Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I HAVE NEVER SAID


I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not
meant the light coming out of the dark
and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake
or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows
or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window
warping its image through the delusional weeping
of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook
by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this
still the case though I’m old enough to know
all that crying never turned into a single chandelier
and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread
than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.
And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles
beside cool dolphins with seabird hands
off the coast of my longing, and marvelled
at the amazing bridges of their bodies
and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream
that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet
of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst
in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;
never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat
or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past
and not meant some era of a woman
who came and stayed awhile with me
in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment
like the first rising of a second moon
I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse
of love’s last crescent across my left wrist
to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,
having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,
or swept my continental vision off the table
back into the coffin like an archipelago
of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel
everytime I try to assemble it, I still know
even if it isn’t vouched to me,
that love is life, and life is a bride
that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,
trailing her ancient veil of stars
along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow
even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch
among the white, sweet, wedding clover,
having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,
it is always somehow strangely okay
and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE

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