FIRST THE TENDERNESS

First the tenderness; I feel the tenderness,

the downy edge of the leaf, the eyelash,

the green tooth of the leaf

gently opening its mouth to the air,

its flag of being high in the branches

unfurling like a sky of its own,

startled by the taste of the first star.

Every drop of rain that falls

is a jester’s cap,

three bells and a splash and that’s me

learning how to swim in this new space

with an ark and a flood, you

the dove with the leaf in its beak, returning.

Then I check a little calendar of razor-blades

to see if any of the days

are holy days circled in my blood,

if I’m late for a sacrifice somewhere,

if there’s a landmine waiting

like a spiny sea urchin buried in the sand,

glass petals shed from a broken rose,

waiting for me to take my boots off

and walk barefoot dazzled along your shore.

You are honey and wheat, and, angry,

a small storm that bleachs lightning white.

Brave despite myself,

your beauty crowns me King of Fools,

and though I meant to disguise my helplessness

by standing my ground like a iron thorn,

I can already feel the earth turning to quicksand

beneath my feet,

and tremors of an approaching earthquake

that might heave me up out of the sea

like a new mountain.

And it’s too early to tell

if it’s demons or angels

that prod my heart

with their taunting spears of fire,

or if they’re just bored,

hanging out on call,

like a gang of crows

pecking at the seed

I left hope against hope on the moon,

but to judge from the way I feel

like a new element

discovered first on the sun,

all my cells and molecules assuming

a new paradigm, a new mandala,

a new configuration of shining,

an unknown constellation in the doorway,

through either end of the telescope,

they seem to mean business.

Fear rolls out its black carpet

and blood rolls out its red,

but only love walks freely in the starfields,

making its own path in the going

and when I think of you,

I pale like a planet

in the labyrinths of a shadowless dawn,

I am the toy of tides of light,

a rootless island

broken like bread

from the continent I thought I was.

Unless broken from the whole loaf

nothing can be shared, and nothing

can feed the heart

that has not been broken

among the hands of the hungry.

I have seen you as a harvest day in September,

your pulse a windfall of poppies and apples,

your radiance, flying fish

and water goblets shattered translucently on the wave,

a white mare in the mirror trampling a glass serpent,

you were the pure blue of a troubled morning

melting the first frost

on the wild, New England asters

that bloomed among the grounded planets

of an abandoned apple tree

somewhere in New Hampshire;

I thought you were a window of honey

saturated in its own light,

that only the rarest of eyes

that came like bees back to the hive of your heart

could look through.

Now the moon is out. Now

I see the ghost of the water-lily ride the darkness

like the soul of a doomed ship

unloading its cargo in the depths,

or the second blue moon in October

silvering the fields

it threshes with a blessing.

First, the tenderness; I feel the tenderness

overwhelm me in gentle enigmas

of fireflies and small eclipses,

random ignitions of the mystery

that this should be so at all,

and it’s as if I could stand beside my heart

astounded by the course of its flowing

as all its rivers run suddenly down to you

like a sea on the moon,

and like the feathers of a storm bird

every sail, every burning paper lifeboat,

every next breath

is a longing off your unmapped coast

and a lighthouse of reason

bawling its warning into the fog

that the star that guides my spirit luminously ignores.

And though my ignorance at this juncture

is a stairwell of wind at a crossroads

and I approach you like a tuning fork

trying to harmonize my ashes

like the urn of a burnt guitar

to sing to you out of the shadows of a summer night,

to touch you with leaves and stars,

to lace the air with the black fragrance

of smouldering roses alluring as the wine of a drunk mystic,

and the beast putting on

his brightest golden chain and collar

to greet your progress through his zoo of desires,

slowly I raise my fingertips to your secret braille of scars

to read the contours of the kells

you have elaborated from your suffering;

the symmetries of passion and solitude,

blood and tears

that ink the mingling of your silent scripture

in the shrine of your deepest intimacy.

First, the tenderness, I feel the tenderness

of a bridge for its stream,

of a fountain on the sun

watching a new comet

rinse the darkness out of its hair with light,

of a tree for its chandelier of ripe cherries

glowing brighter than blood in the night.

And I may be junkmail

on the doorstep to the threshold of your heart,

a wizard shy of magic,

or a kite tangled like a misplaced note

in a stave of humming powerlines,

and I’ve fallen

on the thorns and swords and obelisks

of my delusions more than once,

lost like a single straw in a stack of needles,

drowned diving

for tiny moons in hard shells on the bottom,

and no one grows fat on the feast

in a crumb of light,

and a rumour of love

is not the burning bush

of prophecy and inspiration in the valley of a woman,

and you are not the blue love letter

of an atmosphere I could take for granted,

but I risk slipping myself under your horizon

like the wingspan

of a homing bird in the dusk,

risk stepping out from the trees into the open

to drink from your reflection

from the waters of a midnight lake

that has eclipsed every other vision

that has intoxicated me indelibly

from the very first sip

to let you know while we live and breathe and love and hope,

though hope is seldom a road that arrives,

the first tenderness; I feel the first tenderness

of being enabled, empowered

by this transfigurative gust of grace

that turns the galaxies deep within me like well-wheels,

to summon the images, wraiths, forms of the world,

as it arrays its jewels

on the flying carpets of life,

to compare with your beauty,

to embody these auroral aspects of you

that play me like a keyboard of light

in the likeness of a woman

whose smile

though it were as many as the leaves of fall,

and eyes

though their shining

outnumber the morning asters,

have never failed to startle me

into realizing everything

I am missing in life and love.

PATRICK WHITE