YOU NEVER BECAME A MEMORY

YOU NEVER BECAME A MEMORY

 

You never became a memory.

You remain as you are in my life.

A living compassionate presence.

I have forgotten more of me

than I ever could of you.

Whenever I want to see beyond the light

I see through your eyes

everything you wanted to show me

that was not petty or tragic or cruel.

I was a profound fool

but you taught me how

to add my darkness to the night

to enhance the shining.

And even now

when things aren’t flowering well

I still reach out for you by deepening my roots.

As if I could touch your face again

like a muse of water

lost in her own reflection.

As if I could ignite the same fires again

that blossomed on the dead branch

of the witching wand

that inspired the stars

who thought they had seen everything

to marvel at their own perfection in you.

Inspiratrix of the blue waterstars

that burned like chandeliers

among the constellations of the lilies

pluming themselves like swans

in the feathers of the moon,

how I long to be eclipsed and enlightened again

like a chameleon reflecting the mood of your beauty

as I did before these windows came

like glass-eyed calendars between us

to prove that time isn’t space. It’s pain.

And change is an absolute

that doesn’t like its relatives.

My angel misses you.

My demon misses you

so badly at times

I can’t look into the abyss for long

without impeaching my mind

for its awareness of an emptiness

that aches like an existential absurdity

to be put out of its misery

for being born blind deaf and dumb

about whose wind on the waters is rocking

the cradles and crucibles of creation.

The Medusa holds her tits out

like snakepits and grails

and I never know which one to drink from

or if the poison and the antidote

are just the opposite fangs of the moon

as it grows through its waxing and waning

as if a physician found a way

of healing herself

by sloughing her wounds like skin.

The mindstream weaves its way at night

like a garden snake

through myriad blades of grass

like the shuttle of a loom

that doesn’t know what theme of life

unspools in the flowing.

And my eyes miss you like light.

I’m a lighthouse on the shore of a dead sea

trying to walk on water like the moon

as the waves chip away at me

like shale flakes off the cold stone

that edges slowly through my heart like a thorn.

And it may make a king of me

to draw the sword out of the stone

but that doesn’t close the wound

of having first to fall upon it

to vacate my throne with honour.

If life is the truth

then lying is the only way

to describe death to a god

who doesn’t understand it.

What’s a church without gravestones?

Aspiration without an expiry date?

And so many different kinds of death

not enough generations of humans

have been born yet to know them all.

Death tries to trivialize the relative

as if the things I miss most about you

had never been.

But your mindwaters are mingled with mine inextricably

like the shoreless starstreams of space

panning for planets in our flowing

we might live on

and have our being and our breath

unblighted by loss. Separation. Death.

And there is no more of the sadness

I used to see in your eyes

as if they were my own

that I still see everywhere in the eyes of all living things

when I know as you would have had me know

as clearly as you did

that even though the neverness

of implacable circumstances and lost last chances

may have separated us like the threads of the rope

you used to climb up to heaven before me

like one who took the short-cut

and one who took the long way home through these starfields

taking his painful time

like the unfulfilled hope of a child

he’s not alone when he opens his eyes

like a dream within a dream

that looks but can’t find him,

you can polish the missing into a mirror

and wait like a fox by a black hole for things to appear

that will never be the same again

or you can open your tears like windows

and let out the birds of pain

that I have kept as close to me

as the whisper of your voice

in this cold, dark chimney

telling me to let you go as I do now

to rejoice on the dead branch and the green bough

like the flower and flame

of what became of us.

We cannot be the song or the singer

for very long

as our voices dim like candles in the darkness

that have given it all away.

And as you used to say

as if it would always be today without you

and all we have given is all we could keep of each other

like water returned to the river

we raised to our lips to taste

the sad, last drops

of these eyeless elixirs of the moon

that linger like vapours

in the empty goblets of the morning glory,

and I need  to believe you more than I do

in this neverness of now

that has come before me without a beyond

or a word from all that has irrevocably gone.

Yes. But the singing. That goes on.

 

PATRICK WHITE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PATRICK WHITE