IS THERE MORE LOVE?

Is there more love in your silence

than your words,

more intimacy in your solitude

than your touch?

Lovers come and go,

clouds in the sky,

friends die,

and life seems

more illuminated by the darkness

than the light.

Transforming the miles and the years,

I send you this bouquet of wildflowers

that bloomed under the eyelid of an eclipse,

this starcluster of a shining in the immensity

well beyond lenses and eyes.

Even if you can hear your voice

that doesn’t mean you’re listening

and even if you’re listening

how few have actually seen their voice

or heard the seven stringed harp

of the rainbow

that plays the rain over these distant hills?

You are within me like the wind in the sky

as I am the unborn shadow

in the heart of the night

that knows you like a lonely road

that can’t find itself on the map

to anywhere

because you are your own destination.

Life is greater than death

and love is beyond both

and neither the pea nor the planet

knows what shell it’s under

on this midway between oblivions.

But I know.

Every night

the stars appear

in the same, old, tattered myths

to beg at the gates

of our presumptive awareness

for the lies that failed to consume us.

The light can only cast shadows,

but the darkness

illuminated by its own shining

long before eyes

casts its life upon all.

Everyone understands

the meteor falls through the sky;

but how few know or feel,

looking up from the valley,

how the sky falls through the meteor?

I may have jumped from paradise once,

but now it plunges

like a knife of fire

through me.

Nourished by its own dark energy

the heartmind grows

until time itself awakes

as the only pulse in the body of the world.

PATRICK WHITE