I’VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN
YOU WERE YOUNG
I’ve grown old remembering you when
you were young.
How much wiser we were then though we
didn’t know it
than I am now, or you would have been,
had you lived.
Ignorant of the outcome of desire,
sometimes it’s better
to drown, than learn to keep your head
above water, or swim.
I made a liferaft of my bones to get to
the other side
of my heart. Like the moon, one half
bright, the other, dark.
I’ve knocked on so many doors the
past left ajar,
but for a long time you never answered.
Looked into so many eyes so far from
home,
hoping to catch a glimpse of your
shadow
moving past the window like a waterbird
backlit by the moon,
and though some of them had your mouth,
some, your hair,
some your earlobes hung with silver
chandeliers of rain
falling from your wings like a broken
rosary of waterdroplets,
none of them had your soul, none were
as lost
and inimitable as you unanswerably
were.
Street rose, how is it my tears are
still pierced by your thorns
after all these years? Out of the
midnight blue,
without warning, idling among the river
reeds,
or rooted in the wavelengths of the
mindstream, some star
spears me through the heart like a fish
on the barb of the moon
and I have to sit down among the rocks
at the water’s edge
with a vision of beauty and love and
the passage of time
too unbearably immense for flesh and
blood to carry
like so many other empty buckets and
sad bells back
from the abandoned wishing wells where
the ghosts gather
to recall what it was like to want
something once.
Long for someone so badly you would
gladly
have endured a thousand spiritual
deaths and metaphoric rebirths
as I have done, for one life of being
wounded and healed,
exalted and terrified by the mystery of
what or who
you truly loved like the eclipse of a
moonrise in your blood
more indelibly than death itself
appears in the black mirror
when you look deeply into it like a
starmap of music
as your last futile hope of bringing
someone back
and your eyes freeze like star
sapphires deep underground
with what they see like fireflies and
lightning in the sockets
of prophetic skulls whose eyes are the
jewels of the dead.
Perpetual muse, you, unnamed, who
distinguish my words still
with the intimacy of your absence,
daughter of the abyss
I was left with when you lost your
nerve and collapsed
like a suspension bridge over the
moonlit thread
of your spine below when the safety web
broke like the illusion
of a dreamcatcher, like the beads of
the constellation
the sun belonged to when we first
encountered each other
like alien planets driven out like
black sheep of the solar system
and looked back at its dwindling light
from a long way off
and knew of a certainty, you were, as
was I,
alone in this remote space with each
other,
estranged companions for life. Was it
not so,
and has it not always been in its own
unique way as it is now?
Between your silence and my voice have
we not evolved
a dream grammar by which the living can
speak to the dead?
Do I not hear you in the broken-hearted
train whistle
mourning into the distance with no help
for its sorrow
and in the long mantra of the wind in
the aspens
and the gaping mouths of the
waterlilies awed
by the symmetrical similarity of their
astonished silence
to that of the stars looking ahead in
wonder
at what they’ve been flowering into
for lightyears.
Long after your ashes were scattered
with beautiful sentiments
mingled like rose water in every one’s
tears
to bless the flightpath of a fire
bird’s return to the elements
from a precipitous cliff out over the
sea at night
as if we weren’t saying farewell to a
woman who had lived
like one of us, but were attending the
sky burial of a comet
who had made a Tunguskan impact on
everyone she encountered,
was it not me, when all the other
listeners
thought they’d heard the whole of the
message you had to say
and left you alone in the dark in an
empty hall
that first perplexing night of being
dead among the stars,
who went on listening to your omens as
if there
could never be an end of the flames and
feathers of meaning
that unfolded in the wake of your
passage across
the desolate seas and annulled
atmospheres of my lunar heart?
What pain, what joy, grief, loss,
enlightenment,
life in death and death in life have I
not endured,
what loneliness not embraced as if it
were
more deeply exiled from everything it
had ever known
than I was when I blew out the last
candle of votive fire
like a broken dragon missing one its
own in its reclusive solitude?
Even the ashen sages weep like urns of
wisdom
for the extinction of the light that
taught them
to see in the dark with a compassionate
heart
that insight walks the same path
delusion does
and attachment, too, is another paling
of moonlight
on an open gate that all humans must
pass through
to pay homage to the fountains and
watersheds
love brings to flower in their gardens
and cemeteries alike.
Many times I’ve sensed your
tenderness in the sensitivities
of the carillons of wild columbine that
rang
discretely in the silence like rain
chimes in the spring
and I came to understand it was you,
whenever
I wandered along the river like a
troubled sleepwalker
through the mystic cults of the woods
at night
into a clearing like the third eye of
the torrent
that roared all around me like a
wounded black hole,
it was you in the sanctuary of your
concealment who revealed
that thoughts and emotions like the
unsanctified oceans
of tormented stars I wanted to drown
in, weren’t
static states of mind where space turns
brittle
as the looking glass you get locked
into,
but dynamic events of the heart that
shatter
our crystal skulls into unknown
configurations of light
rising like new constellations out of
the regenerative chaos
that watered the old gardens of our
starmaps
with the splinters of broken
chandeliers that cut our eyes
like tears in an early spring thaw. It
was you
as surely as it was the clear light of
the void within me
who whispered to me that night I was on
the verge
of liberating the past from the future
of a bad precedent
that we don’t live separately from
the dead,
that each of us is the embodiment of
the longing
of unnumbered myriads who released
their hopes
and dreams and prayers like smoke and
birds
and cedar boughs of incense on the wind
knowing they probably wouldn’t be
there
to hear the answer if one ever did come
back again.
Where else but now is the future made
manifest
by the summons of the past in a voice
we recognize as everyone’s including
yours and mine?
Just as I see your eyes in this insight
like the occult bliss
of the dawn at midnight writing
immanental love lyrics
in the journals of nocturnal
wildflowers confiding in the moon.
PATRICK WHITE
