Sunday, February 5, 2012

LOVE GOES EVERYWHERE

LOVE GOES EVERYWHERE


Love goes everywhere, a blue night wind
blowing the stars off the sills of far horizons,
making breasts of the heaving waves,
corrugated ripples, undulant mirrors
on the snake-scrawl skin of the shuddering lake,
kicking through the leaves of the heart
still not satisfied with its last draft of autumn,
arsenic on the tongues of the green dancers in the fire,
and twilights dripping like paint from the lips of vandalized roses.

Seabirds veer into its flesh like drunk swords
and there are cherries in its teeth that bleed,
and huge iron bells that come down like the pillars of dinosaurs
walking their funerals through a nuclear winter too late,
and doors off their hinges with their mouths gaping
at the swallows that come and go trying to paste
their clay and thread, a thatch of matted feathers
into a homely heart, a begging bowl of naked birds.

And the vases of love that are curved like the hips of a woman
Are as often, the fumaroles of spewing volcanoes,
bouquets of smoke and meteors, igneous ejaculations
refleshing themselves in sulfurus ores of glowing magma,
and the candles standing naked like studio models
in the ebb-tide sheets of their languid wax, and wine
on the palette of the sunset matador
who was gored on the horns of the moon,
starfish in the morning death carts of creaking Calcutta.

Up here on the wooden fire-escape, a look-out above
the begging crowns of the trees, and a solitary willow
easier than lips, waiting to rinse her hair in the rain
as if she had sisters, unravelled scars of snared lightning
off in the distance, the shock of electric bats
in the roseate boudoirs of the clouds, and the moon,
hauling its boat up the opposite bank of the Milky Way
to ferry its ghosts across the last abyss before morning,
and the stars ablaze in the flammable radiance of your eyes,
and the fire-iris in the blue of mine, I think of you, us,
and the miles between us in our continental bed
with its coverlet of cities, trains, highways, forests,
and the stains of deep-eyed lakes, plains and mountains,
the landscape of your body under sheets of autumn grain,
gathering prairie storms for a pillow, tornadoes for springs,
and our passion the conflagration of tens of thousands of acres,
the slipping of faults and cracks, the chafing of terraform plates
that shake the earth with apocalyptic ecstasy
and multiple aftershocks, love at the epicenter,
and the turmoil of crazy winds that sigh us away like grass,
and I marvel that in the tiniest house of time,
a breath within a breath, a berry in the sun,
as far as the silence away from each other,
we should live like a thriving planet,
each in the bridal coasts of the other’s arms.

And I want to nudge you with secrets,
whisper eels into your oyster ears,
gather up the mushrooms of your lips,
the soft moss of your sex
and wheel higher than a hawk
on a stairwell of semen and honey
then down the dizzy bannisters of your helical body
into the moist cellars of your rarest wines,
where the ghosts mingle in the fluids of life,
shapes of the watershed, longing for mangers.

And then I remember the rain in a likeness of you,
soft cameos of waterlilies that glow
like islands among black swans,
and the violet hyacinths that reed
the oboes of the dragonflies,
and the wild mink of stolen caresses
that nip your fingertips with the fangs of the moon,
and the terrible distances between your toes and your eyelids
a man walking on his lips
would take years to caress
and how many rivers I’d have to cross
before I came to the jewel in the root,
the fire-well and seed-lake of your tears.

And then the rain comes down harder,
heavy drops of ripe sorrow driving me back to myself,
smearing my clothes over my skin like wet, black leaves
and I sit for an hour, an ark on a mountain top in the legends of the flood,
all my dark abundance released on the bestial floor of the earth,
and an emptiness closer than death
bleeds me out into a vast space under a black sun
where the shadows of time are scattered like ashes
and all the trees in a dream are palatial pillars of salt
because I think of you laughing like a lamp in the rain,
your hair streaming skirts of beaded water
as both of us run into the same heart for shelter
and I find a clean towel to tamp your river face
and the cheeks and eyelids of the blossoms that fall upon it
and just when I’m done and go to give you a kiss, you’re gone
and there’s only these hot, glass blisters of grief to live on and on and on
believing in a day, a month, an era, a year, a moment ago
when I wake up in a doorway of bone, and you, in the flesh, appear.

PATRICK WHITE

JOURNEY


JOURNEY

I’m on some kind of journey
but I don’t know where it’s going;
I’m growing wings and shedding them,
and I’m true to every thought in my head.
I’ve got a heart, worn down at heels,
a used voodoo doll quilled like a native,
a meteorically battered planet
that wobbles between a kiss and a fist
in the way it keeps running itself around.
I spend too much time alone.
There are no obstructions in any direction;
and barefoot, I’m walking on stars and poppies,
talking to myself like a candle,
weaving my way among the shadows
like a fish through the supple harps
of the silver river reeds. I see
that I’m taking a bath in my own grave
to wash the soiled skies of the painted world
off my eyes, to behold
the brief career of the leaf of life
and how the light gusts out from the windows
like curtains and bird-nets. Life is short
and the new temple never gets further built
than a hole and a single cornerstone, the rest
left to the business of the earth,
all that beauty and magnificence,
unravelled among the mud weavers.
I was inoculated against death
by a splinter of the moon;
by how little time there is for love,
for the root to get drunk
on the fruits of enlightenment and compassion,
by how little I will ever know
of the road to the doorway I stepped through
to stand in awe before the moonspill
on the raven blue waters,
and to look so deeply into the eyes of a woman
who has just conceded an island in her passage,
and the fragrance of unheard music
that I am a pillar of wonder
before the unsayable
as she lets drop her shadows and feathers of light,
and the blood-god assumes
his flowering crown of fire
to enhance the splendours of his courtly intensities.
What I have lost in the river
I will find in the river
and what I have taken from the sky
I will give back to the sky,
and there shall come a day
when the eclipse will be the brighter mirror,
and the darkness that overtakes me now
will be a gate of stars to a water palace
where the dragonflies and waterlilies
are the sceptres and crowns of a human divinity
that will endure like a whisper of radiance,
a more haunting taste of light,
the rumour of a black rose
that outshines the angels
that coax the lanterns out of the night.
I will evaporate like the flaring of fireflies
on the windy shore of a trembling lake,
like the blue hat plume of smoke
from a gallant winter chimney
into the vastness of my own mind
like a waterbird without a trace into a sweeter, wilder solitude.
And these words will come and go
like the tides of the ocean I was,
like the providential leaves
of unfurling fortune-cookies,
like an avalanche of gold
washed down from the mountain upstream.
I write them in flowing diamond,
I write them in auroras of blood,
in dawns bluer than the iris of a peacock’s eye,
in fire and water and the mystic inks of the night
in the fleeting, indelible dream
of doors and hands and moons,
in warm breath on a cold window,
in a halo of comets
smeared into light by the sun,
in the sidereal wines that bled from bitter wounds,
I have said what it was mine to say
on a page of the wind
that whistled through me like life
greening the sands of the hourglass
with visions that ripened the bell of blood in my heart
to fall like wisdom from its tower
toward a fallible paradise
that won’t leave me as I am for long.
And I will jump again
into this cauldron of joys and sorrows
to string my spinal cord
over the abyss of the guitar-shaped universe,
walking upright
to plead with my own answers
to thaw like a mirror
estranged from the world it reflects
in the self-effacing flames
of the passionate gardens that dance on the wicks.
The awakening seed
echoes these flowers of fire
in the valley of a voice in the furnace
that lies down in the cool grass
by a stream of idle stars
and arrays its vagrant heart
like a breeze of blood in the dust
to the refugees in the shadows.
They move like eyelids
through all the phases of the moon
from an unspooled well of darkness
to the slash of a razor of light
to the threshing of the full harvest
in the siloes of the nightwind
enthroned like a breath of life
in the midst of its own dispersal.

PATRICK WHITE

SMALL, WARM BIRDS


SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,
a profound tenderness,
something to cherish
in the loneliness of being human
in these vast, cold spaces,
as I read your words
like poppies in my blood again.
What stars could I call upon,
what roses could I ask for their skin,
what darkness charge with radiance,
what ploy of dancing buddhas
could I summon
to let you know
you are all my sky within,
and the assent of my soul in the morning
and the bough of my homing at night,
that there is within me a blind fire,
an invisible flame
that consumes me in the ferocious beauty
of its unseen flowering
even in a flurry of faces
and the business tugging the donkey of the day
braying like a knot in a stream of wood,
and all the objects and forms of the world
are burning mirrors I look into to see
the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,
the irridescent luster of your shining,
how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,
and a dark shrine of desire
that can wake the valley dragons
with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.
I want to kiss your kneecaps;
I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips
and feel my kisses break like bread,
I want to feel my mouth
blossoming on the nape of your neck
and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields
of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,
I want to taste the silk
of the inside of your thighs
as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,
and approach your breasts like crowns,
and under a full moon
tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue
like a stranger in the doorway
of an infinite longing to make you shudder
like the void into light
with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids
that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.
I am the luminosity and shadow
of your green lamp that glows like the sea,
and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries
over the alluvial plain of your stomach
and touch you like a prophet
running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,
savouring the revelations
that throb like a pulse in space;
and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves
over the blue thresholds of your hills
and root their lightning in your body
like a tree of light, a new map of rivers
for your blood to follow back to me
like the echo of thunder in a well.
And all through the day
with its curbs and functions
I imagine the lilt of your fingers
on the rim of a coffee cup,
the cougar in the glance of your eyes,
the way you put a knife down on the table
like a smile without a script
and what it would be like
to circumnavigate the equator of your waist
with a rosary of kisses
to raise you like a sunken continent
out of your depths
and explore all your tides and passages
with the fervour of a dolphin in a bay of wine.
I want to be tangled like a kite
in the turmoil of your hair,
the night watchman of your dreams,
the one who notices
what no one else looks for,
the stone of the small grave
you sweep with your eyelashes
when the leaves of autumn
lie down with the shadows of spring
and the virgin windows of your tears
that no one has ever looked through
weep like glass over the secret root
of a flower only a child could see.
Beyond reason, gates, words,
where the bridges take off their shoes
to admire their feet in the water
and the waterlilies kiss the thorn
of the star that tore them like skin
and whisper ancient pollens to the night
softer than flour and saffron,
and everything I say to you
isn’t a wound in the light,
a mouthful of shadows,
a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,
fleets of butterflies
learning how to sail the oceans of the rose
like the keels and wings
of love-letters you can read in the dark,
I want to fold you in my arms like the moon
and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes
for a gold rush of fireflies
in the all night boomtowns
of a heart that struck it rich
digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS


YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come
to me written on the breath of urgent windows,
and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come
with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems
that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses
on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume
of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,
and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart
and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,
and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets
and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind
and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,
and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,
earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos
that have pierced your body with sad revelations
of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys
that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks
of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels
caught like words in the throat of a mountain
that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences
that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,
and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit
in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,
your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings
that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits
to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets
you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,
and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges
of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness
with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,
from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,
in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows
that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again
for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;
looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night
to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves
and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals
that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves
that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.
Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze
and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers
that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,
fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet
out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness
that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

PATRICK WHITE