Thursday, December 27, 2012

YOU'VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME


YOU’VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

You’ve been gone such a long time.
Do the dead share their absence
with the hearts of those who miss them
or is the scope of the moon diminished
by its lack of a credible atmosphere?

After the flood, I believed in the covenant
the rainbows made with the disquieting day,
but late at night among the moondogs
I heard them weeping like watercolours
left out in the rain that washes their promises away
like false dawns in the third eye of the sea.

Where did you go? And why? Were you
a failure that went unnoticed? Did I let you down
in some unforgivable way and this is how
I pay by having to grow galactic to embrace you,
to close the abyss between us with oceanic forays
into time and space to say I’m sorry when
I feel you near, if I harmed you in any way
I wasn’t aware of, though never out of a lack of love?

Night after night, my heart drifts like a lifeboat
lowered from the moonset in the west
to look for you without a starmap to anywhere
only to be washed up on shore in the morning
as empty as I left. My waterclocks trying
to turn back time like a widow walk
around a lighthouse with no habitable planets.

It’s not the light of candles that I follow
it’s the wend of the smoke when they go out
that reveals the paths of the dead unravelling
like a road of ghosts dispersed among the stars.
My heart’s become a bone-box of your eyes,
your lips, your hair, your fingertips,
the nocturnal fragrance of the orchid of your sex.

I carry the ashes of your shining in a medicine-bag
around my neck in the indefensibly
dangerous human hope that one night
you’ll be attracted back to the relics you left behind
in a kind of sympathetic magic with the blind
so they might see you again, one last time
just to know that you’re ok with your disappearance
like a sundial at noon overwhelmed by its shadows
boarding the flowers up like coffins in a total eclipse.
It’s white outside right now. No topography to the snow.
Silt of the moon. A photographic positive
of the oblivion I don’t imagine you inhabit anymore
now that you’ve crossed the burning bridge
of your last threshold to make an indwelling
of the black hole you’ve left in so many galactic hearts
they’re wheeling like Sufis seeking annihilation
among the dust devils that arise at their heels
like the oldest messengers of the stars
to the mud we’re made of, some, clay bricks in a wall.
Some, dry creekbeds trying to decipher
their own crackling like pictographs
on the shattered ostrakons of a cosmic eggshell
someone got out of like the canary of a buried miner
to see how big the sky was when no one else was looking.

Is it bigger than pain? Is it the freedom of the forsaken?
Does it advance the cause of life to dance
even when you’re weeping over a purple passage
in a suicide note that was meant for your eyes only?
Can you see your reflection on the back of a mirror,
or is it enough that we abuse our tears for that,
lightyear after lightyear, trying to turn them inside out
as if the stars were always on the other side
of where we were for the night, looking out at the snow
making it all seem so irrevocably easy to let go
when you’re staring through an expressionless window
weary of trying to second guess the long view
of what you’ve had to live your way through anymore,
your grief a frozen nightbird in an aviary of razor-wire
entangling your heart in the strings of a harp
looping like the helical orbits of your retrograde descents
into Orphic modes of empty-handed, esoteric thought,
regardless of whether things eventually
come clear of their own spontaneous accord or not.

PATRICK WHITE

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