AND THE ROSE

AND THE ROSE

And the rose of someone else’s dawn,

a warning to drowned sailors,

mingling in the shadows and the leaves

just beyond the bay 

of the window where I stand

with my last afterlife

like a star in a shoe.

And there are voyages I’ll never make

and ones I have

for the sake of the going,

for the islands and the witches, the sirens

and the green flames of the fairies

that crept out from under

the stone of my heart

like a crown of petals, eyelashes,

cool palings of fire.,

and danced for the honey and the gold

from the paper hive

softened from stone

they had made of my life in ashes.

And there’s not much difference

between a sky and a sea,

no two wardrobes ever the same,

an expanse of space and skin,

wide palms of water,

and the confluence of lifelines

the deltas and the rivers,

the arteries and veins

the lightning and the branches,

weeping on a windowpane,

the fossils of leftover tears

that winced like an eye

in the hair of the jellyfish

that washed up out of their agony

like rain. And there are fools I’ve been

that don’t remember me

and lighthouses on the moon

that didn’t heed their own advice.

But there was always something

truer in the absurdity,

a mystery or a jewel, the memory

of a face I’d never seen,

some annihilation

with a threshold of stars

I’d never crossed, a whisper

of light, a fragrance, a voice

singing to itself in a lonely place

that put my caution to shame.

And it’s been my life to go,

to cross, to enter, to know

the lostness as my own,

and the darkness and the solitude

where I begin and end

like water taken from the river

and the river returned

as the moorings of the emptiness

I took for a boat

like a face

between the pages of my hands,

and all in the name of some nightbird

some shadow of a wing

that covered my heart

with such a quick eclipse

that no one even noticed I was gone.

Poetry, love, life; the shore is one thing

but the sea another,

and it’s not that I was brave

or thought I could walk on water

or had a secret starmap,

wiser than the rest;

I looked into the abyss with a shudder,

as if I had to kiss

a cobra on the head

or enter a spider’s womb

without being caught,

for the terrible acceptance

of what I sought

beyond the starless gates

and moth warnings

of the usual taboos. Every terror

scales a treasure, and the dragon

masks its secret,

not meant for the circumspect,

in risk. The sane prefer heaven

but heaven isn’t for the sane

who don’t know how to die enough

to answer the sphinxes and grails.

And it’s made me

a heretic of the heart,

a rogue star, a poet,

to live this way,

drinking the black wine

that was offered me

from the skulls

that lined the mouth

of the mysterious death

in the doorway

of every true entrance.

And it’s not the lies

that kill you,

nor the truths,

or looking through

a hole in the fence

at things you were never meant to see,

the medusa making love

to an apple-tree,

or Isis naked behind her veils

that no one’s ever lifted;

it’s returning

the way you came

from the wells

of the transformations,

the mountains of the muses,

the islands and the trees

of seduction and death,

unchanged, your tears still tears

not jewels of the blood,

and your voice,

not the fire of poison-tipped spears.

PATRICK WHITE