AISHA

Aisha, life, friend of mine, I am thinking of you this morning

and a black rose petal, the eyelid of an eclipse,

drifts down through my mind like a lonely parachute

and I wonder what burns in that hidden heart of yours

where Isis grows the moon like a pearl.

You were always a night brighter than the fire

the shadow people sat around,

rejoicing in their spacey proportions,

your own cornerstone, you,

enthroned in your silence

as if you hadn’t happened yet.

And though I can never be your father,

and for awhile, you were my stepdaughter,

I am your friend, and in the bluing of the hills

from here to Toronto, my eyes, like a free atmosphere

lingering over these bells of earth, envelops you gently

in the musings of a morning full of light

as if you were the taste of stars deep within me

that never stop shining, even when noon

calls in its shadows in like markers.

I see you sitting by the phone, a girl,

wondering what you will say to your father in New Jersey

when he calls and if, waiting for calls and keyboards

that were promised but never came,

and the way you turned away into yourself

with the dignity of an island in the night

abandoned to its own constellations

and wouldn’t eat anything for a year but macaroni.

You whistled through childhood like an arrow

disciplined by the will you drew like a bow

to catch the eye of the target; and you hunted alone,

the enigmatic east of your own rituals

where the moon rose like a slender horn

and the stars felt like rain on the leaves of the trees

and your homelessness wasn’t the axis of a revolving threshold

and your heart, a furnace fuelled by diamonds

born like tears in the eyes that watched over your cradle of coal.

And I remember looking for cabbage-patch dolls in a panic at Christmas,

and that time up at Mississippi Station around the bonfire

when you took shape out of the night

and sat down beside me on a log in the glow of the burning

and I, who greeted you like a child, was smartly redressed

by an amazing young woman who asked me

if its gets any lonelier, and I said, yes, because

your question already knew the answer,

but added there were secret jewels in the solitude

that you will stub your life on

that can only be looked upon

by one alone with the Alone,

except for then, when I sat with you,

like two rivers at the sacred juncture of the witching wand

that trembled like water touched by a revelation,

and knew that you knew.

PATRICK WHITE