SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

SO LIFETIME AFTER LIFETIME

So lifetime after lifetime, sorceress of shadows and dreams

you step out of the dark wood of yourself,

a shy doe, a mournful lighthouse and a warning off the coast

of your infinite solitude, you, the singing bird

on the green bough of your flute pouring yourself

like sorrow over the eye of the sea, your tears,

the ancient wells of an eternal longing unanswered by the secret stars

that have entrusted their radiance to you, fireflies

drowning their light in your black candles,

the blind music of your lonely flowing. Is your flute, a bone, then,

and this rose I bring you, this heart, this blood

that has turned into a goblet of luminous wine,

drunk on the wonder and the missing in your phantom music,

is this rose nothing but a wound, a coffin-flower,

the unmarked grave of a mystic embryo?

Do you fear the tenderness, the meeting? Does the moon

strike at her own reflection in the mirror of her midnight waters

to wander like an orphan along her lifeless shores?

Boy and man, you murder me on the steps of your serpent shrine,

your eyes, cold glass, eclipses of crystal, your spirit

that once drew in the light like breath,

now a slow glacier, an age of ice

pushing your heart before it like a boulder,

like a temple-stone that one night flew out of the abyss

and buried itself like a meteor, a charred jewel, the demon seed

of a religion without saviours, your implacable creed

scriptures of blood in a mouthless book

that only love can open. Once there were swallows in the tree of life,

asylums of celebrants greeting the morning in their madness,

in the garden, in Eden, hurled through that first dawn

like a young girl’s heart trembling like a drop of light on a blade of grass.

Now your voice is a gypsy-crow on a dead branch,

your music, confession without atonement, your flute

without leaves, without orchards, an eyeless spring,

buried in its manger-cloth for years, nothing

but a crib-death, a broken wand, a phoenix

that has lost its faith in fire under the weight of its own ashes.

Beloved, again and again you kill me

in this dance of slayer and slain, tear out

this page of love like a like a child’s tongue, like a mute heresy

you are doomed to rewrite forever

in the indelible inks of your seeing.

Do you dip your pen like a water-bird drinking

from its own image, putting out your eyes

to deepen the darkness, the scars of your sin

the lightless letters of a hidden language

pricked out on your skin, black stars and braille tattoos?

The pages and the years may turn like wings and hinges,

and a thousand deaths, all your own,

tome the field with gravestones,

breathless flutes and hollow bones, ancient futures;

and you the only mistress of those solitary realms; still,

your legend will remain moonless and sunless,

the story of a night sky, the eyelid of a black rose,

that couldn’t break into light. Until

love stands beside the heartwell of another

as if it were its own sacred fountain,

one blood, one wind-mingled music

playing the waves like plectra, and raises the rim

of the single goblet to its lips and tastes,

only silence answers the terrible vastness,

only death graces the obscenity of these loveless wastes.

PATRICK WHITE