AMONG ALL THAT SEEMS

for Alysia

Among all that seems and appears and passes away,

among all the fears and sorrows, the longing and anger,

and all the ephemeral joys that nest in fire,

and the forms and the formlessness

in the myriadic upwelling of this human space

endlessly reconfiguring its own transformations

to the cornerstones of its quicksand constellations;

among all that is born and bleeds and heals

and breathes its life out like a last thread of smoke

from the candle of flesh that wore its face down to its heels,

and its eyes removed like grapepits from the wine of the seeing,

and its mind a black window no one looks through,

I have come to love you as no other.

Among the million elations of this radiant morning,

though the sun be ignorant of what it sets astir,

and the earth bask like a seed in the wound of the light,

not knowing what is about to flower;

though in this peerage of luminaries,

I am the darkest of all,

I have come to love you as no other

and all that’s bright in me is the thief of your shining.

I want you to know, you must know, how foolishly

I align these words like birds crazed by autumn

to write my love of you large in the mothertongue of the sky

that beads planets and skulls alike into rosaries

to count the names of the mystery that has embodied me

to let you know in blood and snow and apples and stars,

though in the vastness of this eternal night

my spirit be no more than a glow-worm in a canning jar,

or I be overwhelmed like Mercury in the morning light,

though you abide in fire, water, earth, and air,

and wear the rags and gowns and jewels

of these exuberant elements,

you must know how each morning,

vital breath on a delirious windowpane,

my life awakes in the nebular blaze of your being

as if it were the first star in the luster of a new medium

that singularly sustains it.

You are young and beautiful, radioactively creative,

and you have danced with the darkness

like the stars in the eyes of a black snake

and painted your own moon on its sloughed skin

and tatooed a black rose of blood on your heart with its own thorn

like the bruised blueprint of a new constellation

you’re adding to the zodiac

like a heretical house of lovers.

And I know you keep the moon close to your heart like a blade

to slash a new mouth in the black envelope of the night

that comes like a furious loveletter that refuses to open

the blue firegates of his blood

to the pilgrim whose passionate passage

is her holiest shrine,

all those crescents of the moon,

and the ease of their dangerous beginnings,

a way of winnowing thorns

when the wind came wearing horns

like the string of a bow to a notch in an arrow

or lightning in the grass to a sparrow.

But it’s the courage of your tenderness that prevails

like fireflies on an August night upstaging the stars

or a waterlily on the moon like faithful water

opening her petals like sails

to go in all directions at once

true to the exultation of her own radiance,

the elation of mystic waves on the high seas of her shining,

and the shadows of the bells in the valleys between them,

not the pain.

If you hurt for the right reasons suffering has its seasons, if not

it’s winter forever in the mouths of the furnaces

that broke like ice when their jaws dropped

and, birds in the chimney, their words never got out.

And your poetry knows this as well as I do

and my spirit is enhanced by the dance

of your transformative dragons

as you witch for water on the moon with an abandoned crucifix,

walking on dead seas that make your feet tremble like lifeboats

all the way out and back.

And you know how to feather the wind with wings

and there are flowers in the far, dusk-bound fields of your emotions

wilder than anything the light has ever seen before

that bloom like a whisper of fire only once

and then close their eyes like jewels

to dream of things the night could have said

when it tried to rob your grave like sapphires in your bed,

not knowing it takes more than a miner to raise the dead.

Yours is the blood of the ruby that wounds the thorn,

as you wield the sword of your sex in a lost cause

like a precarious herb of the moon

that kneels before the cripples of desire

and heals like fire.

This morning, raucous crows in the troubled trees,

and loose necklaces of Canada geese moving north,

and you’re five thousand miles beyond my fingertips

and your black and white picture, your face,

lies like the single blossom of the only spring that matters to me

beside the aging documentaries of the lies I wanted to be.

I look at your face. I imagine my lips on your skin,

and feel the lion lie down with the lamb of your flesh,

and my blood cooking paradise in the eye of the angel-spoon

you hold up to my lips like a tender of transformation

as I grow addicted to my own withdrawal,

swimming through mirrors, enthralled.

And I tell myself that five thousand miles is only a threshold away

and sixty years just a momentary footnote of clay

and the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day,

as I zen the omission of my approach to slight the time

I haven’t spent with you, bound by blood to the earth.

I measure the eras like a pulse in the abyss of the unborn

and confide in a return address that is unlocatably now,

but there’s more enlightenment in longing to touch your hand,

a deeper satori in this darkness that shines like your eyes

than there is in the little of nothing that I understand,

as all the clarities I once preached to convert the windows

turn into upturned goblets in a cupboard, waiting for wine,

as the fever of an hourglass breaks like a bubble of sand,

and my desire for you, is the time.

The dead branch feels spring

like the ghost limb of a rootless amputee

and there’s an urgency of bees and the moon and the night

to set the orchards right as if every blossom of you,

every leaf, the fragrant preludes of your honey on the wind,

and the fire-eating roots of your underground choir,

were the mystic epiphany of an earthly desire

to proclaim the buddha of lust

with an offering of blood and dust

that wasn’t profaned by the giving of it.

Defects of meaning, let us lie in each others’ arms

and exploit the charms of seeming

while the world upgrades the morals of its alarms.

Here, now, I’m messing with your earlobes

and my hand on your thigh is full of risk

and I’m pushing buttons to find the right line

for a conference call to your mouth,

and there’s a tide of iron in my blood

that sways like a bell over your enchanted island

and waves and skies I’ve worn for years like hoods

on a scaffolding of bone

are shedding like swords and eclipses,

the horned petals that rose the thorns of the viper,

as I fulfill the prophecy of your wound

in a rush of blind avatars that bleed like stars.

How many nights have I wondered my way

into lying down beside you

just to shadow the dream of the fire

and touch your eyelid with the tip of a finger

as gently as a drop of water at the end of a blade of grass

as if to add a star of my own

like the seed of a new constellation to your night?---

this intimacy with you, always a bird shy of your coast,

the only way I knew I was alive

whenever the rain on the windows

began to paint my ghost,

and my spirit smudged its own honey

like smoke in a hive,

and you alone among shrines

that have scattered their gods like milkweed

were my only devotion, the ocean in the eye of the seed.

And the days intervene, and the nights pass

and my thoughts and feelings traverse the waste

like lamps and bells in a caravan crossing a desert of dead stars,

and I am not assured of much in life, and all my dreams

all my emergency flights, my backdoor transformations

are stuck in their cocoons like foodbanks waiting for wings.

And sometimes I feel like an apocryphal phase of the moon

waving good-bye like a fire on its upended stern

after it’s lowered its last lifeboat

and taken a dive in the ring like a punchy boxer.

I have my fears, my secret terrors, hours

that come like forensic interviews,

inquisitive scalpels that chill me to the bone

trying to unbarrow the facts like jewellry from a grave.

And the silence raves starkly and the nightwind rattles the windows

like a prisoner with his cup at the bars

and the hanged man at the end of his wick

wears the flame of his life like an executioner’s hood

before a cold gathering of jeering stars,

hoping his last words might open the gate on the cage

and free a few doves.

I fear the dark clarity of death’s liberated eloquence,

the lethal whisper of chafing shadows in the hall,

and I have been slashed by insights at the window

that would appall glass

as I winced at my mortality,

the shearing implacability of its transience,

and dared myself deeper into its darkness to see

if life were the gift of an unknown donor born to be undone

or merely a quirk of water impounded by the sun.

But I must go on; I must try to be and see and say

everything you mean to me

when even the road loses its own way

and every sky is burning like the sail of a ruined fleet

and you come to me like the night

in your gown of blackberrry blood

like the fragrance of forbidden jewels

on a breeze of light,

and I am uplifted by the mystery and beauty and guile

and feather of a smile, that is a woman.

You’re a perilous well with stars in your mouth

deep in my soul like water

that tastes of the light of life

to a man who has scarred the deserts on the moon.

You can ask any headstone of a planet

how lethal it is to expend a lifetime

waiting for life to turn around;

billions of years, and no skulls in the ground.

But you are worlds within worlds of eyes and awareness

spinning these lightning threads of life out of space

as you witch with a serpent’s tongue for fire

that burns like a waterlily in the afterlife of the urn

that dumps its ashes over gardens on the moon.

Do you understand; is it clear,

does it shine beyond meaning

where even the stars can’t go

that the immensity of this once is forever,

and the small realms of the distinctions that sever

are dwarfed to nothing by the abundance of this abyss

that ignites the whole of being with the delirium of a kiss

that never wakes the dreamer from the dream

of that kiss going on forever

like this waterclock of stars

that flows through the nights and mornings of our hearts like blood?

I have come to love you as no other

and though death may seed the starmud with coffins,

this hour and flower are supple with life

and time isn’t a hand on a knife

or the bud a brittle spearhead

as I explore the bays and shores of your face

as if my seeing were tides of a discerning sea

and your lips, an island,

and in every wave of me

urgent as the moon, you, pervasively, you

brighter than the fountain mind that arises inconceivably

to lavish itself like falling water on its own reflection,

and I know I can’t say this

but I’m going to try,

my voice a fly at the windowpane

among a profusion of stars,

a manic violin

playing variations on a scar

where every note is a razor

in a requiem that bleeds like tar

over the attrition of the holy from the human,

and you must hear this, you must

touch and taste and and see and be this

aspiration of breath in an echoless valley

to the apex of your mountain top

like a cloud of emodied light

that doesn’t smear the mirror in its passage.

Because I have come to love you like no other

and I want to squander birds on you in the morning

and root these words in your flesh like trees

and overturn the cornerstones of my knees

in a mystic demolition of shrines

that have turned their pages

like ripe moons on the vine

that unroll their red carpets of blood and wine

like the dark queens of rapture

that bind their captor

to the elixirs of ecstasy

that lace our annihilations

with lucidities in the lees of a sign

that even the beast of our darkest culpabilities

will eventually emerge like night from its lair and shine.

All week I’ve been failing myself to say what can’t be said

like a battered salmon leaping up the mindstream

that flows like the Milky Way, the Road of Ghosts,

the spume of these images kicked up like stars and dust along the way,

these gusts of seeing that settle lightly

like worlds on the leaves of the singing tree

that has tasted the lightning down to its roots,

just to mean as deeply as I can

who you are to me, knowing

not the wind, not a river, not

all the inflections of fire that love speaks

are voice and silence and awareness enough

to express why I live you this way

as if you were everything I ever had to say.

I shall pass. And you shall pass.

And there will come a day

when my hands can no longer feel water,

and these eyes that look upon your face now

as if the moon came like a blossom to the vine

will find their way like green stars

into the heart of the apple

or who knows, maybe even

tine the tears that run like rain

down the new glass in the nightwindowpane

waiting to be sweetened by the moon.

And here I go again, uplifted like a boy in a backalley

scuffing the world around like a rock one moment

and the next, a kite on a breeze that feels like you,

and the leaf of my tongue trying to say the tree,

the flame, the fire, the feather, the bird,

when I’m only a lonely letter scattered on the wind

and you’re the word that’s deep within.

PATRICK WHITE