MY SOLITUDE A HOUSEWELL OR TWO DEEPER THAN LOVE

MY SOLITUDE A HOUSEWELL OR TWO DEEPER THAN LOVE

My solitude a housewell or two deeper than love,

even at noon when the shadows sheathe their daggers,

I can see the stars and fireflies dancing like eyes

down here together to the riverine music of watersnakes.

And I don’t feel confined to my own heart, anymore

than my mind does by the nightsky, or the light

to the fountainhead of the star it emanates from.

Because I loved you as the embodiment

of my own creative freedom, I’ve never had to gnaw

at my chains like obedience on a short umbilical cord

wishing it had asked for wings from love

instead of a kite. And on clear nights that remind me of you

I rise like a fish to the lure of the moon

when I’m just ruddering among my river reeds

to keep my place in the mindstream like a bookmark

at a purple passage that could never read me the same way twice,

and when I let you catch me as if I just jumped

into your lifeboat out of the blue, what I loved most

about you back then, and still do, is that you always

threw me back into the depths of myself

and each time I found myself swimming

in a deeper abyss than the one you just pulled me out of

like a waterclock, I could feel the ripple

of a mermaid flow through the heartwood

I carved myself out of to be the figurehead

at the bow of your ghost ship as we ploughed

the moon together like a mirage in a fog

sowing the waters of life with stars and fireflies.

When my feelings get too big to say anything

to my intimate other, I’ve always found it wise

to rely on the light in the moonlit window

as a silver-tongued interpreter of the silence.

Even after all these lightyears we’ve been disappearing

into the aerial blue of each other’s distances,

I see you out of the corner of my third eye sometimes

as you were when you were the flightfeather of poetry itself,

the burning dove, the arrow of the raven

that struck me in the heart like the bull’s-eye

of an eclipse that never failed to hit the mark.

And out of the starmuck of human confusion

and obsessive lovelessness, something beautiful

blooms in the dark like the fragrance of an occult rose

at a seance of the heart that summons me

out of my solitude like a weary spirit back to the many roads

I’ve walked down alone at night like a pilgrim

that’s lost sight of the shrines he left behind him

like the prophetic skulls of the roadkill the ants trivialize

by trying to punctuate the emptiness in the sockets of their eyes.

You don’t live it. You can’t see it. You can

visualize all you want, turn yourself into

a retinal circus, but when it gets right down to oracles

you’re visionarily blind if you don’t blood

the hungry ghosts of your abstractions.

Beyond solid, you were evanescently real

and the only kind of bond that could exist

between us was an open palm of space and time

as if every meeting were a penumbral farewell.

Time thinks it’s getting the better of me,

and there are days I don’t doubt it, but

more often than not when I light a cigarette up

with a starmap on the corner of me and the universe

at the crosswalk of shadows and thresholds up ahead

knowing I’ll probably jay walk further down the road,

or find a short cut faster than the speed of thought,

you appear apparitionally out of nowhere

like the gnosis of some lost gospel of the night

about the heart and the body and the mind

and the light and the light and the light of love

that shines in the eyes of the dragons of desire

like black diamonds flowing in the heat

of their own fires with the intensity of shadowless mirrors

that may have seemed cold as glaciers on the outside,

frozen waterclocks and housewells, but inside,

like these facets of you, and this is how I know

I’m dying like diamonds, I’m ageing like jewels.

Fire and water. Tears and flames. Here in my heartwood

I’m still burning like the candelabra of a rootless tree

that fell in love with an ice-storm once that turned the tears

that fell like rain from the eyes of my crystal skull

into a chandelier of stars and fireflies waltzing like a dragon

in the moonlight with you, at the full, ever since.

PATRICK WHITE