I MEET AN OLD LOVER.doc

 

I MEET AN OLD LOVER

 

I meet an old lover

and it’s like returning to a poem

I haven’t finished.

Any muse can inspire beginnings

but where’s the dark muse

that knows how to fire up

these prosey endings

that never seem to ring true?

All the swords over our heads

are beginning to rust

like windchimes in the rain

even as the bamboo skeletons

of the cats and dogs

we left hanging on the back porch

go on talking to the wind

as if we’d never left.

Your absence has grown

so expansively beyond me

it doesn’t fit me like skin anymore

and sloughs me

like the boney constellation of a snake.

And though it’s good to know

I am no longer the admiral on deck

in the mizzenmast

of your assassin’s eye,

I vaguely resent the bronze way

you have of dealing with me

like the ghost of an injured albatross

badly in need of your prosthetic advice.

I’d rather have you look into my face

now as you do across the table

like the photo of an author

on the backcover of a book

you’ve already read

and didn’t really like

because it truly wasn’t about you.

But still I must love you

as you say you always will me

as we lie away the yokes of the past

as if they were foreign bridges

we had to cross

in a language neither of us understood.

And it’s all for the good, all for the good,

isn’t it

that peace has replaced

the unstable intermittency

of our savage joy

in feasting on each other like life?

And good too that the years and the miles 

have finally given us each

the aerial perspective

to blue one another into oblivion

like two birds disappearing

without misgiving

into the crowded afterlife

of what dies in the distance.

Perhaps there’s no more agony

in the seed that separates to grow

than their is in the full blown haemorrage of the rose

and it’s all just a matter of shedding

your way back into bloom

like the second full moon

in late October

that comes alone to the high fields

after the harvest is in

and we’ve reaped what we’ve sowed.

But you don’t need to know

what gravity is

to know that it keeps you down

and these days a fish

is as good a definition of water

as any I’ve ever found,

and when I look out into space

for the habitable planet

that was our bond to one another,

our soil, our atmosphere,

when I look for that star

among so many again

that illuminate loftier myths

than the tiny fury

of who we were once to each other

as if each morning laid flowers

at the door of the dark side,

I realize deeper than space

that there’s no point

looking for the universe

in a grain of sand

when I’m already thought-years

beyond the wavelengths of the black pearl

that came of never finding it

and there’s nothing

that could ever call the light back.

Love’s greatest flaw

is trying to turn its thresholds

into cornerstones

that can’t bear the load of the law

or the massive rebuttals of the heart

that shakes them into quicksand

when the mountains come down

like stone tablets

as if jury had just written

their own commandments

and the first was to bury belief in love

as if it were a faith in the light

you could only keep

with your eyes closed.

That’s why when I shine

as I still occasionally do

remembering some elation of you

like a momentary flaring in space,

I pour everything I am and am not

flowing through this boundless abyss of insight

into a single star with nothing to say

about why we are the way we are

when we finger the braille of our scars

like blind men reviewing the history

of constellations that have gone out in the night

to enlighten their study of darkness.

I shine down upon everything

under my eyelids and yours

like the last grace of our leaving

no trace of our grieving

upon these old waters

we rise from

like the ghosts of birds

or words we said to ourselves

alone in a mirror

that never answered back

and went our separate ways

like two smiles that go on for miles

without a face between them.

 

PATRICK WHITE