SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate

to an open field where the white horse

that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude

like a phase of the moon come to earth

is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much

distance and disappearance in it wings

and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by

I can barely hear you singing from here

over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night

when the ghosts are rioting in their graves

like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new

and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree

as do I these strange epiphanies of you

that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs

the substance of my imaginings, devastates me

like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart

like a black cataract of snake skin I keep

trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after

the green thorns have hardened into fangs

that are killing and curing me at the same time.

Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours

and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world

burn out into a dark radiance that makes me

want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.

Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose

that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions

of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,

thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can’t go

without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.

And it isn’t anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,

small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands

vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry

blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you

sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle

mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you’ve become that rip in my heart

all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound

I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays

piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter

that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light

carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.

Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.

And when you’re hurting your worst, sing.

And even when I’m soldiering my way through stone

like a flying fish in the wrong medium,

or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,

just to meet you where you ask me to when you call

and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,

wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,

I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants

and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect

hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.

Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case

I forget how to dance on my own grave

with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile

that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell

my tongue is stuck to like a child’s to a wire fence,

or this black diamond nightbird

that cuts my darkness to the quick

because it’s got nothing to sing about

that can answer the call of the living for someone

on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat

drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,

except the dead air of this strange place

where space is indelibly bruised by the passing

of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull

I’ve carried before me like a nightwatchman

on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears

until I lost my footing and fell in one night,

as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark

I was growing wings where I had none before

and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well

noticed the dead still blooming like stars

in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes

when what I can’t see what need to know about being alive

comes looking for me like the sacred syllable

on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse

like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird

to the dead branch in my heart

that’s having trouble remembering how to blossom

after a long winter, as if you’d summoned me to the trees

like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,

to teach me how to take the pain

and through the alchemy of the grief

that flows through my heartwood like light and rain

turn it into life again, as if every leaf

were a new loveletter from the dead

I’ve been saving for years like expurgated starmaps

illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille

to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips

where they know who you are, and they’ve seen you

like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows

down by the river that weeps like a black mirror

for the stars and waterbirds in passing

that appear and disappear each in its time

and you wait for me like the longing of the dead

to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,

the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,

that let’s me know you’re near, you’re here

rooted in me on earth where we’ve both come

to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

PATRICK WHITE