I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

I have not forgotten

the asters that bloomed in the wake of your smile,

the torn bridal veil

you were always shaking free of the spiders

that wanted to pin themselves like badges,

like mushroom crowns

to the polygonal thrones of your web;

or the way you would walk through doors,

swim through windows

as if my life were your own personal dream

and I was the only horse on the moon

that had ever survived your thorns,

nor the way your fingers could turn into

the horns of a garden snail

or the green tendrils of imperial strawberries

that slowly colonized my skin

with small mystical villages

on the slopes of volcanic dragons,

and how you were always quicker than pyramids

to extinguish the fire

with emergency kisses

that turned the ambulance into

a newspaper tossed on the doorstep

announcing the terms of the armistice,

the swaddled folds

of a nursing iris in bud,

or the cross you swore was a bridge

between a coffin and a cocoon.

Did you ever finish painting your wings,

or that likeness of death

you said was a portrait of me?

Drifting for years

in the stone lifeboat you left me

like an island of my own

where I was the king of shadows,

the disconsolate wizard

of my own ruined magic,

and my heart was a cauldron of skulls,

I often thought of you

to keep myself from believing in love again;

the blow, the money, the music,

the secret sauce

of the Malaysian black current cheesecake

sliced into portions of the moon

robed in the folds of a regal eclipse,

of how you made everyone feel

they were better for you than me,

crazed by the panties you threw everywhere

like the fragrance of a smouldering rose

to prove you were hot and a rockstar,

and then grab me like a mike stand

and give me head in a song no one else could hear,

as if I were a hit long before you were born

and evolution hired a publicist.

I always thought you were a dangerous child,

a bouquet of fireflies

you were trying to give

to the ghost of a death that hadn’t happened yet,

a bee of blood that drowned

in the angry chalice of a broken mirror

that lied to your face about flowers.

I had to throw my heart out

like a corpse at sea to love you,

and lean back and watch as if I didn’t care

as one by one the stars o.d.’d like candles

in the black hole

that was swallowing you

like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

the eternal recurrence

of your father with you in bed.

And now it’s twenty years later

and life is a crosswalk in a dream

where we pass each other like bells on parole

from the spires that plunge through the past

like daggers through the eyes and the skies

of our isolation cells,

and it’s law not love

to go for a drink

to compare the opulence of our solitudes

like trees shedding their leaves to the bone,

and you undo your hair

like ribbons of fire at the foot of my grave

because you remember while I lived

I liked it long,

and reach across the table like wine

and take my hand in yours,

the other half of a split wishbone

that didn’t come true,

the head of a dead swan,

the last bugle of a dying civilization,

and quote from memory

a poem I wrote for you

chained by lightning

to a sacrificial rock in an old abyss

catastrophes ago

to make sure

the moon always had eyelids

when it stared into the lights

that obliterated all my faces

in the dark blaze of planets on tour with the dawn.

And I was moved like blue grasslands

as I always used to be

to witness the eerie beauty of your tears as you spoke,

sweeping out of the open window

of your abandoned heart

like curtains of rain you stood behind

to see if the wind would bring you roses again.

PATRICK WHITE