric violins of emotional razor-wire

shorting out in the rain

like a lightning storm

raving to separate the iron chaff from the silver grain?

Would holy mountains bleed

like the dark ores of heaven

poured from the fire-grails of the stars

into the keys and crowns

of a supple radiance

that breathes like a candle? Burlap or silk,

or the arable silts of your alluvial skin,

would the abdicated thrones of the flowers

be sticky with honey and gold,

could we turn the vinegar

that hammered the wings

of the dove to the door of our dreams

with the taste of wounded nails

to a trance of wine

that would make an afterlife seem like a hangover

compared to the sweetness

of lacing the waters of life

with a frenzy of dancing stars;

could we grace the voice of the bell

with the blossom

of a wedding among apricots,

could we be happy despite ourselves,

despite what we know

about the shadows and eclipses

pariahed in the garden

by the snakes and burning swords

that drove us away like refugees from our own gates

to suffer and die

alone with everything in our solitude,

offering the scars of our eyelids

like the withered leaves of the generations

to the silver herb of the cool mercy

that flows from the weeping fingertips of the stars

trying to read us like braille? Knowing the weary victory

of the tree after a brutal winter,

the dangerous longings bowered

in burning casements of ice,

pondering the pathos of the impossible,

all the orchards and skies we’ve looked through

like a theatrical wardrobe

to star the seed in the apple,

is there a ribbon of road

we might untie together,

a flower or two

we could tumble out of like bed?

I have endured the delirium

of the glass thorns

on the last rose of blood

to surrender to the frost of the night,

I have drawn the crescent of the moon

across my throat like a horizon

so that the message could be the bird

that seeks out the green bough of the heart.

My heart has been inflated like a universe

by the intrepid glassblowers

that thawed my eyes in the furnace

like deserts purified by the wind

that sweeps the shadows from its stairwells

to receive the silence of the dark and divine.

If I asked heaven for only one flower

that opened alone for me

would it send me you;

would it be your face I waited for

with the goblets of the mirrors

to watch awaken like wine in the morning,

the first magic of fire,

of life in the sea,

the effortless mystery of my spontaneous devotion

to the dawn that slept beside me all night

her tenderness the flame of the orchid

fragrant with the intimate secrecy

of insatiable encounters? Would you stretch, naked,

like a compass before me,

your body half-submerged in the surf of the bedclothes,

limbering up its harps and bows

as if it would bask in its own music like water,

and everything I looked upon was human and holy,

and even the ashes of our lust,

the lees of a drunken fire,

happier than honey

to have burned with transformation

in the shrine of the hive? Dark queen,

you are the new moon that keeps to herself,

effaced on both sides of the beginning,

barely the whisper of a dream remembered

like the echo of a pulse of a sea

that once filled your empty glass with night.

And I have stilled the panic

of the small, warm bird

that hurled herself like a rock

through the brittle window of the world

when space turned into glass

and even lightning couldn’t pick the lock

the way a flower can split the heart of a stone

by easing it apart like a parachute;

I have carried her in the boat of my hands

to an island I know in a river

where every flower is a sky and a well,

a chalice rimmed with the wings

of mysterious visitations,

and opened the palms of my hands

like an ancient daybreak

to let her heal in her freedom

and fly deep into her own voice,

knowing how brutally

I would miss the morning.

I have been the leftover star of her flowering,

and my heart, the old shoe

longing for a road, a journey

it never took, as its blood frays

and wanders away like shoelaces

and hairpin turns down a mountain.

I could walk to the stars with you,

I could descend into the basements

of my own interrogative isolation cells

with a key and a pear

that fell from the eye of compassion like a tear

and forgive the unknown accusations

that make me torment myself

like a mad monk

lacerated by his own clarities.

I could have run to you like an embassy

and found sanctuary

in a life embraced by the gates of the wind,

retuning my stars to the moondial of the mountain.

And I could lavish you

with stars and jewels, candles, trinkets

poppies and snails,

and the gowns of gardens

that died for love of a shadow

the light never cast,

and ignite the fleets of my poems

like fire-lilies on the midnight streams of your blood,

stringing the empty silo of your supple guitar

with lightning, the perfect pitch

of the fangs and tuning forks

that startle the silence

with an unknown language that moves

like the caress of a slow caravan

raining bells across a desert on the moon.

I could fill your wineskin

with immeasurable skies

that would open like eyelids in your blood,

and I could be the sea

and whisper secrets into your ear at night

that would make every heartbeat seem

like the pilgrimage of a wave,

and I could enthrone

the illegitimacy of your deepest ignorance,

the troubled echo of the solitary bird

that searches your valleys

for the ghost road of a lost migration

in a tree of light where every leaf was a map

to someone waiting for you to find him.

I could be the thorn and the trigger,

the switch in a dark room, the candle

of the approaching eclipse that enthralls you

like a stranger in the shadows

with the effloresence of his eyeless light.

I could turn my coffin into a lifeboat

and wash up on your shores

like a drowned sailor in the night

enchanted to awake newly robed

in the seabed of a sorceress

tired of her lonely shapeshifting.

I could walk with you

under the orchards of the faces

you release like wounded blossoms,

doves of lime on the wind,

the cloudy fruit of the poems

you saturate and sweeten

on the bough of the witching wand

that trembles like a mirror

over the watershed of your tears,

the sad angels you’ve mingled like elixirs

in translucent menageries of water,

and account myself one of the lords of life

to be devoted to your lips, and eyes, and earlobes

in a realm where the tribute

I placed like my life on your stairs at night

is gone in the morning

glowing with acceptence

like the gentle breath of a warm rain

that yields itself to the effulgence

of the sacred flowers

that would break over your feet

like a tide of shedding petals.

And you would not sit

below the salt

at a feast of scars,

because I would break bread with your pain

like a harvest threshed by the full moon

and every crumb

would be the nugget of a dream

you rubbed like sleep from your eyes,

pollen kneaded like words

in the mandibles of a bee

that would sway like a bell of honey

in the tower of love you woke in

like a bird under the eaves

of the ore of blood

embedded in the rock of the world

like a palace, all the hovels of your heart

breaking open like seeds

to reveal their hidden skies

and mystic tents of light

in an eye of water the sun could not blister,

or the hot wind steal like a jewel

from the crown of a clock of sand.

If I have laboured beautifully

among the fireflies

to ignite a glimpse of the world

that wasn’t grimed by the smouldering

of dragons caged like coal in a furnace,

if I have squandered myself like lightning

to illuminate a single drop of rain,

if I have scrutinized myself

like a bloodbank for roses

my heart a used palatte of autumn gardens,

such a hurt world,

so many bleeding bells,

so many lanterns

dying of thirst

beside a river of fire,

who wouldn’t try to ripen the mud with light

to show the lost stars of our swarming humanity

the way home to the wildflowers

in the far fields that wait to sweeten our suffering

with luminous eyes

that have rooted themselves,

however the storm raves,

like lighthouses and brides in the dark?

And maybe my voice

is only the thunder of a falling eyelash,

and this vision of us

only the stirring of dust at my heel,

a gust of stars

blown into the eyes of time

to be washed out in tears,

and this rag of light

that I hang like a curtain

at the broken window of my soiled radiance,

this petal of the sea,

this feather and whisper

of sky and nightwind

that I crave to live like the page of a holy book

fallen from the white rose

of an ancient lucidity

passing like the shadow of wings and clouds

over the view, is only another snowflake

on the igneous altar

of another spiritual cremation

betrothed to the laconic modes of smoke

it charms from the marrow of a smouldering bone.

It’s hard to grow ivy on a tornado,

to live in the shadows

of the clashing swords of the grass

and not be carried home on your shield from time to time,

and there are wise men whose words

sear the heart like glacial marrow

and songs I’ve heard in the groves of beautiful women

that have cured my heart

with the kiss of a spear of fire

dipped in the iron tears

of the mother-bell of their sorrows.

I could do nothing to save them;

I could do nothing to save myself

and toppled like a stone pillar,

sank like a lead lifeboat

into the emergency depths of just enough of myself

to know the madness and the danger

of walking on the bottom alone, bleeding,

a puppet in a gulfstream of garbage and gardenias,

trying to convince myself

that it was all my fault.

The colour of my blood changes like a mood ring

and I am chameleon enough,

salamander enough,

dragon enough

to wear the locket of the butterfly

as the badge of my infinite transformations,

transcendence the only return address I’ve ever known,

sometimes the black scythe of a wind

that cuts the wrist of the rose

and then a labyrinth of burning doorways

framing the body of a woman

that could make love

without shaming the fire, events of the heart,

the random genetics of starmaps

that led me to the buried shining

I struck like a vine of jewels

while trying to dig my grave;

the perennial wine of utter extinction

in the ferocious oblivions of penumbral clarity,

the last unsayable insight, the dark womb

I will be born again from

to slump down drunk and broken

on the worn threshold

of my most cherished agony.

The tree didn’t ask for apples,

the sky didn’t summon the stars,

and there’s no end of the lilies

that clutter the port with their sails,

making a cornerstone of the wave,

but nothing is written in ink or blood or water

nothing reflected indelibly

in the qicksilver of the eloquent mirror

that isn’t an eye born with wings

that evaporate like mornings in a forbidden desert.

If I were to call to you

like a needle longing for a thread of blood

could we mend this slash of dawn

the stars keep pouring out of

like a miscarriage of seminal destinies,

could we unlace the stitches that have been written

like secret scars on the closed lips

of the healing silence

and converse in the native language of the dark

in a whisper of eyes

under the blossoming sheets,

an orchard of skies enshrining a rumour of fruit?

Could we divine the flesh of the moon

with a sword of light

that released the dark harvest

of an inexhaustible eclipse

gathering stars like grain

to feed the famine in the fire

that keeps our hunger alive?

If I were to call to you,

if I were to cast my longing

into the shape of a bell

with the heart and voice of a bird

singing like a tendril of light in the vastness,

would the blossom answer the vine,

your poppy of fire

ignite my inflammable blood

and set the night ablaze

with stars and prescient apples

hanging from the burning candleabra of the trees?

Or would you bury the pillar

in the soft moss of your sex,

and root your garden in the wind,

letting the weeds overwhelm it like clouds,

and call the chaos freedom

or feeling the darkness contract with enlightenment

enhance the horns of the moon

with hyacinth wreaths

and garlands of visionary fire

culled from the blood of the unknown seers

who walk a blind road in a crucial dream

like lanterns and fireflies

through the shadowless valleys of the heart

that rings with the echo of keys

falling like water over the skulls and the stones

of those who sought without finding,

of those who drank from their own reflection

like a bruise, of those

raised like night to the lips of the beloved

who leaked out of themselves

like funeral candles extinquished at their own wakes

through a crack in the cup of the moon?

Deeper than the volcanic fissures

that douse their torches and dragons

in the deepest trenches of my blood

with the savage intensities of thermophilic species

that have learned to live without light,

your roots are enthroned within me

like the wicks and fuses,

filaments and threads of fate

that the stars and flowers cast out

like nets and veils and constellations

from the trawling boat of the heart

to catch the mystic eel of the moon

I lay at your feet like a carpet of living silver.

Language is a colour-blind pauper

when I dream of the life and love

I would lavish like a planet of opulent shadows

on the least urging of your light

to answer the knocking of your heart

at the door of the mystic fire-seed

that longs to flower in you like a bell in the night.

And if I were to call to you

and you were to wonder,

if I were to try to say the unsayable stars

caught in the throat

of my voiceless wells

like the vowels of birds trapped in a chimney,

and you were to pause and wonder

like a weathervane

at the crossroads of the wind

if the voice you heard is wine or chalk,

or a vow of rain in a lunar desert,

as soon consider the fountains

that are chained like keys

to these lifelines of water

sewers of blood in my veins

than doubt the iron of the bell

that calls to you

is the pulse of a predictable eclipse.

I wait for you like the sea

at the floodgates of the moon

the harp of a golden fish

ribbed like a bridge, a boat, a hand

to move like a whisper of love

in the affinitive depths of your encompassing waters.

And whenever I think of you,

whenever I altar your humanity

in the temple of a sacred mirror,

and sweeten my devotion

with the fragrance of summer stars

burning like incense, like honey, like pollen,

like gold in a mountain river,

a white flower blooms in the silence

of the eloquent eternity

that exceeds its own ineffability

with the alpha of your name

alighting like the wayward kiss

of the first vagrant butterfly

to part the lips of the bell.

I toll like a garden under the eyelid of a dream

or the tidal mouth of this infinite ocean

that has set my heart adrift

like a bottle of singing fire

to true this island on the moon

like a seabird off the passionate coast

of the woman who allures me

like a bay of stars in the night

to burn the rags of these tattered sails

like the clothes of a dead sailor

who dared the edge of the world

to drown in the unfathomable abyss

of the dark bride

who poured herself out like an eye of wine,

the tears of the moon in a chalice of seeing

to temper the metal of wounded swords

scarred by the flesh

in this igneous bell of longing

that canters like a white horse of water

through the turmoil of her phantom waves

returning like blood to the pearl of his heart,

the silver apple of the sea

she layered with nacreous skin

letter by letter like the phases of the moon

unspooling the universe from a grain of sand,

and hung on the dead bough of the clock

that leans like a tree out over the sea,

a battered heartbeat of wind and tide,

a wandering monk with a begging bowl,

a priest of the lightning

witching for water

with a burning branch

of green stars crowning the seed

that opens its book of tender prophencies

to root its bell at a fork in the river,

the firefly of the world

in the well of the black-robed light-giver

that parts her waters like the gown of the moon,

her darkness a carillon of eclipses and lilies,

a solar system of black cherries

dancing like a wounded chandelier of blood

with a planet in exile, a bell, a bird,

the voice of a heart in the night

waltzing through the shadows and light,

the sidereal deserts of an aberrant orbit,

praying for passage

that the sea might open like an eye

and fill the bells

of the wombs and udders and hives of a promise

with prophetic comets of milk and honey

that flow like the stars, like blood, like light

like the empty bells and pails of the heart

that come down to the river

to scoop the blossom of the moon,

the petal of her face from its mirror

and drink like a bee in an orchard

from a windfall of flesh and light

that house the pulse of the bell

in the towers of the shining palaces

I approach like a bouquet of homeless keys

to undo the chain on the secret stargates

and spread the wings of the dawn

that ripens like an eye

in the mysterious fruits of the night

that fall to earth

like a drop of blood, a locket of rain,

the soft thunder of the urgent heartbeat

of a tree on the moon

alive in a bedlam of waking birds

that nest on a branch of lightning

tuning each to the bell of the flood

that flashes through me

like the ocean in the face

of the woman I love

who undoes the rose like a ribbon of blood.

PATRICK WHITE

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