Sunday, October 13, 2013

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

IN MOONLIGHT AND RUBBER BOOTS I LOVED YOU

In moonlight and rubber boots I loved you.
Ladies of the Lake who came like waterlilies
into my life and cast your dark sexual mysticism
over the latest initiate to pass through your veils
like the silhouettes of shepherd moons in transit,
that never edited the shadows out of your loveletters
or deprived the dragons of serpent fire
the new moons that brought on the rain
like the compassionate eclipses of the enlightened
when they show you the way home in the dark
by blowing the candle out. Everyone’s got eyes
but you were the first, as your mindstreams
fell on hard rock, to teach me to throw away
the crutches of light I thought my seeing depended upon
like the flame in a lantern, inside and out,
and flow along with my own visions of life
as if I shone like water on the moon
at the oceanic floodgates of an overwhelming emotion.

In despair, terror, doubt, sorrow, loss and aspiration,
I loved you, I loved the dangers in your raptures
when your intensities threatened to cremate your desires
like a field fire that’s being carried away
by an updraft of itself like a red-tailed hawk
riding its own thermals like aerial stairwells to the top.

Approximation was always more pragmatically true
than perfection and I wanted to live with you
as an indefensible human reasonably at peace with the world
as long as the truce holds. How many times
was I a witness to your desecration of the holiness
of the things you cherished most in life
as if we were on an heretical pilgrimage together
to some unknown shrine of starmud
that would light up heaven in the same fire
you cast hell down into unconfessed.

I loved you even then like the sea loves its weather
whatever its mood, or the sky its clouds and birds,
or an eye that recognizes a star it knows the name of
and can easily pick out from the rest of the crowd in disguise.

Water sylphs, witches, queen of the fireflies,
black apostate madonnas that cried real blood
like roses in the darkness surrounded by thorns,
cowgirl muses and vamps with the bodies of bloodbanks,
Pythian oracles high on the prophetic vapours
of active volcanoes, I have loved each of you
like flesh bound copies of the original mystery of life
I saw published in your eyes the first time
we ever met. Not love at first sight, but the authority
of an intuition something were astronomically bound
to occur between us like a sailor and a sea on the moon.

Each of you, a crystal skull, a chandelier, an open window
into the palatial nature of God drawing up blueprints
for the hovels and estates of water and light.
I could taste more of life in a single tear
you polished like the lens of a third eye
with a nightsky for a cornea, than I could
white-water rafting through the rapids of my mindstream
in the spring run off of my ancestral glaciation
thawing like a mirror to the notion of a lot more warmth
in my life since you plunged like a comet
into the midnight sun with no fear of flaming out like Icarus.

You were the waterbirds of my life, you were
the golden fish that spontaneously jumped into my lifeboat
when the moon had no hooks in the water
and you taught me how to swim out of my depths
by not underestimating myself like a shore-hugger
that refused to go along with the stream
and suffocated under his own weight
like a barnacle the rock it’s anchored to
or a pod of dolphins in a tidal mud puddle.

I’m not even going to try to say thank-you
because gratitude could only sound shabby at best
compared to what I owe you for the blessing
of an insurmountable debt that showed me
the mystic largesse in even the pettiest acts of love

each in its hour and place, were a star
flowering on the river among the waterlilies,
as if what were most enduring and indelible about love
were a light kiss of fire on the face of the waters of life
that leaves no trace of its shining, no starmap
for the albino crows of noon to navigate
their way back to black, nor adds one shadow more
to the darkness of the insight I return my eyes to
from time to time, alone, late at night, in tribute
to the watersheds they were drawn from, the women,
the friends, familiars, companions, the spirits of the well,
the muses, the moondials of the eras of my love I’ve shed
like rose petals and thorns along my path through life,

with no less passion in the lees of the wine that red shifts
tears into blood, than regrets in drinking from mirages
when the wild grapes were blue, under each of their skies
when it was as hard to tell then as it is now, where the deserts
left off and the stars began to add their lustre
like a universe to every mystic detail of a grain of sand
that enlightened the windows with the clarity of what’s
translucently apparent there before them, like the eyes

the stars follow, as I still do theirs, this soft, silver light
of a distant island galaxy that shines deeper into the dark
than the crow flies, or the fledgling arrows of the heart
can hit their mark like the scars of spring in the tree rings
of the lost art of rising to the moment like a candelabra of coral
on the shipwrecked seafloor of an unannounced moonrise.


PATRICK WHITE

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