Thursday, June 27, 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  

SURREALISTIC HARMONIES OF LOVE

SURREALISTIC HARMONIES OF LOVE

Surrealistic harmonies of love fill the dead air
of the sugar-craving heart detoxing like the thorns
of a rose from the bloodbank of beauty that was
withdrawn from it like a fix in the spiral arm
of a sea star addicted to the radiance of the Milky Way
like a pulse of fire bleeding out albino caulking
from a poppy that died honourably by opening its veins.

What dreams may come, of unimaginable tenderness
and the affection of many dusks that glowed
like votive candles in the niche of shadows
that once hallowed the mere vision of a lover’s face
like the calyx of a waterlily your eyes drank from
like the holy grail the moon’s been looking for all along.

Crude truces are not a substitute sweetener
for the sophisticated tastes of a mystic peace
between you and the universe that’s never
been declared a defeat or a victory but nevertheless
leaves nothing unsaid between you and another
and though you could still hear the echoes of the snakes
hunting stars in your housewells like the occult wavelengths
in the visionary telescopes that put their eyes out
like broken mirrors to see prophetically better in the dark,
how dangerously courageous joy can be
when we turn it on each other like garden hoses
even as this house of life we’re leased to
burns down around us for want of water
to keep the most festive mirages of night
from becoming unsubstantiated liars in their sleep.

I can see the wake of wildflowers in the starfields
I once walked through resurgently in the spring
through a gate large-leaved soft basswood trees
towered over like a sacred grove of paintbrushes
the crows came home like the backlit ashes of the day
to roost in like a choir of minor nightmares at a black mass
when love grew fearful as a sign of deep devotion
there was a funeral bell on the dark side of the mirror
the blazing of so much light blinds it to and sets about
unravelling the wicks of its shadows and flames
like flying carpets of mystic happiness the moon wove
in the spare time of its crone phase, as Sinbad the Sailor
candles like a parachute in the bloodlines of hapless Icarus.

Eros and death. Thanatos and life in the same breath.
Copulative food for thought when the hourglass alarm clock
on the back of the black widow is timed to wake up
like a food chain in the middle of a climax
that ensures the continuance of life by ravishing
Daddy like the living host of a cornucopious pantry.

In time, by repetition, you might come to add
a diminutive to the most significant events of love
that inspired you like a flute intoxicated by snake music
before you switched from pica to piccolo
and your serpent fire began to sound more like an asp
buried in the sand, than the swaying wavelengths
of cobras in exstasis. Diminish the black magic
of your Medusan transfixions as just another one
of the facts of life that break like the filaments
of the spiderwebs that once lit up like dreamcatchers
in the dawn of elementally mysterious beatitudes of light.

If not the facts, then, at least, the acts of life
erected like obelisks of scar tissue to commemorate
the intimate war wounds of a crusading heart
in the bird-stained patinas of a public gravestone
that says we died significantly, though over the course
of time, the spell of the dream grammar wears off
and the logic of metaphor is like a tree ring
of fossilized rain buried in the dead heartwood
of the syntax we recollect our lives in the tranquillity
of dead languages that ebb and neap like a sea of shadows
on the moon, so, ghosts of who we once were
to one another, despite these seances we hold
with ourselves that can fairly say, yes, we died,
we gave it all up, you can retrospectively tell
by the depths of the solitude in our eyes
no one’s ever fully satisfied they know for sure for what.

Among the dragons of life, if the fires of love
don’t end in ashes, you have reason to doubt
the sincerity of the withered star buried in the urns
of the rosehips that have shed their petals like eyelids,
their scales like feathers in the balance
of a trial constellation worthy of all the trouble
you went through to keep on shining for lightyears
after there was nothing left to burn
but your unidentifiable fingertips like butterflies
in the sulphuric atmospheres between Venus and Vulcan
when your tears fall like acid rain on the firepits
of the scorched flowers that immolated themselves
like an Arab spring in the black market gardens
of the secrets you keep to yourself like swords
you once fell upon like wild irises pressed between
the covers of a book that’s never going to open
its mouth again like a nightbird between dawn and dusk
without celebrating the rootfires of the pain in a lovesong
even the floodwaters of life aren’t deep enough to put out.


PATRICK WHITE