AM I TOO FAR AWAY.doc

AM I TOO FAR AWAY

 

Am I too far away for you

to hear my voice

calling out to you

like an autumn hill in the fog?

Your absence is archetypically protean

and missing you

I make things up

to amuse my sorrow.

I know I’m only teaching the rain

how to draw circles

and reading bedtime stories

to enraptured constellations

that will retell them

like myths of their own

just to ease the pain

of living themselves as they happen,

but I’d sooner dance with the fireflies

under flashing chandeliers

that astonish the light

that hides in the mirrors

I’ve polished from the radiance of my tears,

than beat the music out of my head with bones

or ask the freeborn of poetry

to stand guard outside the door

in the livery of headstones

while I trivialize matters of state

by imposing myself like a gate

on all who pass this way

like refugees and rivers 

with all they own

like the world

on the shoulders of bridges

who groan like lead

under the dead weight

of being the backbone

of an imperial history

they bear like an aquaduct without water.

So I play with your absence

in the foregone emptiness

as if it were a muse

that dishevels the bed

with the creative miscreance

of a darker genius than night

that delights in the coy taboos

that risk the mystic thresholds

of an illuminating vice.

And sometimes

when you’re the last star burning

on my event horizon

and I’m falling like my last penny

into the wishing-well of a black hole

that doesn’t give anyone a return on their money,

I press my ear to your voice

and listen to the intimate distance

like a star-crossed prophet of sin

crying out alone in the wilderness

to be tempted.

And some hear the sea

in the sex of your shell

and wind up drifting for years

in the rip-tides of their tears 

like a message for help

that raises its sails in a bottle

but I listen to the desert

that howls through your skull

like the deathbed confessions

of lonely gods untempled by the wind

and refuse to embalm my faith in pyramids

though I’ve been known

to slip more than one loveletter

like the Rosetta stone

of a lost dream grammar

like the shadow of a bird

with no return address 

under the heavy eyelids

of the setting moon

as if I had just asked something

of a sphinx on the fly

without expecting an answer.

 

PATRICK WHITE