I’VE NEVER LET THE WIND

I’ve never let the wind forget your name.

My heart glows like a streetlight in the rain.

I’m bleeding eclipses, and the fire

doesn’t know what to say until I burn.

How many weeping skies have washed away my eyes

and exposed my roots like lightning

to a map of lies with a divining rod

in the flash of a furious moment

that snuffs itself out like a heretic or a candle

to begin the world again like an intimate stain in the darkness,

like the meaningless whisper of a voice in a dream

to turn the lights off.

Your absence in my life

has long been a room

in the long halls of the moonlight

I have been afraid to enter,

but now I understand why it never had a door

and why even my deepest dragons

trembled like wicks in those immensities.

Your absence in my life

is the shining of a mysterious dark matter

that was bright with creation before the light was born.

And anyone can shed a leaf, a painting, a poem

and year after year, watching things pass,

I have covered the ground

with things time wrote

to endure the breathless afterlife

of its endless brevity,

but last year I got wise for a moment

and shed the whole autumn

and naked as a snakepit on the moon

that keeps changing its expressions like a face

I shook space with a beginning of my own

that reads like the first draft

of the fossil of a tree for all seasons.

I don’t think sorrow makes anyone wiser

for all the wine that gets drunk on its bells

trying to flint stars from its damp shales

or horde the dead like a drop of blood,

a surrogate heart, to a pulse of iron.

And I’m not aiming any pyramids

at the stargate in Orion on a long shot

there might be a sniper with nightgoggles in a distant tree

that could hit my third eye from here

and make things perfectly clear.

I’m not looking for my reflection in the starmud

like an extinct species trying to deduce itself

from one half of an unanswered wish-bone

or turning my skull in my hands like a phase of the moon,

and it was one thing when I was young

to want to be somebody

but now it’s wholly another

to unspool myself like the light of stars

or blood, or the Atropic thread of my spinal cord

until I am inconceivably no one,

used-up like the fuse of the Big Bang

as the applause turns into irrepressible laughter

and I know it’s just the turning of the leaves.

But I’ve never let the wind forget your name.

PATRICK WHITE