GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

Grey day after grey day, little nicks and slashes

of insight, the Mongol compound bows of her lips

or the angel, Jabril, when he enveloped Muhammad in Hira

like two bows placed symmetrically opposite each other,

embraced by a Sufi experience of inclusiveness,

or was it the neck of a black swan enthroned in its own reflection,

free association of the word made light, but at this late date

I don’t think I can forget anymore than I already have.

Nor really want to, wholly, though the pain

sometimes burns like a matchead of white phosphorus,

tentacled jellyfish when I think of the translucency

of her aquiline eyes, the terrorism of their beauty

when they fixed on me like an innocent walking by.

I sleight nothing. Not a hair on her head, not one plinth

of the starmaps she smashed at my feet like chandeliers

in a sudden ice-storm in November. I was her tree.

She was my nightbird. Things were always as clear

as a glass menagerie between us when she wore her horns

like the moon in a china shop, or a viper, or a garden snail.

Always knew a day would come when

all I’d have left of her would be these memories

like fossils of the constellations we used to walk under

as I pointed out through the gaps in the wild apple trees

the Andromeda Galaxy, two million lightyears away,

as the furthest thing in life the naked eye can see,

though it was obvious to me at the time, once gone,

o is it still so inconceivable, she would be.

Just look at me, I’m weeping like a window

for the lost phases of a moonrise that’s never

going to startle me again with the same madness

I felt around her as if I could see for the very first time

in eras of trying to imagine, what a dangerous drug

love is to be addicted to after a single taste for life.

Demons revel in their sins in the darkness and dance

with slumming angels on an eye-level with paradise in hell.

The temperate homogeneity of these grey days doesn’t know it,

but I remember, I’ve lived it, apocalyptically

when joy grows so intense it’s a darkness that burns

like the portal of a blackhole hourglass that tears

the sea star of your soul apart galactically

like trillions of stars passing into a whole other world,

worlds within worlds in every one of them

and life and love and wisdom and who you

thought you were reverses spin omnidirectionally

and you can see more deeply into the heart

smeared like a rage of lipstick on a black mirror

than you ever could into the guileless blazing of the white.

PATRICK WHITE