PANNING THE FLOW

for Alysia

The deficits of my childhood

are fatter dragons

for having eaten me slowly over the years.

What’s the point of drinking the whole river

to slake your thirst for fame

when one goblet of the moon is enough?

The worst misunderstanding

is to be understood.

Death and sex and poetry

are three eyes of the same delusion.

I am the straw dog, the disposable mask

of a sacred ritual

conceived in a meaningless abyss,

but even so

I want to burnish my blood like gold

in the dark flames

of the insurgencies

I can incite in your eyes.

Now is the only hour

of the spirit

in this house of skin.

Time enough forever

and we shall be other things,

and blood will open its eyes eventually

like a long eclipse

and the partitions of heaven and hell

fall from the parapets

and rise from their pits,

the scales of the snake

will grow into feathers.

What a small room

in this hovel of a body

the wind lives in

compared to the mansions of light,

but what are we if not

the breathing in and out of stars?

Only a fool

is certain of where he’s going;

the unwise hazard a guess;

and there are no maps to lucidity

or an atlas of waves

to pilot the heartmind

through the straits of the unknowing.

Alone with the alone,

only a lonely, lost man

could teach the silence to dance.

The darkness intensifies

in the endless night

of the deepest blindness;

and in the pulse of the moment

that precedes the light,

the world enthrones itself

in the nucleus

of every one of your cells,

crowned by its own shining,

and you are born

to know your deepest intimacy

is life.

It is the same for everyone.

The emptiness of the vase

arranges flowers, stars, mountains,

the mystery

in the valleys of these words

that wander off in all directions

like a billion echoes of light,

or whisper more fluently like a distant stream

over the shales of your blood like night.

One taste of your body

would probably make me an addict

of the black wine in the goblet for life,

and the dragons

of my most infernal desire

would be yoked to the plough of the moon.

And I would confer dark blessings

on the luminous blade

of the life-giving wound

that turned and seeded the sky

into the flesh and bread and starfields

I would break like a harvest with you.

I see you in everything

the way a lighthouse

sees the ocean

and a drowned sailor

in every drop of rain.

When I write to you

something rare and precious

pours out of me like water on Mars,

and the worst of my masks

are put aside like over-used eclipses

and the sky within me grows wild and free

until it is one eyelid over everything

and I am as finite and unbounded

as any sphere

that ever pearled itself into a planet with life.

I shine out in all directions

like the seeds of the earth

as they open their eyes

like flowers in the cradles of the stars,

and the path I leave behind me

is the water’s business

as the future belongs to the wind.

Everything is one likeness, one language,

one similitude of wonder

that astonishes the heart with silence

and pre-emptively impoverishes the voice that would say it

as it is.

There are no stars or words or tears for it,

but everyone comes to believe in the god

that believes in them.

And I have tasted the lips of the goddess

in the shrine of the apple,

and bedded the queen of the darkness like a sea,

and even now the smoke is sweet

that came of those orchids of fire,

but when I write to you

I am transfixed

by the great tenderness

in the fingertips of the mystic surgeon

who is removing my heart like a bulb

to let it root like a river

in these echoless valleys of you.

How many times have I told myself

the only distance between us

is the width of one moon

between the first crescent

and the lunacy of the full?

How many nights have I pondered your being

like an unknown jewel from another world

until you bloomed in the mindlight,

the embodiment of all my interpretations, visions,

the dark energy that enhances the insight

into the expanding universe

that ripples through space

with every pebble of thought

that falls into me like a wishing well?

I have imagined the soft effulgence

of the afternoon light

on the hair of your arm

and awoken beside you

more mornings than I have lived,

darkly delighted

by the renewable feast

of my insatiable hunger

as I fall once more toward paradise.

How many lifetimes have I peered out into the night

and let the windows eat my eyes

so that I could paint your portrait

in the auroral flesh-tones of the wind

and feel you pass over me like a caress;

or tried to decipher the Babylon

of messengers in my head

who bring me news of you

like birds from the abyss,

prophets, sages, heralds, sybils, oracles and wizards,

each the anointed voice of a sacred grove,

the writing on the wall,

a burning bush,

just to feel the warmth

of your breath in my ear

as I am returned to the silence

of my own listening

like wine to the glass of the drunk

who’s just passed out in your doorway?

And sometimes when all the mindmirrors

leave like pilgrims

to go out and seek themselves

by looking into your face,

enquiring at the college

of all my bells and gravestones,

I fear myself like a weakness

when I consult the sober deans

of this semester of reality

about whether I’d be any good for you.

Beyond the midway of the dream

and the brilliance of the stars and the flowers;

would the black soil

of my autumnal heart

turned by the plough of the moon,

rise like bread

from a harvest of stars

and fill the siloes of the abyss

with enough to sustain you;

could I nourish you deeply from within

like light?

Adrift in the darkness and the fog

that sometimes unscrolls over the waters

that yesterday walked upon

would I appear to you

as an iceberg or a lifeboat?

If only so much didn’t depend upon

who asks the question,

I could know the answers to everything,

but it is the ferocity, tenderness, passion

and consoling darkness of your humanity

that embraces and intrigues me in this solitude.

Sometimes I’m merely

a thread of poppy blood

on the dragon fang of the moon

when I consider the danger and the mystery,

the allure and the beauty

of these gestures of you

that beckon me back like a weeping siren

to the rock of the world

I took for my gravestone

so many years ago

after so much pain

when I crawled like a snowman

into the furnace

and assumed this afterlife

of flowing diamond

among the roots of flowers I will never see.

Beyond the mystic insight

that pours its clear wine into the eye

like a mirror

there are modes of folly and wisdom

that are no more separable

than a lamp from its light,

the seeing from the seer,

me from you,

where enlightenment and ignorance

are the same chance

and even these words

I write to you now

track dirt on the waters they walk upon.

And perhaps there’s a better way

of saying it,

and perhaps all we can ever say

is a bird

that hops from branch to branch

of a tree that aspires to the stars,

or maybe my voice

is just another sceptre of lunacy

in the hands of a madman

who doesn’t know how to abdicate,

but I sit like a clown

on this throne of shadows

in a huge, lonely hall

where all the ambassadors are ghosts and echoes,

unamused by myself

like a message in a bottle

I keep entrusting to the tides of a desert

like the wind,

profoundly isolated

by my own urgency

to be mistaken by you for a sail or a tent.

You are my only island,

the lone window of my deepest secret

waiting like the empty glass

that was blown from the tears

I shed in hell

for the delirium of your stars

to overtake me like rain.

How often love has come to me

without reprieve

like mercy to an electric chair,

or tried to rewrite

the constitution of my roots

to labour for someone else’s flower,

or the dragon toiled under the yoke of the butterfly

to stump and burn itself

like a jungle turned into a field?

The ear of a bell deadened

by its own tongueless tolling,

I lived on improbabilities,

the merest of chances

the ricochet might someday

hit the target,

until one day the harp in my throat

I’d forgotten how to play

broke like a wishbone

and the crazed arrow I’d loved like a bow

danced off to the blood of another song.

But I’ve never been able

to linger in the doorway of anything for long

and even the sorrows

get sick of their wardrobes of pain

and walk off the stage naked.

And you feel differently to me,

as if for once in my life

I were walking under a sky

that fit me like skin

and all the radiance that shines within

is not a confusion of light and shadow and blood,

not mud on the moon,

but a clarity beyond

the usual apprehension of the fence

before an open gate,

what breath to keep in

what breath to let out, who

shall wear the chains,

and who, the shadows.

But you are water

to the fish that is my life,

and sky to the bird of my spirit,

and the darkness and the star

that answered

the oldest longing

of the holiest stone in my heart

with the eyes and the light and the love to see you.

PATRICK WHITE