THE WOMEN I HAVE LOVED

The women I have loved,

the taste of old fires in my mouth,

wild orchids

that summoned me

with their fragrance in the night

to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony,

betrayal and loss,

intensities hotter than stars

that could thaw space like glass

in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.

Seizures of flesh, potions of pain,

delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks,

the sweet doom of paradise

in the effulgent bells of their hips

and their skin always

a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille

only the eyes in my fingertips could read.

Each was a way of breathing

in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon,

an atmosphere that clung to me

like the smell of an autumn night in their hair,

an era of seeing

that rooted like lightning

in the starmud of my poems.

Some were the windows of a palatial awareness

that astonished my heart like a peasant

and others, the rocks that crashed through it.

I tuned all my mirrors

to the high notes

of the most beautiful stars

in each of their constellations;

and the ones I loved best

were the windows

that could see both sides of God

and you could taste it in their eyes.

No doubt I was ruinous

in ways that it’s taken years

of deep solitude and suffering

to clarify, the ore

wasn’t always worth the metal within,

the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations,

the urge to express, release, affirm, excel,

the way I parted women I loved like seas

in my quest for the promised land

and the way they closed up on me like pharoah,

like a flower that doesn’t want to look at the night

and lowers its lonely eye,

like coffin lids

that were once the petals of a mystic rose.

Who knows who was buried

on those sexual slopes

that overlooked the motif of the river

wandering easily

through the vistas of the valley;

or how the story truly ended

that went on writing itself

as it does today

long after we were villages,

tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved,

and wholly usurped

like utensils by the afterlife

of the erupting mountain

that put an end

to the interminable funeral orations

that unrolled us like thunder in hell.

We slashed heaven

with the bloody razor of the moon

like the vicious legates of a papal threat

to spiritually salt the holy ground

we were rooted in

like lava, blood, and lightning.

I am still a confusion

of wounded dreams,

and when I look at the moon,

the bruises, the dead seas,

I am devastated again and again

by a ghostly sorrow

that returns to my heart

like a dove to a dark bell

that once knew the morning with another.

The truth is slurred by time,

and the confessions we made to the sky,

gusts of shame and contrition,

tiny burnt-out match-heads

that once flared into big fires,

slagging their depletion

like ore in the rain,

were abysmally true to the moment,

as we felt the ground beneath our feet

sinking like a continent.

We may have drowned like Atlantis

but how many decades since

have we lain here

like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks

offering the hilts of our masts

sheathed in coral

and the bunting of weeds

to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender?

All the beauty of that seeing,

the laughter in bed,

the aloof eternity in the form of the woman

at the end of the garden,

seen through the kitchen window forever

as if I had never made love to her,

pulling weeds from among the asters,

forever true, forever

praeternaturally true,

the mystery that transfixes

and devours me yet.

I have not laid my dream down

like the head of a child

on the pillow of a stony heart;

I have not looked upon the stars

that shone over us those long walks into each other

as if we were two banks of the same river

and we were still a wonder

and a temptation to each other,

two wings of the same gate

hopelessly opening.

I am still summoned against my will

to those dread nights we went out in each other

like down-turned torches,

and the bouquets of the daylilies,

those truces of fire and water

we burned beside,

turned into congested refugee camps

that plunged into civil war with their own reflections.

All along this road

where I carry my life

like the shoes in my hand

there is broken glass,

shattered goblets of the moon

we once drank from together,

shards of the suicidal chandeliers

we once danced under

like the tails of the unnamed comets

that followed us like paparazzi

as if we were the prophecy.

Vampires once cloaked like assassins

in the darkness of the light,

they still come for blood,

pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms,

and I am often aghast at my own compassion,

feeling the quick tendrils

of their tongues flickering in my heart

that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.

Perhaps there is more spontaneity

in the darkness

than there is in the light,

but I have not let my mouth

turn into an open wound;

or wielded the cold flame of my tongue

like a dagger of fire that could only be put out

in the blood of another.

Leechs and lilies

are born in the same pond

and I have not denounced one

at the expense of the other,

but have stood before both in silent awe,

trying to overhear any whisper

of what these things might mean

that they should still sweeten and startle

my deepening ignorance

like the shadows and stars

that leap out of their own darkness and light

to ambush and detain us with love and life

all along these lonely, vivid roads

that walk us like the wind

that moves me now to remember

the generosity of loss that is love,

and the flaring of the dust that we once were,

this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust

that will forever be

like the wind, like love,

like fire and life, like the nights

that bent down over me while I slept

and kissed me good-bye,

the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.

PATRICK WHITE