A SUBTLE TRICK OF THE LIGHT

A SUBTLE TRICK OF THE LIGHT

for Alysia

A subtle trick of the light

this tenderness in the dark

that felt like you last night,

the soft approach of your presence again

like waterbirds or distant smoke

feathering the flames and shadows of their wings

to answer me like the summons of a grove

in a high field,

to adorn me like a tree

whose finest fruit

is the heart that takes shelter in it

at the end of its long flight.

One pulse, one lifetime of knocking

on how many doors

before

just as you’re turning to walk away forever

one finally opens

like a star

or the last flower of autumn,

or your last letter.

Last night and this morning,

there arises an urgency of joy within me

that has made me shed my skin like an oilslick

and bloom like water

in the lucid upwelling

of a spirit that tastes of stars.

Every flower

is the promise of a bird to the wind

and every word has its seasons,

and the human voice very seldom more

than the trembling of grass in the rain,

and only the orchids have ears

that can hear the shadows,

and I am panicked by how little

I can say

and how much I want to express

these moments of you I keep discovering

under the sodden leaves

of last year’s passions and books.

If I could pull on a thread of air

to unravel the sky

and show you the stars that never age

bathing naked in their own light,

renewing their vows

to shine down on everything alike,

I would show you how

everywhere you walk in me

you are a garden without a gate,

a lifeboat of light

in the mystic dark

on a sea of love that thrives

with the creative eclipses and auroras of life

lifting this voice of stars

like morning veils from an unnamed lake.

I would show you a boy alone

trying to be brave about his fears

as he listens like a nightbird

to the approaching echoes

of an unknown eternity

growing louder in his bones.

You could watch him

fold his poems into paper-boats

and sail them across the eye of water

that opens all its eyelids at once like waves

on the resevoir of tears he never shed,

strange lilies born on the moon.

And from the shore of a neighbouring island

you could observe the wind and the gulls

performing their traditional sword-dance

with the warrior lighthouse of his deepest truth,

knowing the most he will ever illuminate

is the ultimate bluff of his own mind in endless space.

So dark and unknown and forever

the abyss that embraces

this firefly of life

that thinks it’s a star

in the infinite folds of its boundlessness.

There is no form to the mind

we can worship like a faithful god

except the masks of the moment

even as they’re peeled away

to reveal the face of our own mortality.

And who could count

the faces of the goddess

that blow like Japanese plum tree blossoms

along the road that continually leads us back

to a place we’ve never and always been?

Do you see how these drafts of awareness

weave these subtle webs of light

that are spun and torn

like river reeds in the star-riddled mindstream

on their own thorns

and how the moonlight

catches the fish at the bottom

with the flash of its silver hook?

And at times

it’s the undiscoverable north

of the lonely pathos of being human

that makes me feel

there are so many places I go

that are so abandoned and mine

that no one can find me,

so forsaken of every hint of me

that it’s enough of a lantern in these barrens

to make out your face in the distance,

trying to look for me

like the moon peering over the hills

into her own lost reflection.

Or I feel the night

pressing its lips against mine

and know it’s you.

I’ve never seen the goblet that holds it

but for two years now

I have been drunk on your wine

like a man with room to celebrate,

passionately singing

under the healing willow

that pours itself out like you.

When your love whispers to me

it’s always the flavour of space

and I am astonished by what I see

in a glimpse of the lightning

in the iris of your eye.

Your letters have arrived

like the petals of a hidden rose

shedding itself like the phases of the moon

on dark waters

and I have bent and tenderly kissed each

that I might be the grain of sand

that pearls the night in the eyes

of your most beautiful dreams.

And like the rain

that roots the stars,

cuttings of light it took

from an intimate language

older than anything I could ever mean

in my book of windows,

when you weep

it’s not salt and water

but the light itself

that wells up and runs from my eyes

to flint your tears with marvels of protean fire

whose very ashes

are the constituent bliss of a world

and whose chief joy

is to surpass its own understanding

as I do on this ladder of thresholds

I lean against the highest walls

in a sudden siege of unbesiegable heaven

every time I hear from you.

PATRICK WHITE