I TAKE THE LILY

I take the lily from your hair

in a garden on the moon

as if it were a comet in a solar wind

and lay it down gently beside you,

the ghost of a swan.

I pull the dream up over us

in this sea of shadows like another sky

than the one you sleep under now

and make love to you

until we disappear in the fire

and it is your blood

that flows through my heart.

You wear the crescents of the moon

on your arm,

the scars of a torrential spring,

contempt for your own anguish,

the cruel language

of a brutal clarity

that roots its black lightning in your veins

and lowers your eyelids

like unpredicted eclipses

and empty lifeboats

abandoned by a sinking ship

just to be able to play with the pain

like a snakehandler,

a key on a kite in a storm

without being struck again

like the darkest note of a tuning fork,

or the fragile witching rod

of your weathervane butterfly

looking for a diamond of illumination

in a heart of smouldering coal.

Even the dragon whose fangs

are the gate to the great secret

that seeks us all the days of our lives

as we drink from our own reflections

in this valley of shadows,

where we sip real water

from the mirage of our faces

like tears,

has come to love you.

Your spirit is as stubborn

as the only well for lifetimes around

in a desert at night,

walking like fire on the water,

burning with stars in your depths.

In this dream, here, on the moon

where you have asked me to meet you

in this exemption from the world

we have flowered with black roses

that shed their passions like poetry

and the stars are never wounded,

and no wind voices the silence

and the moon is an ancient potter

among all these mountains and craters,

and time is merely the gesture

of a falling feather,

I bend tenderly

to lavish all the lives

I have ever lived

upon you

with a single kiss,

as if a galaxy

had touched you like the first snowflake,

and brushing the hair away from your ear,

whisper things to you

not even the darkness

urgent with light

knew it had to say,

things so intimately naked and true

the stars that shine above us now

tomorrow will borrow their fire

like nightwatchmen

from the clear flame

that voices these lanterns of blood

I lift up like my heart before me

in this abyss of longing and darkness

to see you.

PATRICK WHITE