AND ISN’T IT STRANGE AND WONDERFUL

for Trish

And isn’t it strange and wonderful

when I look up close, intimately at your image

shapeshifting through my mind,

hovering over the nightocean of my blood,

or turn it like a jewel in the morning light

to taste the wine you might be,

or the stars of this sky that overtakes me

with thousands of impossibly probable fates

that you should make my eyes flow like diamonds?

And I don’t really know what I’m doing here

standing at your skull-gates on the moon

wondering if anything like life or love will open

and what to do with all these thresholds

I’ve tracked up to your door like every step

of this long road I’ve taken like a man on a short chain,

but there are crucial intensities that have averaged me out like pain

and a light by which I know the light

that has led me here like a battered chalice

to see the waterlily emerge from her palace of starmud

like the moon in all her faces and phases at once.

And I think, if the light goes out in all directions radiantly,

the shadows must as well,

and I may be a bell,

but I don’t always know what I’m ringing for,

a fire-alarm, a church, a wedding charm,

a birth, a funeral, or the foundling

left gently in the night on the stairs.

And there are times when I swing

like a bucket of water in a burning doorway

and put myself out like a torch

as a last act of mercy to the light

to ease the pain of what I’m looking at

though it might not exist

for several lifetimes yet.

I doubt. I wonder. I hope and aspire

to an earthly excellence of grace and fire

that has made my life seem at times

one long, demonic exorcism of myself

so that less than little of nothing

I might be blessed

by one moment of affirming insight

that would get the world off my chest

and all these perjured files of a cold case

I shake against myself in court

like leaves against the evil tree that grew them.

I can’t recall the times I’ve exceeded myself

into some premature afterlife

I can’t wake up from the dream of being me

because I am too profoundly naive not to believe

that life is love and love is rare and noble and seeing

and has a heart that wills without force

the lightning and the fireflies

by which it finds its way along

this mystic bloodroad in glimpses

that will later grow into stars

and mythic constellations

that shine from the inside out

as you already do in me.

A child gives birth to a mother.

An old man kills death

and the trees are green again,

the clouds not at variance with the sky.

You are already a season deeper within me

than the reason why of anything

and I can feel you like a new sea on the moon

along all the astonished coasts of my body,

and there are lighthouses everywhere

humbled by your candles

that refuse to listen to their own warnings

because all my wrecks are rising

from their own ribs like birds

and you are the summer

that wines their voices like words.

You are the first whisper of a feather in aeons

to appall this abysmal impersonality

that won’t stuff me back into my sentimental heart

like fate back into a fortune-cookie

with the mystic intimacy of an enlightened thief

that steals my face with her eyes

and leaves a fingerprint

on the delirious mirror like the moon

for me to follow like a starmap through her labyrinth,

or a way of divining water, the grape through the vine.

I have never wanted what is not mine,

though the truth of that’s a little shabby,

and there are some women whose thresholds

are longer than the roads that lead up to them,

and some roads, looking back from the moon,

shorther than the hair on your shoulder,

but I am a way of my own

that no one else can follow,

and it’s as moot to me

as one river flowing into another

who leads who where.

You didn’t show up yesterday

and you didn’t call as you said you would

and the lean razor of the daymoon

cut the cord under the tongue of the day

and stole the solar obol of my passage

so that even the dead would not let me in,

and where, the day before,

your lightning enthralled the powerlines,

yesterday severed my spinal cord lengthwise

as if it were gutting a snake

to pull my partially digested heart out,

slowly appalled by the long severance of your silence

like a scream that can’t hear itself.

Romanticus interruptus, no doubt,

but I sit here this morning alone

before the grey radiance of this computer screen

with a full quorum of my usual folly,

and impeach myself like the burnt stake

I pulled out of this Cyclopean eye

like the thorn of the moon from the sky.

And I feel I mean nothing to anyone,

and I’m trying to be heroic about my whining,

and maybe it’s time I adjusted

to growing suspiciously old,

but honestly, I’m more baffled now

than I was when the rain was still a cloud

and knew nothing of roots or the reach of its powers.

A doodle of blood in the margins of the hours

I have studied myself for years

and taken copious notes

but when I go to say who I am

my mouth is an open book on the lawn

and everything I mean runs like ink

in a sudden shower,

and so washed clean of myself

I break new ground like the first draft

of an unknown flower,

and I don’t know if I’m a loveletter to the stars

or a flag of white surrender to the bees.

And then you call and I am uplifted again

like a coca leaf panicked into hot cocaine

when the sun comes out like a spoon,

and we get drunk all nightlong

falling into each others wells like the moon

as we wish for everything.

Unredemptive folly, what a fool of a man,

says the voice that watches events for a sign,

sawing through the green bough I’m singing on,

but the indictment is an old sling

with my skull in it

and there are no more mirrors or windows to shatter.

What heat if the fire were to reason

or think it’s burning a risk

and I were to lie and act as if

as if every breath you take,

every astonishing moment of your presence

doesn’t feather the ashes of the phoenix

in the palm of your hand

with fireflies and lightning

flashing through my darkness

with the mysterious beginnings of worlds within worlds,

each a glimpse of joy so deep

I am a delirium of terror

before the precarious gates of my own happiness

whenever I’m around you?

And when you leave

I know a greater fall than the first

when paradise uproots itself and jumps from me.

Do you understand? Just to think of you

turns me into a man more than the poet I used to be,

as I slough off this serpent skin of sky

that has long held me in the coils of its constellations

and rush like liberated stars into your ultimacy.

PATRICK WHITE