YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

YOU WOULD HAVE BEEN PROUD OF THE WAY

You would have been proud of the way

I honoured your ghost as the focus

of my loneliness after you left. I refused

to malign your solitude or mine

by attempting to come back to life.

Discretely mad as it must have seemed

at the time to anyone outside the allegory,

still, I mimed the protocols of the dead

as if I were mouthing the words I had

once said to you one night in the afterglow

of wreaking fervent love upon one another

released from my vows by your absence

as the shadows of sacred syllables disappeared

into the silence like a coven of crows

cacophonously breaking the spell of a cold sunset,

helter-skelter, with the asymmetry

of standing there alone without you.

The stars I taught you have returned and gone

many times since then. The maple groves

have shed their foliage like pole dancers

their circumpolar clothes of serpent fire

coiled seven times like the ages of man

around the earth’s axis, a dragon slayer

and healer in one oracular insight

into the hopeless hunger for someone, anyone

to lie naked in the dark beside them

like the tiara on an X-rated starmap of beauty queens.

Other lovers have estranged me from myself

in the name of the same oceanic notions

I can’t help seeing in the unfolding of the black rose

that burns me like a love poem I wrote in blood,

a nocturne of thorns, my rapturous devotions

to a mystical eclipse of a new moon rising

like Orpheus from the dead, my prophetic skull

refleshed with the starmud of the face I had

before I was born to wear this assortment of deathmasks

and return the swords I drew from the wounded rock

to the waters of life like the hands of a cosmic clock

that couldn’t do otherwise than throw them away

like crutches at the top of the temple stairs

I mounted on my knees in the bower of a feather bed.

The down of a dead swan in the eyrie of Altair in Aquila.

Blood on the talon of the moon and all those sad elixirs

that used to make my taste buds bloom as if

my tears had been spiked irrecoverably

by the picture-music of a black rose lingering

like the shadow of a hungry ghost about

to take possession of me again, a creative medium

of love pierced through the heart by the pain

like a searing dream in a black mirror

I’ve been trying for lightyears to wake up from.

PATRICK WHITE