HARSH METAL IN THE WELL

Harsh metal in the well, small black bells, plum blossoms wearing iron masks, and the ghosts of violet salt that haunt her tearsas if blood wanted to become water, as if
all her lakes, the hazelnut trees in her eyes, and the bruised dawns of the salmon beneath themwho wait for the rocks of poetic wisdom to fall,
were wounded in their watersheds.

And I’m trying to patch the sun
with old eye-patches, unused eclipses, sunpots

and the moon with blue-green lichens,

and the blooddrop saline drip of crimson columbines

mingled with the visionary mist

of soft, grey morning voices, ashen butterflies,

to keep the light from leaking out.

There’s a hawk tearing at the cherry of her dove-heart

and long red wavelengths soaking into the blue-black of starless skies,

quicksilver rain on the hovering windows

and looping spider veils of slashed paint in a race of rivers

letting go to weep themselves

to the bottom of their lilies,

the burning tentacles of jellyfish wine

sweeping its tresses across the distant hills

like the bridal smudge of a lost storm,

ashes on its gown. Her lanterns are covered

in the scarves of her sorrows like the hair of reformed widows,

and even from here, I can hear her trying to tune

the ashes of a burnt guitar

to the songs of a happier day

and the goblets of softer voices

that touched her like snow at night among the pines.

In the irretrievable lostness of now

she lingers in a dream of savaged shrines

with the crow priests of the sacred echoes,

grieving for the frost on the mirrors

of her farewell oceans,

rosaries of autumn migrations

hanging like a string of skull-faced planets,

her lifelines beaded with tars and tears,

and the slow coagulants of time

that rose the pain with scabs and badges

and later, the distorted pearls of our scars.

And my heart’s going off like a fire-alarm

because I love her, because

love panics at a wound,

immolates itself in the green flames of its own tenderness

to kiss the sting of the world away

to remove the thorns

in the eyelids of the beloved

one by one between its teeth,

between the silver tweezers of the moon,

and lay a salve of cool kisses on the ruptured berries.

And it’s cruelty to feel the divinity of love,

this godfire that exceeds our furthest horizons,

like eagles in the stairwells of the stars, wingspans of light,

and remain a human, remain

a boundary stone with a sword in it,

a liferaft of punctured powers and straining oars

when everything within me

calls for the dragon arcana of sleeping wizards

and the invincible excaliburs of pauper kings,

when all I have in my hands are these words,

these withered embryo eyes,

these dead beans of a fallen giant

to remove the arrow from the heart of the blue gazelle,

to keep the sky from bleeding,

to answer the baffled eternity of mortal sorrow in her eyes,

the apricot of her skin raked by the crystal claws

of sidereal lions that rage like minerals

against the fairy fountains and solar-paced sunflowers

robed in the elephant ears

that spill like hearts from the supples vases of our blood.

I’m a hand without fingers, an amputated starfish,

the monk of a blind wick, the wet fuse

of a star too weak for ignition

who’s been praying to all the wrong gods

for the loan of an ambulance and a white cocoon

to bandage a vineless severance with wings,

to pour my blood into hers like a tide

that will lift her dolphin of light,

the waterwings of her lungs, lead pears,

weighed down like bags of stone on a desolate shore,

into a liberty of leaping bells, her body

a crazy tongue of joy saying the sea,

and her spirit the limber spire of breathing free.

Who throws the sparrows against the glare

of a brittle window pane; who

devises these labyrinths of thwarted emotion, who

teaches us to blaze among the wincing galaxies

only to stifle the mouth of our exaltations

with rags of grief, with the crusty towels,

the soiled sheets of ravished rainbows,

that daub the tears of the shining

that always weeps away like light from our paintings?

And love answers that it’s suffering

that hurls our voices into the morning, suffering

that taught us to sing to Venus in the dawn, suffering

that pours the stars into the chalice of the heart

and bids us lift and cradle the heavy head of a planet

too weak to rise from its injuries

and offer our thread of mending light

to the parted lips of an ancient wound.

Love answers that it’s love that scalds, love

that breaks the thorny arms of the aloes like starfish,

like bread and the pincers of boiling crabs

to free the cool honeys of love that heal the burns,

to teach the mouths of our wounds how to kiss.

But even so, even so,

I can feel the spear in the flesh of the moon,

and the fireflies faltering in the urn of her heart,

and the empty hand of the wind that misses its leaf,

and the sloughed skies in a solitude of lost gloves,

and the fallen irises of limp swans

puzzled by the failure of their green swords,

the splayed feathers of their rearing wings

to lift them out of the breach of encroaching winter

and appoint them like a trumpet heading south.

I can feel the weeping braille under the eyelids of my lover,

the dark queen of my radiant bees,

and my heart is a crucial hive of urgent ashes

hanging like a paper lantern

on the night bough

of a burning apple-tree.

PATRICK WHITE