ALYSIAN BLUE

In my dismantled studio, my dismantled mind,

alone on a road I’ll make with my walking,

the ancient future I was meant to live,

and the green mountains are forever walking,

and all the gains of war are ruined by peace,

and the night comes around at last to love,

a white poppy in the skirts of the moon,

and the easels ask me softly,

feeling the change,

why I took the paintings away

that were their only way of seeing,

and I tell them I’ll be back soon with their eyes

and a new colour, Alysian blue, the star-drenched waters,

almost anthracite, where the panthers linger alone to drink

the moon-flavoured diamonds and fireflies

that nick the dark with the small knives in the flight of her poems

the random semaphore in the black mirror brighter than the white,

I think of her. I sit and I wonder. I look for her face

in the broken cup of my heart brimming with time and sky

as if it could blossom again, and brittle porcelains

resume the rose I laid on my own grave

in passing this way a moment ago.

All my constellations, doors I’ve left ajar,

and the windows longing for the shadows of thieves,

I sit and I wonder and I unravel easily into the distance

like the smoke from my companion candle, a stray thread

gone off to look somewhere for the eye of her needle in a haystack

and come back to stitch the ghost that flows from the wound that haunts me

with the negligent translucencies of her auroral negligees,

and the grey kisses of her coffee-shop mornings

where the fire-hoses screen the clocks for willing hydrants,

and the smiles are all leeches within inches of bleeding away;

I look for her as I would the rumour

of an ashphalt comet in a coma of ice

off the radiant coast of the sun

as she bathes in the light of her thawing.

And because and because and because of the relative conjunctions

that thump on the drum of the world, I try to turn away

from her cormorant body drying her wings in the wind,

but something, I don’t know what it is, a gesture of blood and fire,

or the lament of the lost earring that fell like a pulse in the wine,

a word that ripples, or the spectre of a bridge from long ago,

that has turned its outstretched hand toward me over time

to cradle the waters from below,

where we’ve always met this way

only a whisper and chance away from knowing

where we buried the years that carried us away in tears,

keeps me enthralled in my chair here and now inside out in the open.

And there are small flashbulbs of lightning over the hills in the distance

where I wait to meet the flowerstorms

I believe must be her eyes.

And even though the floor is breaking up

like an ice-pack of cardboard coffins

waiting to receive my things,

the books and brushes and paints,

the trinkets, relics, awards

and paper towers of poetry

I’m concealing from the grave-robbers

that itch to plunder my tomb;

there’s something in the room that’s true,

a longing that climbs itself like a stairwell or a poem,

a bell that’s calling its blood home from the far fields

like sand in an hourglass that once was a whisper

in the mouth of a sphinx that wrote her secret lifelines in water

that fell like tears from the eyes of alien stars

and now calls her wells and sacred serpents

up from the depths of her desert veils

to return to this mystery of bays that is now

a woman beyond the rain.

And there’s a hand growing its iris out of the dark,

a tree, a candleabra, the head of a black swan

moving through the fog like a question mark,

looking for answers to riddles

that could slay the player into life again

and draw her out of the ore of her heart like a silver vein

that walks her smile along the edge of a wandering knife

that tries to convince her there is no afterlife afterlife afterlife

that isn’t a waterclock of pain that can only tell the hour

by asking what mask it is, what face, what name?

Pearled under the twin eclipses of her eyes

emerging into cherries, into urgent fruit,

She breathes me in and I can feel myself

slipping into her throat like a nightbird,

like a sky that once spoke like a lover to her wells

and dropped his heart like a rock into her watershed

and threw moist summer stars like rice at her windows

to get her up, to jump in the bucket that’s winched to the spine of this line

and rise out of her single eye through the roots and clouds of seeing

as high as the invisible fire-thrones of the open clear space

that she unlaces among the shrines of my foundation-stones

with the orchids and vines of her shining.

And as her eyes, her breasts, her skin, her mouth,

the encircling bows of her lips curve space into apples and hips,

and we are together human again naked and blameless in love,

and the glyphs of the scars that cut out the tongues of the stone

so long ago they could say nothing to the fingertips

that traced the braille of our muted wounding,

the blood track that led back into a wilderness of arrows,

I want to say softly in the language that grows

in the dawn of her face like doves and morning glory

she is to me what the light is to the lamp that burns to be her;

what the moon is to the wave that sprawls her name in tides

across the shores of this island flesh that’s breaking bread with diamonds,

that if there’s a bird beyond wings, a light beyond the light,

a fire beyond the longest night of the phoenix dreaming in ashes

a word beyond this word in the water mouth of the fountain

she has made of me, I will find it and bind it

in ribbons of blood for her.

And when the strangers come to ask me who she is,

what I am, and who we are to one another,

trying to pick the moon from the sky like a scab

to see if she was wounded, if I was healed,

or we both lie together dead

under the same cold, corroding stone,

two needles in the same compass aligned to one another,

midnight at noon, the bird in the root, the fish in the tree,

and all the symmetrically-distorted, whole, kind, soft destroyers

who like to pin the issue down, top to bottom, zenith to nadir

in one vertical direction, drive two stakes into one heart to keep us down,

take our butterfly volumes off the shelf like marrow from the bone

to look for clues in the candles of the maggots

who will try to eat our shadows again

because we taste of one another

and the taste is sweet,

cool honey in the night of the hive,

waterlilies and dragonflies, poppies and wheat

and the ghost boats that eventually became of our scars,

and the words we carried in them to the other side,

and the long sorrows that dropped like robes from the shoulders of her stars

as we walked skinless through each other when we wanted

and put on flesh like bells and hills and beds in the houses that we haunted,

because the gardens that we wedded spoon by spoon to our eyes

were the wild fields and wines we ploughed

from the shadows of the moon

while everyone else was sleeping,

because we drank from the same chalice of igneous blood

and edged the same sword of our letters with feathers and love

and in the single drop of water that tipped the stargrass for years

we were oceans to each other frenzied with potions of life

and when we fell into laughter and light

I was the skin of her voice and she was the shape of mine;

I’ll say when they ask, and they will,

she’s the white flower in the mouth of the silence

that burns her dark abundance into me like a star on a hill,

and when news from the valley is ashes and glue,

startles me with poetry stained Alysian blue.

PATRICK WHITE