NOT EVEN THE LIGHT

NOT EVEN THE LIGHT

Not even the light of the stars

shining like the keys to the ancient love-letters

bound among the secret jewels

of the queen of heaven

penetrates me as deeply as you do.

The planet wheels into the night

bearing its burden of humans

murdering each other

to enforce one state of ignorance

upon another

as the rabid bees

strafe the demented flowers

on the far side of the world

for enriching their radioactive pollen,

convinced in their madness

more honey than blood will flow from the wound.

I walk by myself

along the brittle banks of a frozen stream

among the detonations of the cattails

waiting like Napoleonic cannoneers

to stoke the charge of the next volley.

The snow in the sunset

is stained a spectral apricot

that disappears like breath on a cold window

and the sky is vast with my insignificance.

Two or three decades of life left,

if I’m lucky,

and though I have tried to use my time

to leave a gift for someone I will never meet,

long ago I realized

there is no way of assessing

what they will find

after the coffin closes like an eyelid

on this long, dark, radiant brevity

that once shone like the moon

in the ores of my blood.

Like the wandering of this rivulet

my heart has always been

a pilgrim without a shrine

and the direction of prayer has encompassed all

like a man getting up off his knees

and walking through an open door

to drink from the cup of his lover

in the shadows of the autumn willow

that sways like kite-tails

from the flights of fire

she ignites among the stars

that gather in the dark like strangers

before their own ghosts.

What the wind

has torn away from me like apple-bloom,

like poems, like smoke and leaf, like skies,

like tears and blood and faith

it has replaced

with these deeper revelations of you

that hang like a windfall of scarlet bells

from the branch of a dead tree in winter.

The wine of your life and light

has matured in the ferocious crucibles of the sun

and you have been poured out

like the passion of a sword

to cleave the stone of my heart

with these truant rivers of wounded silver

that flow through me like blood.

A young breeze

tries to hone the edge of its blade

on the rising moon

as a black ribbon of water

runs like a snake of oil

between the enclosing jaws

and cataracts of ice,

tiny wavelets scaling its skin

scintillant with the small commotions of stars overhead.

The bush wolves

have been nosing for muskrat

and you can almost taste the steam

rising from hot meat on the air.

I squeak like a pulley through the virgin snow,

following the banks of my own meandering,

owing nothing of myself to anyone,

wholly my own solitude,

as I pass through the gates

of the enclosing darkness

trying to enter the abyss and the mystery

of what I have lived so precariously

over the last sixty-three years,

what it means, if anything,

to be a human among these paper birches

on an island in the stream,

looking up at the intimate unattainability

of the stars,

knowing you are growing old,

that death is more populous with friends

than life, that love

has sloughed you so many times

like a viper’s skin,

like the phases of the moon,

like a shrine of smoke and ashes,

that the phoenix hesitates

to robe itself in the full glory

of its former plumes of fire.

My mother will die soon.

I must say it,

voice it in my blood

to be able to bear it

and my children are clouds in the world

that no longer look for their reflections

in the eyes of the lake they arose from

as if they were merely breathed out.

And how in any god’s name

can a man define the absence

he has grown to be,

except he standardize his own spinal cord

as the only measure of loss

he has to go by?

And even after

all the millennia of my walking,

standing up,

I’m still only six feet closer to the stars

though my mind can embody all of space

in a solitary thought.

And the deep, inner silence

in the empty throne-room of my heart

where even the most profound events of my life

are seen to be ultimately no more

than the antics of a jester

playing with shadows,

turns out after all to be

just another mode of weeping.

It takes a lifetime

for a drop of water

to gather the courage to fall

from the tip of a blade of stargrass,

and the tongue has tears

the eyes know nothing of.

I admire the cool crimson

on the brushes of the ground willow

as they try to catch my likeness

on the ice-primed canvas of the snow,

but suggest

to portray me as I lived

they need to be loaded with blood not paint.

Like the moon

I have worn the same blossom

as a face

for years now

and I still don’t know the fruit

that ripens beneath it;

whether my life has sweetened

in orchards of light,

or black dwarf of the forbidden apple

on a dead tree,

I taste like a full eclipse.

And what could it change even if I did know?

When the diaspora of my starseed

breaks bread

at a harvest of thorns;

who is the host

and who is the guest

and who asks for a menu?

And no matter how far from home

the journey takes him,

whether down a dead-end alley

or further than the stars

was there ever a man

who didn’t walk to his own funeral

like a bell

looking for any beginning

that might not be lost in the end?

Or does the snake

that takes its tail in its mouth

as a gesture of eternity

eventually end up swallowing

its own head

like this stream before me

making its way to the sea?

I stepped across a star sill

through a vertical door into life

and in the leaving of it

I shall knock from the inside

on a door that’s horizontal

to continue my descent toward earth

down a ladder of thresholds;

and what began so earnestly

among family and friends and lovers

will be concluded by a stranger

who will wear my name like a gravestone.

But here among the tangle

of these fallen trees, their roots

fleshed out

and washed like a corpse

by the water and the snow,

Venus peers through the fingers

of the branches above

where two crows have paired

like quotation marks

around the hearsay of the night

though I am left speechless

by the random beauty of the scene,

as if my voice had been released like a bird

into its own most intimate, inward vision

and that vision were everywhere you like the sky

it disappears into like I do

everytime my heart is opened

like one of the lockets of time

and I stare into your eyes

and the universe stares back

as you breathe out the night with all of its stars

and then I breathe you in

just as a golden feather of the moon

lands without a ripple

or unravelling wake

on the mirror of these lonely, black waters

I have followed deep into the darkness

like the urgent secret of my own lifestream,

and I know it’s you. I know it’s you.

PATRICK WHITE