WITH FINGERS OF SAND

With fingers of sand, with hands of water

with hearts fuller than apples with night,

we reach out to pluck the orchid on the moon,

to touch beauty on the wing,

the coal swan with feathers of flame,

the shadows that wear our face,

the skin of a waterleaf of gold

that evaporates like an eyelid of dust,

the pilgrim on the smoke-road of the candle,

the black panther in an oildrum,

and the vision is blanched from the seeing

like the albumen of an egg,

the albino leper cooked in the mouth of the moon,

we reach out for what exceeds us,

for the dark thresholds of blood

in the palace of the rose,

the vivid windows of the sea

with their curtains of light and salt,

the green chandeliers of the rain,

the hidden excellence of the early wood sorrel

that whispers to us from its solitude,

shy secrets, indigo birds of paradise

with harps of eloquent feathers,

the laments and deadly night shades

of the alone with the alone in a shadowless abyss.

And there’s the predicate of an unexpected jewel

sewn into the lining of everything;

even the flies are touched by rainbows

and the morning lifts her gown

and wades gloriously through the oilslicks,

hummingbirds in the sour trumpets of the weeds,

jungle parrots painting passion fruit

with palettes of stuttering neon,

hard oyster hearts that bed with pearls. Everyone

reveres the beauty of the wine on the lips

of the unsayable quality of being

that supersedes them, a facet of the turning jewel

that falls like the eyelash of an angel,

a winged samara of autumn dusk

into the seeing, and for a moment as long as life

they touch the pulse of an ageless longing

and feel beating within them

in a panic of wonder and joy,

the radiance of the starbound dove

caught in the throat of the chimney.

Even the worst have known the nightsky reach down

and wipe the stains from their eyes,

or felt embraced by a warm summer rain

that polished their skin like heritage silver

and remembered it for the rest of their lives.

For me, the chalice in the ore is you;

for me, you are all lenses, all mirrors

dewed by the waterveils of the mystery

in the early morning dark before creation

begins itself anew. My heart is seized by the fire-trance

of a sacred silence, the word within the word

as if wax suddenly discovered the flame

whose dancing made its flesh melt in a luminous consummation.

Even seared in the igneous cages of my heart,

an iron tiger baring its worn fangs

to the torment of the staring, when I think of you,

a nightbird with gates for wings

brings me a star and a key

and the bars turn into the pillars of palatial winds,

and an openness lies before me that tastes of lilacs and rain.

For years I’ve been witching for water in hell,

for years I’ve been diving for corpses in quicksand,

living like a squall in a shipwreck

under the eyes of a pleading lighthouse,

and the morning was just the morning

and the night was just the night,

and I thought it would go on like this

until I stared myself to death,

believing there was only the suffering

and the emptiness, and the suffering

and the black, mute bells of the wingless seabirds.

Now there’s a planet that gleams like an eye

in the peacock silks of the twilight,

and a woman standing in the last shadows of the willow

like a doorway, like a ghost on a wharf,

like the depths of an urgent spear.

PATRICK WHITE