IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.

Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies

into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism

over the latest initiate to pass through your veils

like the silhouettes of shepherd moons in transit,

that never edited the shadows out of your loveletters

or deprived the dragons of serpent fire

the new moons that brought on the rain

like the compassionate eclipses of the enlightened

when they show you the way home in the dark

by blowing the candle out. Everyone’s got eyes

but you were the first, as your mindstreams

fell on hard rock, to teach me to throw away

the crutches of light I thought my seeing depended upon

like the flame in a lantern, inside and out,

and flow along with my own visions of life

as if I shone like water on the moon

at the oceanic floodgates of an overwhelming emotion.

In despair, terror, doubt, sorrow, loss and aspiration,

I loved you, I loved the dangers in your raptures

when your intensities threatened to cremate your desires

like a field fire that’s being carried away

by an updraft of itself like a red-tailed hawk

riding its own thermals like aerial stairwells to the top.

Approximation was always more pragmatically true

than perfection and I wanted to live with you

as an indefensible human reasonably at peace with the world

as long as the truce holds. How many times

was I a witness to your desecration of the holiness

of the things you cherished most in life

as if we were on an heretical pilgrimage together

to some unknown shrine of starmud

that would light up heaven in the same fire

you cast hell down into unconfessed.

I loved you even then like the sea loves its weather

whatever its mood, or the sky its clouds and birds,

or an eye that recognizes a star it knows the name of

and can easily pick out from the rest of the crowd in disguise.

Water sylphs, witches, queen of the fireflies,

black apostate madonnas that cried real blood

like roses in the darkness surrounded by thorns,

cowgirl muses and vamps with the bodies of bloodbanks,

Pythian oracles high on the prophetic vapours

of active volcanoes, I have loved each of you

like flesh bound copies of the original mystery of life

I saw published in your eyes the first time

we ever met. Not love at first sight, but the authority

of an intuition something were astronomically bound

to occur between us like a sailor and a sea on the moon.

Each of you, a crystal skull, a chandelier, an open window

into the palatial nature of God drawing up blueprints

for the hovels and estates of water and light.

I could taste more of life in a single tear

you polished like the lens of a third eye

with a nightsky for a cornea, than I could

white-water rafting through the rapids of my mindstream

in the spring run off of my ancestral glaciation

thawing like a mirror to the notion of a lot more warmth

in my life since you plunged like a comet

into the midnight sun with no fear of flaming out like Icarus.

You were the waterbirds of my life, you were

the golden fish that spontaneously jumped into my lifeboat

when the moon had no hooks in the water

and you taught me how to swim out of my depths

by not underestimating myself like a shore-hugger

that refused to go along with the stream

and suffocated under his own weight

like a barnacle the rock it’s anchored to

or a pod of dolphins in a tidal mud puddle.

I’m not even going to try to say thank-you

because gratitude could only sound shabby at best

compared to what I owe you for the blessing

of an insurmountable debt that showed me

the mystic largesse in even the pettiest acts of love

each in its hour and place, were a star

flowering on the river among the waterlilies,

as if what were most enduring and indelible about love

were a light kiss of fire on the face of the waters of life

that leaves no trace of its shining, no starmap

for the albino crows of noon to navigate

their way back to black, nor adds one shadow more

to the darkness of the insight I return my eyes to

from time to time, alone, late at night, in tribute

to the watersheds they were drawn from, the women,

the friends, familiars, companions, the spirits of the well,

the muses, the moondials of the eras of my love I’ve shed

like rose petals and thorns along my path through life,

with no less passion in the lees of the wine that red shifts

tears into blood, than regrets in drinking from mirages

when the wild grapes were blue, under each of their skies

when it was as hard to tell then as it is now, where the deserts

left off and the stars began to add their lustre

like a universe to every mystic detail of a grain of sand

that enlightened the windows with the clarity of what’s

translucently apparent there before them, like the eyes

the stars follow, as I still do theirs, this soft, silver light

of a distant island galaxy that shines deeper into the dark

than the crow flies, or the fledgling arrows of the heart

can hit their mark like the scars of spring in the tree rings

of the lost art of rising to the moment like a candelabra of coral

on the shipwrecked seafloor of an unannounced moonrise.

PATRICK WHITE