AND THOUGH IT'S DARK AND COLD NOW

AND THOUGH IT’S DARK AND COLD NOW

And though it’s dark and cold now

in this ice palace of broken windows

that don’t know whether to bite their lips

or cut their wrists like a suicide

that took it one step too far

like an eclipse that went into exile

I remember the swell and release

of your breasts in moonlight,

rising and falling like a lunar tide.

I remember coiling my finger around

the soft chestnut tendrils of your hair

as if I were dialling a long distance call

to someone I knew light years from here

who was living her dream

like the black sheep of a shepherd moon

she was giving her life up to.

You were an atmosphere on the nightshift

on the intensive care unit of a hospital

applying a cool poultice of moonlight

to the volcanic burns

of more terminal passions

than I ever aroused in you.

Or thought I ever could.

Though time stopped

dead in its tracks like a coma

whenever I was around you

and everything the good doctors

found incurably bad about me

suddenly went into remission,

I knew I was merely

a minor miracle in your life.

Intermission. Time out. One day

every four years to tune up the calendar

A blue moon in late October

after the harvest’s in

and the small birds

are gleaning the rags of a garden.

Canada geese in the cornfields

shredding the last documents

of an abandoned embassy heading south.

We were Indian summer

together for awhile both knowing

the frost would come soon enough

and one morning I would wake up

and look through the window

on your side of the bed

and say, hey, look, it’s snowing

and you wouldn’t be there.

And when the time came, you weren’t.

And I spent the next six years of my life

numb with understanding

in the snake pit of a Zen morphine drip

blessing the beauty of the knife

and the wound you left me with

like a thorn of light under the eyelids

of a new moon in full eclipse.

An eyepatch over the third eye

of an enlightened planet

that felt just like any other

starless night on earth without you.

And though I hurt like a lamp

that couldn’t see you

even when the sun shone at midnight

I knew enough about attachment even then

not to hold up hope

like a cage to the wind.

I never laid a trap line

along the path you took to leave.

I let the silence and the solitude

I returned to like a night bird

to a white-out deep in the woods

efface your footprints in the snow.

I knew I had to stay.

And I knew you had to go.

That one mile east is one mile west

like two feet going in opposite directions

down a road that doesn’t have any.

And though sometimes I look

at the moon these days

and say to myself

what a little scar it is

to cover so much

that’s dark and wounded

about the human heart,

I still haven’t changed the broken windows

I often find myself standing before

to take a long, good, hard,

dark, radiant look at life

to see if it’s still crying outside,

for a thermal-paned, fire-walled website

prophetically updating the virtual weather.

I’m still throwing stones

with loveletters attached to your absence

like the moon through the windows

of a glass palace in an ice-age

I know will thaw by itself in time

like the whirling Castle of Arianrhod,

the hot gem of Celtic heaven shining

in the afterlife of the Northern Crown

down upon these small human acts

of estranged encounters with our own kind

where we meet each other in passing

at the gate of a cosmic garden

that no one was tending at the time,

and long after the one has gone their way

and the other has gone inside.

Long after the flowers have died

that were strewn across

each others’s paths through life

like the spring on a windy night;

no matter how vulnerable it makes us

to being a prime candidate

among many with their sensible shoes on

to firewalk barefoot

on a starmap of burning thorns

into the darkness of enlightenment

to stay attached to the unattainable

the way we both were to the same stars.

Even when the morning glory

overruns the New England asters,

we leave the gates thereafter open

as if the whole heart of the dark matter

of why we love and suffer, bloom

and come to fruition

in the light of each other

as if the aurora borealis

that mystified our nights on earth

with the sheen of cool Persian silks of insight

blowing over the flesh and blood of mystic serpents

then die back into our brief lifespan

like a solar flare back into its sunspots

were still hanging

on one star

one eye

one wing

one prayer

one hinge.

PATRICK WHITE