YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT ME EARLIER
You should have left me earlier
when you caught me skinning snakes
with the scalpel of the moon
to free my voice like a bird
from the darkness of a gratuitous eclipse.
And you missed your chance that night
I told you that the things you wanted bored me
and as fine as your body was
it was still just silk on a birdcage
and there wasn’t anything dangerous in the night
you imposed like a gesture of modesty
to scare me enough to take flight
and I didn’t think of sex as a reward
for following your breadcrumbs like stars
through your serpentine miles of delusional labyrinths to bed.
There was no prophecy in the stains we left on the sheets.
I tried to listen, but your tears got in the way.
I tried to see, but my eyes couldn’t adjust to the light
you disappeared in like a shadow of noon
and the things I could see from the bottom of the open grave
I lay in for days like a baffled loveletter
trying to speak braille to the blind
weren’t stars.
It’s not hard after all these years, as it wasn’t then,
to confess you were a better woman than I was a man
but the way you were right
was forgiveness without end like the incommensurable pilgrimage of pi
to some end term of a shrine
so I could never wash the flaw of myself
like a gnostic phase of the moon out of my one good eye
to clarify my gospels like junkmail.
I’d rather be loved than right
and love is not law
and feelings aren’t just another mode of emergency administration
after every earthquake,
and I lost count of the times you were Rome
and I lept into the abyss of my own widening fault-line
hoping my self-destructiveness would look like courage to you
and save you from me
in an ironic act of hell.
Again and again I took your knife
like the moon into my heart
on every threshold you came to
as if I were raising my own orphan assassin
under the starless nightwing of my ambivalent compassion.
And it wasn’t until years after
like the light of a star too far from itself to know
what was illuminated by the sacrifice
that I would learn of my death
like a rumour of night you kept alive
to prove how bright you were.
And it’s true
you did shake a few fireflies out of the dragon like jewels
and there were nights I slept beside you like lightning in a jar
dreaming of dark intensities
in the sidereal immensities
of who you were for a moment
when things weren’t so sad
and you were the free water
of a theme of your own
that wasn’t looking to be uplifted
by another spiritual transformation
that always let you further and further down
like a leaf in a gust of stars.
When my demon jumped from paradise
your angel rose from hell
like the circulation of blood
so you bolted the trapdoors in the chambers of the heart
where love gets through like a thief
and more original than sin in your self-containment
pretended you were good and poppy-red
and I was the cyanotic blueblood
of a decadent habitat exhausting my resources
on being unredemptively me.
But you weren’t the bridge of fire
that could catch my breath like a choir
on the other side of oxygen,
and I never had any intentions of rescuing you
once I saw how defeated your dragons were
cremating all those bad drafts of me
like comets that fell from your halo
into a cold urn
without realizing the mad difference
between psychological graffitti
and the writing on the wall.
And it’s still not much of a consolation
to know that it was a longer good-bye than I expected
and as you would have had it
if I could have loved you like destiny
instead of blind chance
the lie of it all has been perfected by time and distance
and these autumn windows
that look through me like dutiful executioners
waiting for the cold stone of the moon
to shatter me like a trance
aren’t medium enough to summon me back to you
to say the things I would like to have said
beside you, late at night, after sex, in bed
as the carlights played solitaire with their light on the walls
and we were a language that death has never spoken
into the burning silence of the great stars
that know nothing of tomorrow.
PATRICK WHITE
