I LONG FOR WORDS

I long for words that don’t exist;

I long for a light

that my eyes have never flowered in before,

but hope is a gravedigger

singing in a pit

and I removed those bones long ago

to accommodate the newly dead.

Now I conduct night-classes under a bridge

for working constellations.

And I don’t really know what I’d say

if the silence were ever

to shape the urn of my voice

into an uncontainable emptiness again;

so that every drop of dew

on every blade of grass,

while the moon rose 

through the broad-leaved basswood grove

were wrapped like a sky

in the skin of my eyes.

What can be understood

is already slurred by signs,

and the best way to hide

is to go looking for yourself.

Forgetting for the moment

that ignorant doors

are not looking for enlightened keys,

maybe I would still try to express

that first dark kiss

of the original fountain-mouth

that stepped out of the tide of an eclipse

like an island or a woman

who wore the shore of her own shapeshifting body

to walk like a watershed into consciousness.

But the light cloaks as well as reveals

and eventually the eyes

evaporate into their visions,

and the hearts of the seers

hang like drops of blood

above the cold and empty cauldron of the universe.

Time and suffering

will enlighten the profound folly

of your most sacred delusion

and in a black lightning flash

before the arising of signs

you’ll know whose signature the wind is.

How many tomorrows ago,

furious and young,

did I make a ladder

out of violated thresholds

to climb up to the window of a burning lighthouse

and rescue myself like a child

from this moment now?

Follow someone else’s road

and you walk your own wake.

Make your own

and you are everywhere

the immoveable seed

the world flowers for.

When your silence turned grey,

and your jewels

no longer hosted the light

in their darkening palaces,

and your echoes rewrote the original play

for three actors with the same voice,

and all your one-legged bridges

stood on a single bank,

longing to straddle heaven,

and you let your heart wither

until it was only a medicine bag

full of sacred dirt,

and what you once knew

without a witness,

you now forced yourself to believe in

like a sinner you thought you were

pressed into jury duty against herself

because eventually all the lies come true

and sin is just another form

of back porch enlightenment

to obviate your entrance

into the greater delusion of virtue.

Do you remember what it was like

to see clearly

before you poured 

all this snakefire and moonsilt into the well?

Now you’re trying

to wash a mudslide off

in a drop of dew,

straining to cast the shadow of a mountain

behind every grain of dust.

And you’re afraid

to be afraid that all

your goofy revelations of personal apocalypse

are cliches of other people’s wisdom

on the back of a matchbook,

that you’ve passed

through the gates of midnight thousands of times

only to find

you’re still veiled like a nun

by the light of your own passage.

The answer shows up

and you start looking for the question.

You wear your nakedness on the outside

to disguise your masks

and what kind of a lover can you be now

that you’re too shy

to undress in front of yourself?

How many skeletons

have you tried like keys

on the doors of your emptiness,

trying to get out of yourself,

only to realize

the abyss between your legs

has no inside or outside,

that the void never checks its mail

for love-letters,

that all your scars and bruises

rolled up into a ball

still don’t make a moon

with a sea and an atmosphere?

You never liked me

because I wouldn’t lie to you,

and though I ached for the oblivion

in the black fire of your lust,

and waited for you to rise from the lake

to claim my burning body,

and loved you like the death I was meant for,

I never could teach you

to swim through ashes with dragons,

or convince you you weren’t blind

when the mirrors turned their backs

to prove by the light of a brighter darkness

your eyes were your own.

You shot past me

like a near-sighted asteroid

thrown like the first stone

at a planet grown stubborn with life

the cold, igneous ore of your porous heart

could not sponsor on its own.

You took what you thought was aim

and squeezed one off

the trigger of the moon

as the hammer fell on the anvil of your body

and you recoiled like a serpent with intent.

You missed

and have gone on as you are forever,

stunned by the concussion that proved

beyond the shadow of a misfire

you’re bad ammo,

a leaky white phosphorus grenade

advancing rapidly toward the front lines

of a war with yourself

already well lost

when you came out of the tent

of your high command like a worm

with the battle plan of your next breath

and the junkie poppies

that blow like kisses between your crosses

row on row

o.d.’d en masse like a blood transfusion

rather than remember

anything about you.

Some people just make more of an impact

than others I guess.

But I haven’t completely forgotten you.

You were the pygmy empress

in the shadows of the single matchstick pillar

of your own self-renown,

trying to plough the moon with a sword

that couldn’t tell the difference

between a crater and a crown.

PATRICK WHITE