VASTER

VASTER

 

for you whose name means night

 

Vaster than this lost immensity

I revel in alone

a space opens up inside of me

like a nightsky

with stars I cannot name.

The silence gapes at their radiance

and strange chameleonic flowers gather

like moths to a flame.

The grass is kind.

The leaves are tender.

And the moon is always new.

I can feel lyrical tendrils of longing

reaching out for you in the darkness

like water and wine

in paisley designs

and your fingerprints

are all over the grapes

as if you wanted someone to know

who’s crying in the window.

The night is urgent

with small animals

changing species.

I can feel their eyes

beading on the bushes

as they look out in wonder

at what I might be

as I do you

enraptured with becoming.

You turned the world upside down

like a shotglass at a bar

just for a change of stars.

Now you’re down under.

And I’m slowly getting drunk on your absence

like a dark wine that matured

like a calendar of eclipses

into a choir that knows

all the songs of summer

that could make a grown man cry

for things he wonders

if he’ll ever know again.

So little love.

So much pain.

I’ve become good friends

with the crystal dolmen you left me

like a buddha in the Arctic

trying to thaw the moonlight a little

like an unexpected intensity

in the middle of things.

A little brass statue of Kali

dances beside him

and next to that

the small hand-carved sign

that follows me around like a branch

trying to be a perch for a bird

that’s run out of trees:

Poet’s Landing.

Wherever that is.

And maybe maybe maybe baby one night

you’ll let me see the stars through your window

and I can tell you all their names in Arabic

and what they mean in the ascendant

when I look beyond your eyes

like a drowning man

to read the lifelines in the light

you keep throwing out to me

like gentle nets of water

you bead in your moonboat 

as you’re sailing through Aquarius

mobbed by flying fish

who can’t thank you enough for their wings.

I’m a freedom fighter

for a dreamcatcher

that wants to come true.

I’m a pilgrim

on the last hill before home

back from a holy war of one.

And I look at you in the distance

like a promise I made

to the sun at midnight

and I see what I’ve come back to

like a witching wand to water

is you in every sign of life

that wakes in the valley of the mindstream.

And I think of who you were

before you left

and who you might be

when you come back

and I dream things about you

that please me with the easy way

your veils fall from the seeming

and I’m left

beaming alone like a lighthouse

on a rough coast in a Pacific storm

as if I were high on fireflies

and there were no warning

in the red morning 

in which I have no say

like stars lost in the sun

when I see you this way.

 

PATRICK WHITE