THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

The mind reflected in the silence of its own light.

Chaos is not pacified, but your memory remains

like a work in progress, fireflies with no fear of heights

arc-welding the wounds of the suspension bridges

that use to sway in the wind over the fathomless abyss I risked

to love you more obsessively than solitude. Black candle

of the heart, you burned in me like a votive flame

in the visionary shrines of my prophetic skull, a tender madness

veiled in the shadows of a thousand extinct stars.

Your body an amphora of wine on the sea floor of Atlantis,

an hourglass full of goldfish and nocturnal mirages

of oracular starclusters, I’ve never fully shaken the hangover

of consuming entire watersheds from the sorrows in your eyes

whenever I went witching for the rootfires of your flesh

with lightning rods as urgent as the tusks of the moon.

The memories circle back on me like a solar storm

of firebirds over the tree line and though it’s getting dark now,

I can still smell the fragrance of your light lingering

like auroral apparitions of deadly nightshade, wild orchids

and black roses that smeared their eyelids in the lampblack

and mascara of total eclipses that weren’t manic enough to go punk

when your rage smashed your insights like frosted lightbulbs

in a morgue where you burned the dead in effigy

on a pyre of ice, a cremation of fireflies, dragons

in the hulls of those Viking funeral ships you liked to launch

like matchbooks with crazy stamens and anthers

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey when you

weren’t in the mood to water down your blood

by tempering the Celtic weaponry of your metalwork

in the elixirs of acid rain that scalded your eyes like wildflowers.

I loved the refreshing arrogance of your blue tattoo

and the unassuming vulnerability of the way

you never expected the steel in your heart to fail

when we used to meet secretly every night

on a burning bridge like thieves of the fire

we stole like graverobbers from our own urns.

Somehow our afterlives got mixed up with this one

and eternity crept into our love affair like autumn ivy

or sumac burning in its igneous flightfeathers

for the long, strange, heartless journey ahead

as we looked at each other like orphanages

waving good-bye to someone we’d have to get over

by closing the windows we opened up in each other

like a starmap of dark matter in mourning

for the black doves that died like sacred syllables

in the throats of the fires that roared like a larynx of stars,

o, can you hear me now, wherever you are

like the other wavelength of this lap-winged caduceus

where the grave of the wound is the cradle of the cure,

still trying to say things after all these circuitous lightyears

to you, to me, to each other in the evanescent vastness

of the darkness that came like a coroner

to our unsustainable dreams with surrealistic autopsies

that were meant to be whispered like rain

into the ears of the dead listening to it weep

like tears that either came too early or too late,

sema soma, to open their coffin lids amid

this garland of fruitless plumage and rootless flowers

like seeds of fire wired to the wayward fuses of the wind

as if love were still glowing like a night light we left on

in the ashes of those starfields we were immolated in.

Foxfire, I suspect, and fiddleheads on the first violins of the bracken.

PATRICK WHITE