Sunday, October 7, 2012

MORE DIRECTLY, MORE INTIMATELY


MORE DIRECTLY, MORE INTIMATELY

More directly, more intimately I would approach you
with fingertips and lips, with the black roses of mysterious midnights,
with eloquent eyes full of solace and tenderness, forgotten tears,
and the leaves of our ancient longing shed like a library in the ripening silence
of the moment just before the universe is born of an unwitnessed union
and arrayed like the robes we have discarded
of as many forelives as there are
stars in the sky and gardens in orbit. Breath of my breath, how often
over the ages have I lingered in this dream of you, waking
from shrine after shrine like a swallow to find you again, the sacred syllable
of the jewel in the well, lunar sapphire, unsayable to all but the one
who has looked far beyond his seeing to retrieve it
from the welter and turmoil of the world like a second innocence? Beloved,
you have always been the firefly in my grave, the lost star
that answered what the darkness was asking,
a sunflower in the shadow of an eclipse, a ghost-song
rising inconceivably from the ashes of the guitar
like the first morning of a leaf. Together
we have lived forever in the tiniest house of time, over and over,
like a drumbeat or the beating of single heart, two wings on the same bird,
renewing and fulfilling each other, gathering and releasing,
the river in rain, bathing in its own waters, arrivals in every departure.
Soft fire, fire on the moon, blood-fire, mind-fire, mystic fire,
sweet arsonist, white heretic, you heal in your burning,
your beauty, golden knives of light that adorn the heart they strike,
even over coffee, even over distant glimpses of you
on the other side of the street, even here now, miles
and hours away among these voids and apparitions I keep searching
like abandoned theaters for the word within the word to tell you
what the world is, what we are with you in it, not just
the green bells of April annunciations, or the sanguine avowals of passion
downing the bitter cup on a hill of skulls
or the amazing resurrections, or the sun in your hair
suddenly a revelry of light, or the star in the bay of your smile, first crescent
threshing the harvest of sunset, not just that, not just
black lightning slaking its igneous roots in underground watersheds,
volcanoes spewing virgin islands for sexual castaways, but the things
I once whispered to you in a thousand languages
that have long been rubbled in the mouths of men like temples,
things I once said to you like the wind shining in moonlight
when we lay down secretly by the banks of the Orontes
far from anything but the shelter of ourselves,
obedient in that ancient future to nothing but time and the stars
as civilizations passed, talking to their gods. Slowly
like an empty boat drifting through the fog
it all returns, the many lives, the many blossoms returning to the branch,
and all the windfall of faces assumed by the flesh and the spirit,
fruit on the tree of the moon again, eyelids and mouths again,
and the many hearts that have lain like silver coins ungathered
in the fountains of yearning that flowed away from us
into clouds on the mountain just as we reached out,
and all the dreams in the cellars of blood we pulled over ourselves like skies
where we wandered in the far fields among the flowering fires,
two planets of bliss on a single thread of blood, the stars
beneath our feet and siloes of silence our only bread, too full to speak,
too vagrantly sustained by a feast of wonder to lack anything.
Tomorrows ago, then as now, all one encounter, one greeting,
we are mountain and valley and the echo of the calling as again and again
you incredibly answer like a beautiful wilderness, supernal spring,
the origin in my end. O you who are my only passage and threshold,
let me sing to you again of your alphas and omegas
on the bull-harps of the moon, let me send messengers on ahead
centuries from now to celebrate your astounding arrivals
on the shores of all these unborn lives, future after future, wave after wave,
the days and dawns of our walking from oasis to oasis, island to island
in this desert of stars. Let me drink gold from the rock,
honey from the bone, wine from the thistle; wise, let me drink
from the hands of a fool; foolish, drown me in a prophet’s tears;
ignorant or enlightened, madman or sage alike, let me
see you again under the eyelids of the moon, let me brush the hair
from your forehead and kiss you again like cool apples in September,
one orchard after another, wild grapes in the grass.
In the silver of faceless mirrors I would write your name,
on the waters of unnamed lakes I would reflect your face.
Ghetto rose, orchid in a slum, let my sorrows rinse your leaves,
let me fall like rain to the root and rise again through the petals of your ocean,
let me fill your glass and be consumed once more
on the precipice of your lips so might I be your wine and water,
this trance of flowing diamonds. And of my joys remembered and to come,
let the greatest and smallest of my palaces and hovels
hold you for the night in rooms with eyes for windows,
my body for a bed, and my love of you that makes a candle
and a shadow of the world, this lighthouse off the watchful coast
of your epiphanies, where my heart is a solitary seabird,
a sample of land from an undiscovered continent, the light behind the light
you go by. Gentle gypsy-witch, bright voyager, again
I have found you like a needle, mystic north, your star,
your steady lucidity, the calm Pacific under your shining, within and without,
direction and retrieval, a radiance that shakes the grave
of its disembodied contents and hands out living passports
in the cities of the dead to ports of call
among the lost islands of light in your eyes, greener than music.

PATRICK WHITE

NO ONE IN THE WORLD


NO ONE IN THE WORLD

No one in the world knows me today;
there isn’t a mirror that could sink
the black sail of my face,
or a name that could follow me home like a threshold,
no sea at the end of the limp ribbon of my bloodstream,
no shore of an island heart to be washed up on
as the trees wait to announce their burning retractions
and the sky so blue, so blue, so blue,
such a perfect oblivion of blue
no mortar and pestle of the mouth
could grind a colour so fine,
and I hear the engines of the day
and the people of the day
but their business is not mine,
and the roads that can be patched,
that smoulder under a hot poultice,
a black bandage of asphalt
are not the roads I walk like a wound
with nothing to say to the delinquent streetlamps
wondering if winter will catch them in bud,
signing a guest-book of wet cement
in a braille of fingers and footprints.
One by one I have pulled the stars out of my skin
like the thorns of roses and serpents,
the stingers of the kamikaze honey bees
that die like lost swords
in a blaze of devotion, sugar and gold,
detangled their burrs of light from my hair,
and disarmed the toxic sickles
of the moon in Scorpio
that reaps fire with fire
by letting the harvest go to seed like ashes,
by letting the harvest rust,
by making martyrs of the scars and the scarecrows
by crowning them
with the bitter ivy and barbed wire
of distinct constellations that glowed
like an eyelid of nettles,
needles through the eyes of an evil doll
that drowned in a deluge of roosters and whiskey.
And it’s not that I’m giving up on my defeat
or looking for immunity, an antidote, sanctuary,
an ebullient insight into the way I feel
that grasps at clouds with too much certainty,
or even an honorable armistice
to lay down my weapons
like the shadows of the midnight sun at noon,
or trying to get high on hallucinogenic parachutes
that gill the sky with fish and mushrooms and terminal envelopes
that house the feathers of another dimension;
let me fall like a pillar of wine
in the ranks of this lonely holy war
I wage with the sand ghosts
of a thousand visionary shrines
like a heresy whose time has come,
like the empty-handed boat I am
whenever it starts to rain.
No one needs to know who sits on the throne
of the faceless coins I’ve issued
to shut my eyes like doors
on a fever of scissors cutting the strings
of fanatical puppets
stuffing the mailbox
with bouquets of crusading propaganda
that want to tar my household gods with wings.
There are things that go on in the world
so alone and unknown,
hidden harmonies, fountains, wells,
the eyes that the night drinks from like flowers
and gates of light so open
that even space and time leave their shoes
like the beginning of ignorance
to circle the clear flame once like unwitting pilgrims
and extinguish their gaping mirrors
like the torches of unfaithful lovers in the silence.

PATRICK WHITE