Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I HAVE NEVER SAID


I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not
meant the light coming out of the dark
and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake
or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows
or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window
warping its image through the delusional weeping
of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook
by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this
still the case though I’m old enough to know
all that crying never turned into a single chandelier
and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread
than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.
And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles
beside cool dolphins with seabird hands
off the coast of my longing, and marvelled
at the amazing bridges of their bodies
and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them
and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream
that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet
of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst
in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;
never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat
or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past
and not meant some era of a woman
who came and stayed awhile with me
in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment
like the first rising of a second moon
I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse
of love’s last crescent across my left wrist
to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,
having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,
or swept my continental vision off the table
back into the coffin like an archipelago
of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel
everytime I try to assemble it, I still know
even if it isn’t vouched to me,
that love is life, and life is a bride
that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,
trailing her ancient veil of stars
along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow
even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch
among the white, sweet, wedding clover,
having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,
it is always somehow strangely okay
and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THE ROSE


AND THE ROSE

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,
a warning to drowned sailors,
mingling in the shadows and the leaves
just beyond the bay 
of the window where I stand
with my last afterlife
like a star in a shoe.
And there are voyages I’ll never make
and ones I have
for the sake of the going,
for the islands and the witches, the sirens
and the green flames of the fairies
that crept out from under
the stone of my heart
like a crown of petals, eyelashes,
cool palings of fire.,
and danced for the honey and the gold
from the paper hive
softened from stone
they had made of my life in ashes.
And there’s not much difference
between a sky and a sea,
no two wardrobes ever the same,
an expanse of space and skin,
wide palms of water,
and the confluence of lifelines
the deltas and the rivers,
the arteries and veins
the lightning and the branches,
weeping on a windowpane,
the fossils of leftover tears
that winced like an eye
in the hair of the jellyfish
that washed up out of their agony
like rain. And there are fools I’ve been
that don’t remember me
and lighthouses on the moon
that didn’t heed their own advice.
But there was always something
truer in the absurdity,
a mystery or a jewel, the memory
of a face I’d never seen,
some annihilation
with a threshold of stars
I’d never crossed, a whisper
of light, a fragrance, a voice
singing to itself in a lonely place
that put my caution to shame.
And it’s been my life to go,
to cross, to enter, to know
the lostness as my own,
and the darkness and the solitude
where I begin and end
like water taken from the river
and the river returned
as the moorings of the emptiness
I took for a boat
like a face
between the pages of my hands,
and all in the name of some nightbird
some shadow of a wing
that covered my heart
with such a quick eclipse
that no one even noticed I was gone.
Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing
but the sea another,
and it’s not that I was brave
or thought I could walk on water
or had a secret starmap,
wiser than the rest;
I looked into the abyss with a shudder,
as if I had to kiss
a cobra on the head
or enter a spider’s womb
without being caught,
for the terrible acceptance
of what I sought
beyond the starless gates
and moth warnings
of the usual taboos. Every terror
scales a treasure, and the dragon
masks its secret,
not meant for the circumspect,
in risk. The sane prefer heaven
but heaven isn’t for the sane
who don’t know how to die enough
to answer the sphinxes and grails.
And it’s made me
a heretic of the heart,
a rogue star, a poet,
to live this way,
drinking the black wine
that was offered me
from the skulls
that lined the mouth
of the mysterious death
in the doorway
of every true entrance.
And it’s not the lies
that kill you,
nor the truths,
or looking through
a hole in the fence
at things you were never meant to see,
the medusa making love
to an apple-tree,
or Isis naked behind her veils
that no one’s ever lifted;
it’s returning
the way you came
from the wells
of the transformations,
the mountains of the muses,
the islands and the trees
of seduction and death,
unchanged, your tears still tears
not jewels of the blood,
and your voice,
not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

PATRICK WHITE