LONGING OVER-REACHS ITSELF

LONGING OVER-REACHES ITSELF

Longing over-reaches itself

when it turns into a request

so I’m not asking for anything from the stars;

I’m not standing here looking up at the night sky

trying to identify you among all that is shining,

waiting for your light like a remote gift

on this bridge without a past or a future

where a man in the vastness of his solitude

is still not enough of a zenith

to illuminate his passage to the other side.

I don’t keep myself on like a nightlight in the darkness

or churning in the lifestreams

of these immeasureable depths

pretend someone’s saved a seat for me

in a lifeboat that’s already full.

And for all the eternities that I have spent looking

like waves out on the open eye of the sea

for a constellation of my own,

when the moon breaks like a wine goblet

over the stone of my skull

to launch another continental shipwreck

I still don’t think I taste of stars

or that my dick is a reliable lighthouse.

And sure, it’s a lot of bluff and brave talk

when you get punched in the heart

by a bareknuckled squall

and you’re buried at sea

under the black flag of an indelible eclipse

after someone suggests you say something over yourself

as you would for the dead

and it’s lifetimes later

and you’re a dangerously different coast

but I’m beginning to remember what I said.

That you are life is certain.

That you are love

is the wind in a curtain

fishing for fireflies in an open window

as if you were trawling for stars.

And if I were caught like the gills of the moon in your nets

would you haul me up onto your decks

and choosing me like a coin from your purse

to put under my tongue

like a full moon for the ferryman

throw me back into my own resurgency?

I’ve been to the top of the prodigal mountain

that looks into its own heart

like a ghost returning home

only to stand before the scuttled gate

of a dead sea that had wept away its waters.

And I have heard the sirens scream

like poppies in their sleep

rushing to their own emergencies

like blood in the water

waiting for the jaws of life,

but there was nothing I could do to wake them

and they slept through me like an afterlife

that had come to the back door

of someone who doesn’t live here anymore.

PATRICK WHITE