I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not

meant the light coming out of the dark

and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake

or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows

or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window

warping its image through the delusional weeping

of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook

by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this

still the case though I’m old enough to know

all that crying never turned into a single chandelier

and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread

than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.

And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles

beside cool dolphins with seabird hands

off the coast of my longing, and marvelled

at the amazing bridges of their bodies

and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream

that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet

of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst

in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;

never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat

or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past

and not meant some era of a woman

who came and stayed awhile with me

in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment

like the first rising of a second moon

I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse

of love’s last crescent across my left wrist

to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,

having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,

or swept my continental vision off the table

back into the coffin like an archipelago

of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel

everytime I try to assemble it, I still know

even if it isn’t vouched to me,

that love is life, and life is a bride

that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,

trailing her ancient veil of stars

along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow

even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch

among the white, sweet, wedding clover,

having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,

it is always somehow strangely okay

and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE