WHEN SOMEONE LOVES YOU AND YOU'RE NO ONE

WHEN SOMEONE LOVES YOU AND YOU’RE NO ONE

for Kristine Marie

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what happens then? What do you have to give

that they aren’t already in full possession of?

The many I have loved have become one woman.

And this is an orchid that blooms in fire at night.

And this is the dove that returns from earth

with a wing like a broken arrow and asks to be healed.

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what happens then? This picture-music flowing

like a carillon of bliss and despair through

my body, heart, mind as if they were all

poured like dragon iron into the casting of the same bell

that yesterday raised like a sword to kill it back into life?

And this is a doorway you can stand in forever

as if you were greeting someone who never comes.

And this is that butterfly among wildflowers

that flutters about like a symbol of the mind

as if it didn’t know whose loveletter it is yet.

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what happens then? Do you give them your emptiness?

Do you wrap space around them when they’re cold

like a star-studded shawl you asked the night to weave

for someone very special into astrology?

Or do you minutely examine the mystic specifics

of your life as you’ve known it up to now

and from somewhere in some dark room

way back of the heart, feel the urge to apologize

to the stars for how much their light’s been through

for so little? The star labours, and candles are brought forth.

And this is the delirium of a window the moon drinks from.

And this is that jewel of a tear that didn’t

make a big splash on the rock like other tears

and by that you know it’s a diamond in disguise.

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what happens then? Does the air as now revel

like autumn in a gleeful chaos of images and insights

the wind unravels like leaves in a tantric realm of crazy wisdom?

Do you see a woman coming through a gate

as if she’d lived her whole life among roses and razor-blades?

And she’s not asking for rapture, but you’re beginning to feel

there’s a peony of a supernova in the house of Cancer

waiting to express itself in the beauty of the way

it relinquishes itself like the moon to the waters of earth.

And this is that mysterious spell that beguiles

the expert hunter into baiting his trap with his own heart

hoping it’s irresistible to the fox he wants to take it.

And this is that dawn of a new day that arises like

a strange exorcism of everything that’s ever possessed you before

as you greet every ghost in passing off the lake

the same as you’ve always done, the waterbirds.

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what then? You stare as I do at Venus in the sunset

and write long poems that tunnel through mountains

like work trains full of precious ores that glow in the dark

more intensely as it approaches like a lantern from a long way off?

Or is it just another firefly at the end of my nose

casting galactic shadows across the time and space

it takes to behold them in the furthest reaches of my mind?

I sense a gentleness I haven’t known before.

I see a beauty that’s as easing to the eyes as moonrise.

And the seeds of words that haven’t passed between us yet

are already beginning to open their eyelids and flower.

And there’s a soft gray blue sky with a scattering of ashes

to honour the dead and give the wind its due

I can see spilling out of the urn of your heart

to make room for the phoenix I am about to give you

as if it were child’s play, when I’m with you,

wholly absorbed like light into bread, to rise from the dead

and feel hunger again, to drink from the fountain mouths

of fire again, and desire and long as I once did

and imbibe the wines of life as if I’d never existed before

without cutting my tongue on the taste

or succumbing to the inconceivable as if everything

that followed thereafter were the afterlife of the inevitable.

And this is the era in which you know

you’ve already tied your blood like a scarlet ribbon

around a gift no one can determine the value of

if she opens it in wonder, haste and love.

And this is the moment you dread the joy of

when death tastes as sweet as birth in the mouth of life

and autumn lives out of the suitcase of all its memoirs

like the blossoms of a manuscript that has come to bear fruit.

I saw you and you were a gazelle at the easel,

painting the moon like a beauty mark on the forehead

of a sacred slave girl dancing naked in the light that released her

like a butterfly in the jaws of a dragon she could awake with a whisper.

I saw you in a gust of stars, and felt the wings and dust devils

sprouting out of my heels to let me ride the thermals of my heart again

as if the long, dark, strange, radiant journey I’d already come

were merely a hair of the way I had yet to go like the sole copy

of a love poem I had committed to the wind so hopelessly

such a long time ago when my solitude could play

the rosey-fingered sea like a musical instrument

that could make the waves sing like mermaids

without a plectrum or a pick or a ship, as long

as there was desire in your fingertips and urgency in your art.

When someone loves you and you’re no one,

what then? Let them be everything to you even

if there’s no you to be anything to. Pour your emptiness

into hers and fill the cup up to the edge of the moon

and let it spill over with light as if it had a leak in it

bigger than a record harvest in the horn of the moon at full.

I’ve cut star wheat in a virgin’s hand

in a total eclipse of my senses

and touched flesh as if it were fresh bread

cooling on the windowsill of a hungry man

who can taste the light in it like letters from a child hood

far enough away from home to learn to love it again

with a second innocence more indelible than the first.

As for me and my treehouse with open windows,

I shall welcome a songbird on the cusp of Leo

to every branch and rafter of it, or if need be

at sea on the moon, in the event of a storm,

a lifeboat fashioned out of my own bones

to hang on to like the eye of peace in the skull of the dragon

who looks at you and reads you like fireflies on a starchart

delineating a new constellation out of homeless space and time

and a habitable myth of origin for two exiles in love

among the sacred groves of the rootless trees.

With you I have not come to revere the pain and longing

of hungry ghosts hanging on to every blade of grass

like a flag at half mast in a high wind.

I have come to appeal any destiny

that doesn’t bear the seal and signage of your heart.

Nor will I ever surrender any sword to your waters

that wasn’t first tempered in the translucent fire of diamonds

that feel like a fool of cool water running down your skin

like a spring thaw of the crystal chandeliers

that melted down their spear points into rain,

that dipped their swords in wax

and trimmed the wicks into fuses

and lit them up like Roman candles

such that my eyes and my heart

are still flowering wildly with you in these starfields.

PATRICK WHITE