NOT EVEN THE REPOSE OF ASHES

Not even the repose of ashes

in these desolations of rock

that mourn the last bells

of their unwept metals.

And the reappearance of the full moon

above the sodden, black hills

too old to be shaken by a storm,

is not a greater wonder

than its shattered afterlife

under the falling chandeliers of the rain

confiding the beauty of their wholeness to the broken.

Is there any silver in the ore of the heart

I could pour out of the crucible of this igneous dream

to upgrade the lustre of its shining,

and like the moon,

conform it to my solitude?

I will not add my adage to the woods

in a cumbersome ceremony of expired tokens

and expect to redeem the goddess in her grove.

Until you scoop the moon like cool water

from the fires of your body

love is an abstract thing.

Patch whatever you will together

from the junkyards and fleamarkets

that have rummaged last autumn along the shore,

or open your heart like a grave-robber

and plunder your own remains,

however you bind it, it’s not

a chrysalis, a house of transformation

until something alive and propitious crawls in

and deep in the silence of the mutative dark

stirs the worm to long for the dragon

the moon confers on a cradle of wings.

All creation by man and Satan cursed

condemned to sip blood and snakeoil

as a cure for themselves

from the same long blue spoon of the sky,

though the one doesn’t make the day brighter

nor the other the night darker,

are we not bonded in our repudiation by the same interdict,

are we not mothered by the same hopelessness,

the moon melting on our tongue

like an unblessed wafer

that we might cry out in our delirium

that the fevered earth

we won like a bride by default

is the only fire of resurrection in our veins

and among these spires

that have been braced to impale us

to the grim predilictions

of havoc and chaos to come,

even if the silks of insight

are spun into needles

to afflict the night upon her like a wound,

even if the worst of sorrows are never terminal,

and life itself spurn us like a carcasse,

and prove the sternest of all denials,

and the evangelical fathers of war

beget the evangelical sons of war

to rape her like a holy book

and burn her like a poem,

even if fire should scream in its own burning,

and water die in a waste of itself,

and the stars and flowers

above and below us

wander aimlessly

through the infinite labyrinths of our derangement

and the cosmos unsheathe

the black crescent of chaos

to strike our heads off

like the beads of a broken rosary,

she who has come to our deserted beds

and like the lips of a well

lowered us into her depths

that we might drink from the mystery

of blue waterlilies blooming on the tars of hell

in a riot of unnamed constellations,

each the supple vagrant of its own myth,

compiled like a whisper of rain in the darkness,

untouched by the blighted word

that corrupts the stars above,

is, even in hell,

even in the rubble of this better world,

even in the crippled doorway

of the refugee heart

that carries the corpse of its daughter

like a bride of ashes across the threshold

of a house she will never enter,

of a future that appalls even the black art of the silence

to hold its tongue

like a headstone left speechless

on the precipice

of the inconceivable vastness of the grave,

the torn breath

that gapes like trust

in the eyes of a murdered child,

the inconsolable space left by the fallen petal

of the missing hour

at the round table

in the fable of the flower, she, forever, she,

she alone is the black rose in our blood,

the unsayable paramour of our thorns

that sheds herself like the moon

at the foot of the crosses

we have raised

to pin her lovers in the haloes of our gunsights,

and wash the gore of the world

off the horns of her poets like rain.

PATRICK WHITE