I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say

everything there is to say, one heart to another.

I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.

Write it in blood and honey and snow.

Write it in moonlight on the water,

in the sands of sidereal deserts

where the wind doesn’t sing

as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness

when you’re on hallowed ground and those

who are scared to death of what it all means

and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,

give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo

to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth

to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said

imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination

and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.

And that’s the way space gets bent

like the nightsky of my third eye

whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon

that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers

to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.

Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.

A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull

that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music

you like and if he were ever called upon

to go down into hell again before your eyes

got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,

I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp

for someone like you to follow me up out of death

without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion

that has made us both feel at times,

like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly

preserve our bones, if nothing else, so

the future can tell by the fang marks

what pierced us through the heart

like crescent moons into voodoo,

baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs

so we both look like we’ve been carved on

like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus

You can weave a wavelength into

a beautifully disciplined flying carpet

and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine

on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton

that thirsts for wine from your heart well.

I may be the inspired in this, but you’re

the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,

a shape of space that teaches matter how to move

in orbit around you, even from this distance

where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries

to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one

and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face

toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion

for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,

but life always comes like a vestal virgin

or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,

who knows what they’ve seen in their time,

but whatever it was, or is, or will be,

they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see

the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.

Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light

as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky

and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through

like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower

in my field of view for light years that have left

the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,

one warm breath, and I begin to melt

like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.

The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells

of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes

when I began to believe they were seeing things

from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.

Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,

even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,

and if I’m not weeding the constellations

in secret gardens where the gates open

at the same time as these flowers in my eyes

it’s just because of the way I can empathize

with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,

show some timely respect for the pariahs

burning at the same stake that I am for flaws

I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night

casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow

and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.

PATRICK WHITE