SHOULD I NOT LOOK FOR YOU THEN

Should I not look for you then;

is there reason to forget,

should I leave the wound open

and let the moon bleed to death

or appall your absence

by shattering the eye of my own

like a drop of water on a rock

and confess that love

was always a dagger too late,

a petal shy of the blooming,

to arrest the timing of my assassin?

The wind outside

raves from the west

and brutally rattles the windowpanes

to taunt the madman

who’s trying to get out of himself

as if he were salt in water,

or the shadow of the intimate stranger

who affirms his solitary confinement

by never asking a question

that can remember an alibi.

I’m tired of waiting for nothing.

I’m tired of these violent chimeras of hope

that pour themselves like gold rushes

into the depleted nugget of my heart

trying to skip a beat or two

of its boom and bust economy.

And I want no more of despair,

no more of bundling the days on the walls

with my nails

as if I were stooking a harvest of wheat.

Let time account for itself,

I am not the coiled serpent

of its mainspring

waiting at the heel of the hour to strike.

I am not a broken wheel

at the side of the road,

or this wind in winter

cruising for flowers

like the forlorn lust of an old man.

If you do not want me,

if your words were ghosts

before they were born,

just the chatter of tiny graves

in the nightward of a cemetery,

comets of passion

flaring like fashion

above the footlights

of celebrity constellations,

and this antiseptic silence

that burns like bleach

is the tongueless herald of a new ice age,

a lengthening of the hems

of the polar ice-caps,

or if you think you’ve discovered

an essential flaw

in my working disguise as a man,

a spiritual fallibility, a taint of heresy,

the face of an excommunicant

under the mask,

something forbidden in need of confession,

or if you’ve turned over

the rock of my heart

looking for a key

to a house that’s burnt to the ground,

or your only caress

is a spiritual orchid at midnight

that doesn’t come with breasts,

and someone else

adds his blood-verb

to the grammar of your lips,

I will be saddened

by this sleight of fate

that has thrown a piston

through my heart

like the block of a rebuilt engine,

and call a sturdy towtruck

with a large questionmark

hanging on a chain

like a silhouette of you

in a pendant on a crane

to come and haul it away.

It’s a shock

after such amorous relevance

to discover

you’re still negligible after all,

as if life had started

on a new planet

and had evolved

as far as you and I

and then changed its mind.

In love, I’m a dolphin on land,

but now I’m giving my legs

back to the sea

like prosthetic devices,

and learning

to hold my breath longer underwater.

There are nightclubs in Atlantis

for people like me

who want to get lost

in the labyrinths of the unkempt shipwrecks;

in the forsaken back-alleys

of the drowned cities

that have forgotten their names

to amend the indicipherable eloquence

of the silence they weep in,

who seek death

as the last and deepest delirium of love

they will ever be true to,

where this cruel art

of trying to greet love

in a dangerous world

finds nothing to master.

PATRICK WHITE