LILACS AT MIDNIGHT
Stars clustered around green hearts, every night
we meet like this as you walk in out of the dark
through the golden mouth of the door
that says your tender lightning into the vast spaces
of the electric room basking in its garden of lamps,
a spray of torn lilac in your hand as a gift
sweeter than the embroidered pillowcases
of our ghostly grandmothers unspooled
like smoke and incense on the wind.
And it’s been a thousand bumbling deaths and revivals
since a beautiful woman brought me flowers
and you are young and honey and peach roses
and I am the burnt library of an expurgated constellation
laired in an abyss littered with my own unmarrowed bones
where I try to look deeply into the eyes of things
no one can understand, hoping, if I stare long enough
these yarrow sticks from the book of changes, nine
in the fifth place, might restore my faith in water
and make something bloom again under the black eyelids
of the dream in the stone I’m trying to teach my name.
A fountain of flowers, pink coral, a trine
of tiny crowns, the spume and foam of twilight oceans, three tongues
on the fractured olive branch in the dove of your hand,
a sign of life and land, but you are the fairest token
of the spring to seize the grey bird in the storm-drenched nest
of my aberrant ashes, and raising a choir of fire and blood
that lives on nothing, make it sing.
And you know I love you as the sunset loves its planet,
as the great, ruined dusty rose of the dusk loves
the flashing spirit of the brilliant, white mare
that grazes in the spreading bruise of its darkening pastures,
until all is night and time and the silence of old, unmoveable immensities
too close to God to cry for the worlds
that go out in them like candles, like fireflies, like
the overturned lanterns of the heart
that never makes it home again,
its blood path through the labyrinths of the dark
uncertain as the headwaters of the streams
that slay the swan park with the force of their running.
And, no doubt, you will be reading this one autumn night
tears away from now, the windows rattling in a cold wind
and the stars breaking their glass fangs on the iron air
and I will be the small island of moist breath, the lunar lichen, that blooms
and disappears like a phantom sail on the black mirror
of your widow-walk, frost on the black rose of your grief
a ghost in the garden. You will remember me then as I am now
and feel my presence flood the room like the first draft of a love-letter
slipped through a crevice of light under the door.
And you will not fear the tremor in the bird net of the swaying curtains
or the dead branch with its solitary blossom
that scratches like a broken pencil at your windowpane,
or the shadow of the ashen moth that flutters in the flame of your votive candle.
You will not fear the things that my books could not explain
or the kiss of cold cherries on the nape of your neck
like the glance of a stranger that fills you with knives
on the blood-bridge of one of your former lives;
you will not fear the voice that whispers your name in the well
or the seabird in the fog off the coast of your hearing
that mourns like a lost ship or the ocean in the unfathomed abyss
of an abandoned shell. You will not withdraw like a wave
from the nearing because I know you are a strong bell, a lighthouse of courage,
and it will be me come back from the unsayable distances
between the blossoms and the roots on the silver tree of the dead
to thaw my hands again at the good fire of your abundant heart,
and feel once more your small body gathered up like grain and wine
and stars and volcanic poppies into the bay of mine
before we part. I will come to you out of that vast, shoreless sea
like a tender message in the blue bottle of this June night
with its gentle gestures of lilacs and love in the air
and I don’t know what I’ll say that I can’t say now
or if my tongue will be further schooled in the hidden harmonies
of unseen things the living cannot know, but sweetness,
as we live and have our being now in this madhouse of the moment,
remember this when the gust of that spirit comes like a slow lament
in a tattered robe of autumn leaves:
Though we were the unlikeliest of friends,
my sense of humour beginning where yours ends, if at all,
and the years between us the wingspan between dusk and dawn
and the others envious, askance, black, or jealous
because they could not understand or refused to see
what the autumn had to say to the spring, forgetting
that both seasons are revealed by the melting snow, that after the ice
the withered fields of last October are the overtures of March,
the first to hear the chiming doorbells of the crimson columbine
waiting in the soft moss on the bleak threshold of the rock
to be answered; that winter isn’t the wall of ice between spring and fall
but one greens into the other like an underpainting
and the echo in the valley is the first to hear the call to arise
and root the white lily in the gold-green iris of your eyes.
They sowed scorpions and vipers in the clefts
of their depletions and drank the shrieking acids of nettles and ants
hoping things would flower for them, too, even in the brain slag
of their salted earth, but the festering air of their condemnations
mothered a nation of blackflies and nothing was brought to birth
but more lies, and you can’t farm heaven with the devil’s tools
or impress the sun with the splendour of fools.
How could I tell them that for me, in the squalls of these later years
that blew the stars out one by one, lovers and friends gone,
and the sinkings and the cruel descents that never found bottom
and kept on happening, and the shipwrecks and the sudden seizure of events
that spiralled upward only to smash the moon like an egg
on the rocks below, how could I have let them know
that for me you were a lifeboat in shark weather, a hurricane rose
with hazel eyes and deep in the heart of your fury
a haven of blue that saw me through everything with laughter?
And I don’t know what everyone else was after, a little love
some dignity, a bit of cash, and a splash of self-respect,
but I was after you, crazed by your physical charms
hoping to hold you like the new moon in the old moon’s arms
and against all gods, all convention, all the poetic lore
that said you can turn a muse into a whore by sleeping with her,
love you the way the lightning loves its lightning rods. Be that as it may
and may it be one day in some deranged encounter of the senses
that flaunt their flowers on the banks of the other side,
I remained the longing devotee of your beauty, and you, the water-bride
of a hundred hungry poems. And still I waited for the moonrise,
still I waited for the apricot of your flesh above the willow,
and your angry cassettes, and your love of cats, and your emergency tears
when life handed you another hard stone for a pillow.
You were the orchid in the shadow of the outhouse
that the world can be when you grow up in the coils of poverty
and the wines of life are rags of blood on the razorwire
and the only way out is the stamp-sized gram
crumbled in the valley of the cigarette-paper you lick and post
like a letter addressed to the fire that lights it up,
hoping the next joint gets you higher than the last.
You were the water-lily that turned the rot of the swamp
into something beautiful, a star ahead of your past, a lamp
that never went out or soiled itself with black pollen
even when it shone alone in the morgues of doubt, a glowing rose
come of the dark into which even the strongest have fallen.
And if less than a lover then I loved you more than a friend.
And you brought me lilacs at midnight, and you entered me, a river,
singing of all the things that had drifted downstream
to the dream of an ocean that never spoke
of death or desertion to the birds in the tree
at the end of its frayed rope
where the deltas and divinities give in.
And you brought me lilacs at midnight,
a three-pronged jester’s cap of flowers with hearts for bells
sweeter than any crown of laurels among the iron kells
of the embellished poets stuck like overwrought weathervanes
at the front of the line, or roosters on the apex of the roof,
or closed gates with intercoms demanding proof
they’re the masters of their chains. Lilacs at midnight: remember,
this small exhalation of earthly stars
that will never ember in time or rust in the rain
because when you were all scars and I was all pain
we were bound by something that even death can’t profane.
PATRICK WHITE
