AUTUMN SWINGS ITS BELL

Autumn swings its bell like an eyelid over my heart

and in the penumbral umbrellas that bloom 

in a garden of eclipses and sundials,

I discuss you with an enlightened ghost

and an ignorant shadow

that have learned to see star to star

in this echoless abyss of silence and solitude.

Within, where the winds scrawl

their spray bombs on the wall,

delighted with their literary delinquency,

I realize what’s beginning to look like

the mouthless howl of an ancient agony,

the collapsed bridge

of that which was separated

from the moon’s reflection,

an ache deep in the ores of the earth

before it learned to speak of trees and rivers,

before its longing invested the dead branch

with a fugue of nightbirds

trying to write themselves like a dream

into the black candle of the darkness

with a feather of fire.

My heart is hollow, and empty,

a drunk in an oildrum,

and love seems nothing more

than a harvest of eyelashes

and all my works are seeds on the moon.

A kite crash lands in the powerlines.

A phoenix rises from its dearth of ashes.

I want to go deeper into myself,

I don’t want to hover like smoke

over my sidereal cremations,

or atomize the particulars

of how time bends like the arms

of my galactic alarm clocks,

or if I deserve to be this lonely,

a lighthouse that went on shining underwater

after the last flood carried me out to sea.

You make things happen in me,

thinking of you, your lapidary tides,

blue species of emotion

are born, evolve, and die

for reasons unknown

in the space between two thoughts;

and there are crazy black spiders in the wine

that tempt me to swallow them

to know how things are connected,

and always an electric dawn

to dazzle the event with black holes

and blind, astronomical photographers.

I feel the tenderness of time and distance from you,

fountains that no one drinks from,

and space all the jewels and palaces of water

that no one owns or lives in

because they are reserved for your progress alone

through these wounded labyrinths of me

following the stars I’ve laced

in the wake of living your way free of the maze

that will prove to be

the foundation of another kind of temple,

the cornerstone of a vastly more intimate space

than the eclipse that encloses you now

in the bleeding flames of an endangered poppy.

I wish I were wise, I wish

I were young and becoming,

I wish I could engender a planet

out of this cosmic debris

I spew like a supernova across the night,

the exhalation of my spirit from the lamp I go by,

the arraying of the world in every breath.

I wish I were good and always cooling

on a farmhouse windowsill;

I wish I was not so tormented

by the torn skies that hang from the broken window

I hurled my heart through like a stone with a message.

I wish my enlightenment

didn’t knock on every door of delusion

hoping to find no one home.

I place the cool kiss of a nocturnal snail on your skin,

and I look at the words and I wonder

if you’ll wake with a silver smear on your breast

like the path of the moon on water

and know it was me

or feel the tremor of a forbidden ecstasy in your sleep

I burn a church to the ground like a ram

to honour the altar of your talent,

the passion, pulse, and fire-voice of your poetry

and the midnight shadows of your blue rose

shedding its eyelids like petals, skin and sky.

My words are metal birds, rocks

wishing for wings

so that this avalanche of mountain thunder

might once take flight in the dusk

toward the valley where you wander like a stream

turning over lost echoes

like the links of a chain with a key,

zeroes looping arms with the past

to bind one moment of the infinite

to the wonder of a passion that lasts.

My eyes are heavier

for having seen the light,

saturated with everything they’ve witnessed,

honey, ink, and blood,

and every tear is a sea closer to the moon,

and every lyrical efflorescence of the dream

is punctured by thorns,

and even the lies of the most subtle mirrors

have grown obvious

as the beast within is saddened

by its cultivated charm,

knowing what hour it is.

Understand me well

in this rogue season of awareness;

where lightning freezes in the flower-realms

and breaks like branches of ice,

where even black is too garish for clarity,

and sometimes even the sea

loses its nerve,

gaping into its own depths,

an asylum of lightless shapeshifters

for a likeness of itself

that isn’t perfectly preserved,

the locket-heart of the last fish on the moon,

a Martian meteor in Antarctica,

this gravel walk of asteroids

through the gates and the gardens

of the whole planet I am in every piece,

though I do not glow like fool’s gold

in the pan of the night,

and my throne has crumbled like hard bread,

and love seems to die at the first affirmation

like a bird against a late night windowpane,

this goblet of darkness

that stains the lips with an indelible silence;

though I have been deconstructed

by the suspicious sphericity

of my most cherished symmetries,

toppled like a tower of blood and water,

a shattered river

condemned to the beginning of spring,

a continent sunk in the depths of the mirror

barring this handful of nuggets and islands,

I am still immutable diamond

that learned its flowing from the stars,

and what I write to you

is not a thread of light

that holds the kite of your heart

up to the lightning like a key

to prove that your blood is a good conductor,

not the severed fishing line necklace of eyes

scattered like beads and dice

across the usual geometries

and impoverished granaries of the floor,

not the afterbirth of a morphological wine

that left you burnt orchards

as the fruits of the fire that promised

a feast of pears and cherries,

not the disembodied jewels of a ghost

weeping in the doorway of its skull in the night,

but the threshold and theme,

though for the moment you disdain the stairwells

in the hovels and mansions of love,

embittered by the lonely rose of space and matter

that pours the shining out the backdoor

like the lees of harvest stars

in the corner of the eye of an irisless bell

waking you up mutely

from a dream of falling in a morgue,

but the threshold and theme,

the story-line, the mythogem and motif,

the oceanic pulse and spume

of sidereal ferocities and urgent follies

robed like the king of shells

in the bruised purple of symbols

I take like the pulse of a lightning-rod

rooted like blood in me

to know as constantly as space

that I draw my life from you

like a shadow in a garden of blue fire

that courses through the dried creek beds

of these hourglass deserts

like the mystic tents

of a caravan of rain on the moon.

Wells, goblets, bells, or roses,

or thorns gnawing through chains and lifelines

to let the heart drift

like an empty boat from its moorings,

whatever season you assume

like the changing wardrobes

and unassailable affinities of a life

you must improvise as you go along,

I will always be with you

like shadows and leaves

and footprints and stars,

as I am now your next breath

whatever the scarves of fire

that grace your ghost-dance

with the black ribbons of an abysmal freedom

that feels like the halls of an abandoned prison.

I will liberate the key

like a hanged man

from the noose that adorns your neck,

and raise myself like a bell to your lips

and have you drink

the light and stars and flowers again

from the urn, the crown,

the hive of the heart

that sends its eyes out into a far field like bees

on the perfume trail of a summer constellation

to sweeten the light around you

with honey that burns for an emergent queen to find it.

PATRICK WHITE