THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO

THERE, YOU SEE, I LET YOU GO

There, you see, I let you go, just like that, open my hand

like milkweed, like dandelion, a grave full of ghosts

and let space take the parachutes and parasols,

chimney-sparks and fireflies in a gust of wind by a dark lake,

and I wonder if the stars, too, are a way of saying good-bye,

if the blood drapes its lanterns in black

after the light has fled

and latches the gate with a question, if

the sun dies in the apricot after it falls,

if the branch is sadder by the weight of one bird

or if the fruit it bears like tears is enough

to go on conducting the requiem of your absence,

because we are just an eye of water at the end of a leaf,

a match plummeting down a well,

a tiny fury of seeing that scalds the watershed

with the hiss of a cat, a feather of flame, and dies,

the dreary slag of a dwarf moon, a black, pitted skull.

And who would believe such a desolate thing,

was once a red bud on a paper stem, dreaming of flowers,

imagining the dawns that would come of its flaring,

or the constellations that might recruit its shining;

now the head and thorax of a dismembered insect,

a pygmy matador robbed of its scarlet cape,

its anonymous corpse, the only gravestone

to say it once existed among the radiant, a meteor, a comet,

a star doused in the morning light, an orchid of fire

at the end of an exclamation mark that shocked nothing

by its Luciferian fall from grace, no more than a wounded kite

that mistook itself at the end of its tether

for a phoenix with other lives. And the spring is green

and the rain trips delicately off the plectra of the leaves and petals,

and everywhere there is the frenzy of growing things,

blue carillons of liberated bells, but I am alone

with the battered asteroid of my own insignificance

far from light and water, in a straitjacket of space,

a minor bead on a rosary of greater planets,

a nugget of injured iron in the gold-pan gleanings of the sun,

the seed cast away, the extinguished stone

of a directionless house of worship

with nothing in my loins but the ghosts of the evicted poems

that once lived there, the pride of the desert tribes

before the nations of faith revised the unsayable silence

your eyes have left me like dry wells in the starless dark.

PATRICK WHITE