THESE WORDS TURN HOMEWARD

THESE WORDS TURN HOMEWARD

These words turn homeward

toward you, my dark wood,

because of all assignations of the night

you are West, you are dream and secret

you, deeper than jewels, sweeter

than the taste of stars

in the eyes of wounded black berries.

You, longing and lucidity,

singing in the last of the shadows

of the sacred trees for the unattainable

that summons me to you.

Endless, the farewell, endless

the dusk the nightbirds follow

after the swallows

have danced for the stars

in an aerial display of their own.

You, my star field, my wildflower,

whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies

and the tide at the tips of my fingers.

My new moon, my despair,

my solitude, my silence, my absence

which among these thousand lonely lakes

has looked upon you and seen

as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes

how unfathomable they are to themselves

in your depths, your death,

the fullness of your abiding evanescence.

the quiet intimacies

that have just crept up on me

over these intervening years

that have done nothing

but linger in the moment

as if you would always be there

and could be found nowhere else

but now forever in this doorway

this broken window into my heart

to let go of

over and over and over again

like the rain, this stone, that leaf,

the wraith of your breath

hovering like a thin autumn mist

always at a distance over the harvested fields.

O diminished one, subtle one, free,

how is it you can inspire me still

though your ashes were given back to the stars

like a message for their eyes only

so many years ago that time itself

has upgraded all my starmaps

and made you alone, far one, bright one,

this lonely holy road that’s walking me home

as if my final destination, like yours, like you

were everywhere in whatever direction I turn

to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,

has it seen you, has it heard

was it too soon, was it too early

is it too late, too perilous, too absurd

for the morning to return you

like a singing bird to a green bough

to the dead branch that lost the moon

like its only blossom

on the rootless tree

that it took you from

when it took you from me?

PATRICK WHITE