AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE

AND YOU SHALL FOREVER BE

And you shall forever be

all that could not be said of me

though I spoke for myself as long as I could

to answer your absence in paint and words

like this night creek talking in tongues to itself.

I see the maple leaves rotting in manuscript

like the dead civilization of a mummified language

that never made it into print.

And though I know every name

of the wildflowers that did, and of the stars,

their perennial myths of origin,

and of the fireflies, their efflorescent haikus,

tonight I walk among bones and pelvises of ice,

the desecration of forms, limbs lobbed off

like the right arms of offended trees and the eyes

of small skulls plucked out like stillborn moons

that never made it through the winter.

Alone with this emptiness which yet remains

the biggest clue I’ve ever found

to the whereabouts of myself,

I am not estranged by my usual compassion

for outcast things with no voice of their own.

There is no pillow of snow over the mouth

of what can’t be said without me.

The dead don’t hold their fingers

up to their lips to bid me keep silent.

They’re all dancing wildly to lyrics of their own

in a winter carnival of deathmasks

that have shed their bodies

like the hags of the withered waterlilies

trying to wash the brown out of their gowns

like sunspots from the memory of the stars.

As if there were an eloquence

in the radiance of their rags

that overwhelmed the silence

with the sacred syllables of a mother-tongue

that has no word for time or death.

No word for life that distinguishes them from me.

Not just moonlight on the barkless limbs of mannequins

that have shed their skin seductively.

Not the dead of a northern Pompey

frozen in ash and ice and snow

catastrophically posed for generations to come

but the hymns of the homeless

who’ve finally found common ground

with the tent cities of the stars high overhead

and the gypsy moths in the Dutch elms.

The long vowels of the living joining hands

with the skeletal consonants of the dead

to make one whole word we can say in our sleep

like a secret we keep between ourselves.

And for the moment I feel almost complete here

like the first draft of a book

that the dead have yet to rewrite.

And though I’ve said it thousands of times before

in as many ways as I was inspired to,

like a fire that reared up at the mere shadow of the whip

to outrun the starlight for the sheer spirit

of challenging the will of this body

dug like a spur in its own ribs,

it was clear from the very beginning,

as clear as poppies and marigolds

in the summer of their oral traditions,

no more can be said in the dead of winter

than can be said by the living

to coax the wild crocuses out in spring.

You might be a lone night bird

that inhabits the woods like a magus

with too many stars to follow

to follow any one of them

and gratify your life by stargazing

and calling the faithful to prayer

like a muezzin in the morning

with the voice of an underground river.

And for all your lucidity you might never find

the long shadows of your ancestors

erecting the waterlilies of their tents

along the riverbanks of those rivers and lifelines

you keep returning to every year like waterbirds.

Or you could find no sign of anyone

for light years who could recognize you

for who you are even as you change time-zones

like a child with ageing eyes

who was raised by the alone with the Alone

in an incomprehensible solitude that included everyone.

Here where distinctions break down

and the dead and the living both draw

from the same source as they’ve always done

each is known to the other

by attributes that neither of them have.

The warm heart of a black rose

looking back over its shoulder

at a bend in the night creek,

the moon rising up over the valley,

a pearl in partial eclipse,

taking one long, last look

at the broken cages of ghostly tree limbs

and shattered ladders of lifeboat wing bones

that drowned on the way to their own rescue.

Is one side of a window truer than another?

Inner and outer, I and the other,

truly separated by this mere hole in my eye?

Do the stars streaming through my mind

feel a subtle change in the nature of the sky

when they do, a different feel to the darkness,

something strange about the flowers

they open like loveletters, sensing someone

has been tampering with their mail

as if the message were still the medium

but with a different return address?

Is my absence any less baffling than my presence?

These with the hearts of departed things

any less whole or real or displaced

or death any less of a prelude to time

than any other point in its passage is?

Even in death, even when the sun

shines at midnight it’s always dawn.

The waterbirds go. The waterbirds come back.

Like an ongoing dialogue in an hourglass

where content is the same as timing

and the most enduring of things

are the things that most readily pass

between the bright vacancy

and dark abundance of life

like the moon that keeps growing

without coming or going like a journey

standing in the doorway

of its own vastly expanding threshold.

PATRICK WHITE