I'VE GONE ON THRESHING WHEATFIELDS ON THE MOON

I’VE GONE ON THRESHING WHEATFIELDS ON THE MOON

I’ve gone on threshing wheatfields on the moon

with the last crescent of the smile you left me,

closing the gate behind you as if you never wanted

me to get out of the high starfields where you put me out

to stud and pasture like the Great Square of Pegasus.

And for awhile, after you, it’s true, it wasn’t important

if I knew the name of any woman I made love to.

But slowly, my emptiness adapted to your absence,

and who knows, if it had been written for us to know,

two nothings might have made something of themselves.

Shadowyears with intermittent crossroads of light

Sufi dancing with the starmud dust devils

like the three of swords with its wands and cups

full of feeling as you were at the approaching darkness

as if you couldn’t take anything seriously that wasn’t occult.

You were the raven witch, the herbal beast mistress,

the mysterious singularity at the bottom of the housewells

after the light bulbs had gone out and an ice age

had striated your eyes like big, black, plastic

long playing records, as if you were a widowed queen

sleepwalking through a famished eclipse on the mean side

of what must have been a beautiful dream once,

one lonely nightbird of that sad, sad song in your voice

that always seemed to be calling out to the dead

on some ancient night in a timeless abyss

when you were happier than you’ve ever been since.

Once, like a French executioner with the moon

for an axe, precise, neat, surgical, absolute

when you go under the knives of the clock

for a hydra-headed brain transplant, scalpels

in the oarlocks of the lifeboat you’re adrift in

like the remnants of a supernova shapeshifting through space,

once, for everything, the continuum of an overachieving event

that doesn’t know when to call it quits.

Ignorance tries to understand what wisdom ignores,

and why not play the fool against the sage

like a long shot you have to be crazy to take,

impugn your mirroring awareness for making a mistake

when your eyes turn around and you begin to realize

things caught in the doe-glare of your highbeams

frozen in time, indelible as a razor-blade in a loveletter.

Samsara is nirvana. Cosmology a psychic reading of the stars.

Noumena, phenomena. As with love, so

with the shadows of dreams past we cast

on the wildflowers we’ve forgotten how

to walk naked through without shame

as the willows turn away from our libidinous sorrows

and the shedding leaves, be they poems or the moonset

of your eyelids, begin to compile the laborious history,

the magnum opus, of the posthumous victories

of all those insurgent tomorrows we put to the sword,

once, like a bloodoath we took to heal

the broken vows scarred on our hearts,

the magic runes on the stones and ostrakons

of glacial ice sheets retreating north like the curtains

rising on the last act, the white noise of a record

that’s been repeating itself all night like the cosmic hiss

of the afterbirth of the Big Bang that began all this.

Late in the light eras of my mind when it’s as big as the white ox

of the full moon left to graze among the stars

as it will, on its own, I’ve regressively come to understand

love is looping like everything else through space

like a red tailed hawk carrying a candle

up the stairwell of a thermal of eternal recurrence

where it disappears helically into the third eye of the setting sun

and once is the burning stargate of an afterlife

born of your creative immolation on a pyre

of lightning and fireflies, insights and compassionate lies,

creation myths, legends of your shining

etched like Braille starmaps in the Burgess Shale

as fault by fault, we groped our way up the mountainside

like kings and queens of the hills we were buried in,

looking to get back to our graves like ghosts before dawn

so we could rise like the moon from the corals

on the bottom of our lunar seabeds again.

May the smoke of a sacred cedar fire smudge

the savage silence of the pain that makes oblations

to the night at a seance of constellations love can still read

like a hunter-gatherer, the signage of extinct zodiacs,

as if life were always a valley ahead of death,

like the light of a star, forever a journey behind

where you are when the darkness of love

brings you to enlightenment like a firefly

to the face of a sleeping child that’s just jumped out

of the dream of her favourite hiding place

as if there were still something in the eyes of love

that urgently wanted to be found like a surprise

no one’s ever had any notion of before or after

they stopped looking like a lamplighter in the woods at night

for the muse of the wild white-tailed doe, with her big, sad eyes,

warily breaking cover in the full glare of the moonlight

as if she were taking her lachrymose deathmask off

to drink from her own reflection like the Queen of Cups

from the river of life that pours out of her where

time meets the timeless like a root fire flowering

like a bouquet of blue roses gathered from the Pleiades

floating like a flood myth on the mindstream

coursing into a lunar sea of oceanic consciousness

as the shipwrecks disembark like sailors absent without leave

and the stowaways are lowering lifeboats to answer

the death laments in the s.o.s. of the mermaids on the rocks,

beguiled like seafaring dragons with the subliminal lyrics

of the unbroken circles and recurring bracelets of the rain.

Wounded by love in the depths of a fathomless nightsea,

everything after that’s a matchbook scratching for light

like a galactic starfish trying to make something beautiful

like a chandelier out of an ice storm or a waterproof starmap

out of the pain that opens like an umbrella at a wake

or love on the nightwatch of a flower at daybreak.

PATRICK WHITE