Wednesday, January 28, 2009

THEY'RE ONLY MOMENTS

THEY’RE ONLY MOMENTS


They’re only moments pretending that they’ve past, but how sweet to remember the way things were before they worked out like water looking for its own equilibrium. Tiny fractions of time, gnats in the sunset, that live along with us like the incommensurability of pi. Fireflies and tears at the end of an eyelash fishing in the abyss, the leftover ores of the furnace that poured the dream out like gold, swept up into the corner of an eye, diamonds and dust, the seasoned intimacy with certain stars that shine out from within. Thought-moments, the sensation of the space between two thoughts, time, before it had more than one shadow. Consider the generations of ghosts that death has wrought from sex. All that undoing wrecked, for a moment, by my next breath, as I am renewed by the past like a flower along the path of an unknown messiah who hasn’t walked this way yet. Or maybe it’s just the delinquent waywardness of random chance, but you can still make my fossils dance like summer constellations, fire on the water, tatoos in invisible ink that wake up like dragons at the gates of these gardens I enter like suggestions of rain, like private conversations we once had in the same lifeboat on the moon. And it isn’t wisdom, or experience, or poetry I derive from the insight, but a clarity beyond these grails that doesn’t taste of the cup it’s served in; wine, without veils. And what fool so petty he would insult the largesse of the moment by smearing it with sorrow and longing for what he is missing, when the moment, like the sea at his lips, is always full. So I don’t long for you; I don’t miss you, knowing how you overflow all the goblets of yesterday we raised to our mutual rescue like a waterclock running down a mountain as if you were late for the sea, as if, as you were so often, late for me. My body still mourns like a bell for yours, and the face you wear in my mind like the moon on nightwaters hasn’t changed for years. And your hands? Your hands are still doves of descending fire I feed in the morning from the inexhaustible siloes of the wound in my side you opened like a loveletter mailed to the moon. What window could I ever look through, lense, eye or mirror to hold you when even the sky wasn’t an envelope large enough to keep you from flying away? So I don’t try when you return like this to these timeless intersections where we went every way like the light of a star or the beginning of a universe that still hasn’t managed over the billions of years, or the leaf of the moment, to separate us. Not even the sword of the moon raised on a wave can cleave these waters, nor the orchids of fire that burned like torches of white phosphorous through my brain to conceal my retreat, be darkened by the rain.


PATRICK WHITE