AFTER YOU LEFT

AFTER YOU LEFT

After you left your absence turned into more of a muse

than your presence seldom was. Sat at my desk

and fell on my pen over and over again like a samurai sword

until I got the knack of gutting myself properly.

Last of the summer’s late blooming poems,

black-eyed Susans and asters, monosyllabic tragedies,

dutiful domestic farces demanding a coven of doves

be sacrificed to the darkness I was remanded to,

my heart a cross between a spiny sea urchin and a voodoo doll.

And at night, the beautiful, September stars, my God

who would have thought something so distant

and impersonally uncaring could have hurt like that?

Loved you well and faithfully while you were around,

and gave you my assent when it was time

for you to go, blessings on your head and house,

you be the one who goes off down the road

to fulfil the promise of a new life without me,

and I’ll be the one, my last sacrifice, who

stayed at home and died because it would be

neo-romantically rude not to, without you.

Functioned by rote, the reflex habit

of a lifeboat drifting in the abyss. Too much

significance to everything, especially the things

your hands had touched, mythically inflated sublimities

that scorched my fragile equanimity with gamma ray bursts

to the third eye as my vision of life boiled off

like the last forgivable atmosphere

of the brutally habitable planet I was living on at the time.

I was precise and grateful for the hidden solace

in the ritual commonality of simple human chores

from feeding the dogs and the cats, to

shaving my face with a razor blade

and cutting my reflection a hair shy

of its jugular vein to see which one of us

would blink first. Freedom bound, I liberated

as many chains as I could. I kept the bird-feeders

full of sunflower seeds when colder nights

began to come on. Dusk was always the worst

between the prelude of the beginning,

with a couple of false dawns to start with,

and the epilogue at the end, like the last word

of the day in the twilight of the bardo state

in between when everything you are is behind you

and what you’re about to become is still nothing,

and you’re standing beside a leafless locust tree

that’s all thorns, and the stars are emerging

as the darkness saturates your mindscape like black lung

mining diamonds of adamantine insight

in an emotional tarpit with an occult sense of humour

that leaves you as bruised and numb as if someone

had just inoculated you against the constellation

you were born under like a pathogen that can have

a mystic effect on those who have not been exposed

to it before, and all you can do is stand like a fever

in an ice-age and gape, just gape through the gates

of separation at how immaculately lethal forever can be

when you’re still trying to cling to a relative state of mind.

Time can be ambidextrously ironic or it can

stare at you like a bad joke waiting for a laugh at the end

and all you can feel is something remotely eerie

and exhaustively incomprehensible about the way it grins

like the skull of the moon rising over the sacred groves

of unmummifying birch trees where we buried

the barn cats the fishers and coyotes got, placing

large boulders on top of their corpses to keep

the dogs from digging them up again. Bast

the cat goddess look over them and the white flowers

of the bilabiate catmint you planted for feline

and butterfly alike, keep blooming in the thickets

of the thousand small kisses you left them where they slept.

The dream’s moved on since, but one night up there,

I wept the stars out of my eyes like an ice storm

of glass splinters as if the plinths of the light

were all that was left under the brittle calyx

of the deft rose frost bit by the fangs and thorns

of the cold that sliced my lips like a paper cut.

For awhile after the last rose had died,

my solitude began to taste like blood on the snow

in a backwoods winter abattoir. And then the spring

and the long impassable roads of starmud

waiting for the rain to pack them down.

Love hurts most when it begins to thaw out

like the frozen fingers of a child with its hands to the stove.

Marrow aches like slush in the bone, the agony

leaves nothing to the imagination to play with.

Endured, it passes like the death of a favourite cat.

Meow. Hope I purred around you more than I roared

because there was always so much more

to thank you as I do than forgive you for.

PATRICK WHITE