AND THE DAY SETTLES

for Alysia

And the day settles like a collapsing poppy, a parachute of blood,

and the turmoil and commotion of all the busy things

that have accomplished me for all these long accountable hours

dies down, settles its tongue on the ground like a leaf

whose eloquence couldn’t speak for the raving wind

that tore the world up like a first draft

and looped and noosed the powerlines

as if they were the hasty autograph of a final edition.

At my desk now in my small new writing room

where the windows open like a book

and I’m a human in a cube of light

under the constellations gambling with fate

by loading the negative space of the dice,

my thoughts turn like birds toward you

and there is great solace in the moment

that pours the starwater from your eyes

into the wounded fire that longs for you like a sky.

And all that is human about you, is human about me,

and all that is mystic, moon, and thief, all

that is woman in the valley of the wave,

and woman in the darkness that is older than men,

and your silence, and you like a black orchid

that no one sees growing in the shadow of your beauty,

and your third mode of knowing

that is neither thought nor feeling

but the way a lake knows the taste of the moon on sight,

all that and more than all the midnight suns can illumine,

your talent, your doubt, your pain, and all the shy joys

that you’ve been condemned to get away with,

and the breath that expires like an atmosphere

and the breath that infuses the lock like a key

and the breath that lights the inferno of the divine

and the one that snuffs it out

and devotes itself like a storm to a lightning rod,

are ingathered into me now like a tide in a bay on the moon

as if I were the emptiness of the envelope

and you were all the risks of the loveletter that is the sea.

As I think of you, the night grows a face, and it’s yours,

and your body and skin, moonlight

on the bare limbs of the young basswood trees,

and your eyes, the deepest seeing in the boundless darkness of me,

and your heart, the courage of a rose in winter,

and the vapour on the window of the enlightened spirit I write in,

your spirit thawing the glass to free the stars

and ease the tears of the mirrors that weep alone.

And this is the way you come to me,

seeping out of the rocks like a sword,

investing the silence with a meaning just out of reach

of the things you’ve left unsaid, and all the worlds

within worlds that are simultaneously us and not us,

a whisper of dust, when you walk me home alone like a road.

And the breath that gives the serpent wings

and incites the lamp of the dragon’s flame,

and the breath that blows glass lungs into an hourglass

in the womb of a furnace, and the breath

that abandoned the wick like the wind to its question,

more intimately mingled with my own, inside me and out,

than the roots of last night’s dream

when your hair silked my fingertips with knowing

and your lips were a language without laws.

How vividly I want these words to bleed for you

until they’re rooted in the soil of your solitude

like books and flowers and bone

that only you can open, and only when you’re alone

and the rain is full of distance and the moon is a cold stone

hurled at the wing of a passing bird,

and you’re accused by the inmates of affliction

of an illicit affair with freedom,

and there are evangelists like junkmail

on the thresholds of your genius

who threaten to love you if you recant,

and you wonder what love is and if it’s ever known you.

I want these words to exceed themselves

beyond anything they can be,

a cherry-tree carved in jade,

shedding real blossoms,

or a chandelier of fireflies hung up at a dance

high above the club-footed constellations

that follow their own painted feet across the floor.

And the breath that is a blue tincture of the night

that unlaces the day like the fragrance of a name,

and the breath that buries its dead on the moon,

and the breath that is a fire on shore to a ship at sea

pleading like a bell for landfall. Soon. Soon.

I want these words to convey more than the river can carry,

so they sink deeply to the bottom, the sediment of stars,

the veils of a dream settling over the shipwrecks

who were killed by the swordplay of their compasses;

I want these words to ink the indelibility of a spiritual tatoo

that looks like the nightsky when the scars have fallen away

and it’s done. I want these words to express what I meant

before they were said because they mean more unborn

than they do in the noon ray, eclipsed by our understanding.

And your breath that is my ocean and my atmosphere,

and the breath that is shocked like the wind

by the random beauty of asters and orchards.

And the breath that draws itself up like a bucket

from the well of its watershed depths

to pour the serpent out

like the ambivalent residue of a black wine.

And the breath of this poem and the next taken

to squander itself like oxygen in your blood,

light in your eyes. Love, where the waters of life flow

into a vastness that only the sea

and the unsayable passions of the night you are would dare.

PATRICK WHITE