TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

TOO MUCH TO SAY GOOD-BYE TO THOUGH I HAD

Too much to say good-bye to though I had,

I sat down by a fork in the road and wept

into both my hands like a flashflood

in the dry creekbeds of my lifelines,

lightning over the nerve endings of the shedding trees

my heart shrieking like a red-tailed falcon

with an arrow in its wing, my life

uprooted like mandrake and ginseng

as I remember every woman after that

I ever said yes to was a truce with the pain.

X-rated, vampiric muse with the style

of a chandelier at the death of a candle,

witch of the retrograde sixties, you never age.

The night retains its mystery, though the day

grows old like too many stiff springs

in the matresses of the faith healers in a turf war.

Hellebore, bella donna and deadly nightshade

I’ve kissed Medusa on her eyelids in her sleep

and tasted what she dreamed of before

she became the queen mamba of black prophecy.

Spider on a widow walk, you took the Tarot

too seriously and stopped weaving mandalas

of undulant silk like the aurora borealis

drifting like the fins of Oriental goldfish on the wind.

O it was beautiful to watch you work your magic once.

A transformative experience I still like

to look back upon like a waterlily in a cauldron

of frog soup fit for a prince of darkness

carnal as the starmud of a tenant farmer

on a summer night in the sweat lodge of his pores.

If you empower the dark roots of the mystery

the stars will come as naturally as wildflowers

to the nightsky, or the potpourri of black roses

preparing a deathbed for a lover to lie down upon

with you in their arms like a new moon

things get done under like a spooky affair

with silence it’s a taboo with its tongue cut out

to talk about like shoes gossiping about a firewalk

on the other side of the door where you took them off.

You wouldn’t recognize me now among

the vagrant souls exorcised from this furnace

of life on the first cold night at the end of October

waving farewell on the road of ghosts where

it turns down into the birchgroves and out of sight

having cleared the creosote and starlings

out of the chimney pipes with a voice as thick as fire.

Will I live again? Is it necessary? Did I do it wrong

or was there never a right way to proceed?

Or should I ask for reparations for the tears I shed

like a sundial that foreshadowed its own extinction

like a nightbird on the same wavelength

as a snakey dragon saint in a black boa

of gathering storm clouds summoning

the lightning and then the rain to cool

the burnt heartwood of the pine that once stood

like a man on a hill that looks back over its shoulder

into a valley it just passed through guided

by a surrealistic starmap of dragons with the charms

of fireflies, as he turns and goes down into the one

you apprenticed him to walk, whistling

inconceivably in the dark without you

as he casts the deathmask of his shadow up ahead

as the only path where love was meant

to surpass itself like a moment from the past

that overtakes tomorrow like a light

it can’t run from followed by a night it can’t run to.

PATRICK WHITE