A GHOST IN A MOONBOAT

A GHOST IN A MOONBOAT

A ghost in a moonboat,

what has become of your heart,

that vase, that urn, that furnace

that slept at your feet like a dragon?

When did you depart, when

did you fling your bouquet of stars,

like the wedding vows

of a widow behind you,

the lone rose of your blood,

the polyglot mother tongues of the flowers

you liked to translate once

like an archaic science of silence

into the flames for good

and walk away like a grave

that fit you like a shoe

with journeys yet to come

through the realms of the talking dead?

Did you let what came before

break the heart of your afterlife

like a wishbone caught

in the throat of a chimney

that couldn’t get the song right

until one day just before false dawn

the bird just up and died in its cage?

A loveletter from the gods

that had aged way past its prime.

I remember when you were diamond

not a dime a dozen, a species of coal

that doesn’t give off any heat.

I can remember when an ice age

wasn’t the only window

you looked through at the world.

You were tropically sexual,

you were the black panther

that stalked the jungle at night

like a new moon on the make.

You were the princess butterfly

who could kiss the head

of a venomous snake pit

fanged like crescent moons

and make it bloom like a daffodil.

You could weave dreamcatchers

between the horns of any demon you met

like spider webs between two blades

of stargrass in the morning.

You could bead a requiem of rosaries

into solar systems of music on a loom

that always had a song in its heart

like the harps of the celestial spheres

in the ear of a radio telescope

looking for an extraterrestrial emotional life

to make first contact like love

in a universal language of laughter and touch.

And you could cut a throat

like a sour guitar string

that couldn’t hold a high note

like a box-kite at night on fire

to reach the stars beyond the powerlines

where the birds sat like a choir

of open whole notes in a total eclipse

of upstaged back-up singers

like chakras on their spinal cords.

I never knew a phoenix

had a three octave wingspan

until I listened to the fire in your voice.

And you could take a light bulb

with a broken filament for a lifeline

and heal it by turning it into

a firefly of insight in the hands

of a faith healing glassblower.

Now you’re the dark ore

of a sword swallower

that’s poured her metal out

like the slag of the bells

you melted down for cannon

in a holy war of troubled mirrors

that fought in the image

of an imageless God

who abhorred metaphors.

And what happened to those features

of your bodymind, those teachers of yours

that were always planting pines

on the barren slopes of world mountains

like Zen masters with nothing better to do?

Were you beguiled one day

like a mirage of heaven in an hourglass

and break your neck against it

like a red-winged blackbird

against a glacial windowpane

it trusted like a true reflection

of someone who didn’t open up to you?

Whatever the unreason of it all,

Whatever compelled the rose

to tear her soul and her flesh

on her own lunar thorns

like a junkie with a razor blade

performing a Caesarian on her eyelids

as if they were the little wombs

of a recurring nightmare

of embryonic hearing aids

born like voices in your ear

with no one there to listen but you

to what they said in their sleep

in a dead language on the night ward.

I once trusted you

like I trusted the wind,

like the sea trusts its own weather,

like a skull trusts moonrise to happen again.

Now all your radical lighthouses

are the pillars of a headland temple

dedicated to an unknown cause

that warns the gods and the swallows

to keep their distance from your lunar reefs.

You’re a garden of slogans

on protests signs gone to seed

that haven’t been weeded in years.

And I know you count me a fool

to remember how our waters

once mingled on the moon

like spectral wavelengths of serpent fire

on the same frequency as our tears.

Years and years and years ago

before things fell apart like an ice floe

headed for the deep south

in a holy month of heat

that changed my direction of prayer

like a compass needle at a Sufi intersection

that saw you everywhere I turned.

And there were letters

I wanted to send you like night skies

that were scaled and feathered by the wind,

and things I wanted to say to you

like a thousand epitaphs

of what we were all about,

mason jars of fireflies and poems

I wrote like a prophet in tongues

in the eternal flames of separation

I hoped that you might blow on

to keep the fire alive

in the ash pits of our graves.

And now you’ve come back

and I can tell you’ve bruised

the music in your voice

like the skin of deadly nightshade

and scarred your eyes

to look like crescent moons

with no signs of life.

No stars in your eyes

that aren’t the holy relics

of an extinct constellation of saints

that went over to the dark side.

A whisper of worms,

the din of wasps hovering

over the corpse of an apple

in the Indian summer of its waning.

And yet I can still see

a green star with habitable planets

shining deep in the heart of death

like the sacred syllables

of the seeds of life

stirring like tendrils of gold

in the ore of a starless night.

And you might fake it

like a sign of a zodiac

far off the beaten path,

and keep your black halo on,

or take it as an echo of mutual respect

for what we once tried

so lyrically to mean to one another

that the threshold you left by

for a higher rung on the ladder

is as earthbound in autumn as ever

to the ghost in the apple orchard

that uprooted my heart in the spring.

I offer my arm to the falcon.

I offer my bough to the nightbird

I once answered to like longing

answers an unnamed muse.

I offer landfall to the dove

and a silver earring of rain

to the eye of the crow,

just to hear you sing again

of what we had to risk

and what we had to lose

and what a sadder, happier

surrealistic mystery of a world it is

a wingspan of light years away

from the one we used to think it was.

PATRICK WHITE