AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

AND SHOULD YOU THINK I NEVER THINK OF YOU

And should you think I never think of you

out here like a space probe

in the great indivisibility of the abyss

sending post cards back from the edge of nowhere

to no one in particular

you’d be as wrong as you usually were.

I think of you. I remember. I recall.

You were the chandelier of the unattainable

and I was the flying carpet in the hall.

Intimately specific images of unassuming moments

Watching you slip off one your heels

with your arm braced against a brick wall

to check for pebbles.

Or that time after another fight

you stopped the car at the end of the dirt driveway

and got out to pull up your t-shirt

to show me your breasts like a superlative

you knew would keep my attention

until you came home from work that night.

Not the big things you’d think I’d remember.

Not the great revelatory enlightenments

of the dark matter at hand

when everything was either perfectly tragic

or tragically perfect between us

under the stars in the frosty hay fields

reverting to the wild by acclamation;

but little flakes of snow and ashes

or moonlight flint knapped off

the blue anthracite of a midnight lake

trying to shape a spearhead of insight

into the Clovis point of a diamond.

Feathers and petals and leaves of things

that were hardly noticed when they fell.

The feeble shadows cast by Venus

across the snow on a moonless night

when nobody was looking

because they were all inside

huddled around a fire

like blazing mesmerized by its own blindness.

Breathless shadows born of Venus.

You don’t even need to have your third eye open

to know how beautiful and rare that is.

Things on the wind that blow up like leaves

scratching at the door like cats

to be let in out of the cold.

Memories that suddenly fly into my field of vision

like bats out of the dark baffled by the porchlight

only to end up stuck on the burdock

like martyrs to the cause

and birds that break their necks

against the false skies in my eyes

with the dull thud of softballs

thrown against the wall of a house

and fall to earth like ricochets

off knightly suits of body armour

forged out of old shell casings

to hide the evidence of my vulnerability.

At least from me for a while.

And I’ve got wounds that are deeper than that

I know will never heal

and moments of vital bliss

I’m living on like a ghost in a lighthouse

that didn’t take its own advice

when it put its lantern out

like a candle beside the bed

to go all the way with a mermaid

and not get burnt.

Now I’m a nightwatchman of the stars

with a big enough flashlight

its eyebeam reaches all the way to Mars

to make sure there are bars on the windows

and locks on all the doors.

PATRICK WHITE