I AM A DRAGON

I am a dragon,

but I’ve got cloudy teeth.

You are a vase among jars,

a feather among scales.

Obviously you are the sea

and I am the seabed.

In the darkness you are the shining.

I come to you

like lead to an alchemist,

base metal to gold.

Already I am transformed

by your mirrors of fire.

There is a light, a glow,

invisible but more illuminating,

not of the moon, or sun, or a star,

but of the heart and mind,

the light of life itself

when it’s the only candle in the room

dancing behind its veil of shadows,

and in the least filament

of the down upon your thighs,

there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,

mystic lanterns

ripening like apricots

over the open doors of worlds within,

over eyes that bloom like wild asters

rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.

I have been a ghost

trying to say itself into existence;

and my bread and my blood

have been the whisper and breath of you.

Not the mountains, not

the mothering floors of the wheat seas,

not the forests or the hills or the rivers,

not the ladders or roads or miles between us,

nor the seasons of the threshing clock,

have kept us one eyelash apart;

we have been wings to each other;

we have been the secret tides of the rose

in a bay of blood to one another;

we have been the substance of a dream

that lingers like the impression in cool grass

of where the deer slept the night before.

In the flights of winter birds,

on moist winter days,

I have rehearsed endless summers to come,

when the sky whispered your eyes

in bells of sidereal fragrance

into the abyss of my longing for you

and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,

and you were that petal,

and I was that wind.

And though I have stood for eras

on this bridge of night alone

waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,

a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars

I want to live with you,

we have always embraced, not two,

arrow and bow,

pilgrim and shrine,

release and enlightenment

reflected in these visions

the insistent palettes of the heart

paint on the impassioned waters

of the deepening lifestream.

I have been a storm of blood and stars;

I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears

and learned to breathe through a new medium,

set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,

and bloom in a mythically enhanced

immensity of sorrows,

and the shadows under my eyes

have mourned for me

like black bells in a tower of thorns,

two horses of night chained to a heart

that dragged itself around like a hearse

looking for a lost grave.

I buried myself in women

who were torn like the satin lining

out of a coffin just

when they were about to give birth.

Their pain always tasted of an afterlife

that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue

until my blood caught fire

like a rose with a voice of wine.

Black, apostate, madonnas

of body, heart, and mystery,

even the moon a bead of devotion

on a thread of their blood,

a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.

I never knew what to say

that wasn’t a life shy

of an inadequate skeleton

trying to reflesh itself with the ashes

of its last sidereal cremation.

I was born again and again

like a sword drawn out of a stone

to hurl my humanity

like a sparrow

against the windows and eyes of the gods.

They knew I was right

to live the prophecy

written in the book of my wings by the wind,

but their tears fell like glass rice

on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors

that wept like silver serpents

at the heels of the moon

and whatever road I walked,

whatever direction I wandered in

like a drunken river

I passed through my own ribs

like an opening gate

to a sealess exile on the moon,

a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.

Events of the spirit,

and the imported executioners

of tormented ecstasies

that made our bodies shudder with oblivion

until even our shadows glowed

like feathers of light

that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone

to lay our heads down upon and dream,

every emotion,

keyed like a highwire

over the infinite emptiness

of a guitar in the corner of a tomb

eating the dust of a blackboard

that schooled the scrawl of the angels

into the writing on the wall.

How many lovers have perished in me

like the rings and eras of a tree,

and what enormities of childhood it takes

to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,

what tides of blood and light

collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus

that pulled off miracles

under the sheets and skies and skin

of our lascivious tents:

now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,

a cone of light,

the pillar of a fallen shadow,

freeing the wings of wounded birds

from the nets and mesh of the stars.

I am a dragon

with the soul of a bridge to here and now,

a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple

to a god that sweeps me away like ashes

with the broom of my shadow,

and my face is the footprint of the wind

as flowers are the footprints of the light,

and my heart is a pebble

I keep dropping down a well

to listen for an echo from the depths,

for a whisper of fire on the water,

to deliver me like a burning dove

with a leaf of the moon in its beak,

a letter from you,

to say there is a south of the heart

that can thaw this arctic desolation

that overtakes me like an ageless night

as my thoughts fall away

like the flames of descending matches,

like angels and demons

tilted from heaven,

from the plane of their orbital hearts,

toppled like towers and lighthouses

by an urge to kiss their own reflections.

I am a dragon

chained to the nightrain

that inks the roots of the locust tree

with thorns and stars and flowers,

and my blood is a dusky mess 

of dawns and ancient sunsets.

My heart was scaled like the moon

by the phases of an empty cup,

my eyes were birdless skies

and nothing flew higher

than the feathered shadows of the trees

that roosted in the grass like water,

and there were no tears left

in the wineskin of the heart

withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,

the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.

Now I think of you

so many nights and miles away,

and I walk like a bridge toward you,

and my wings are spread out

like the pages of ample skies

that have yet to be written on by the stars,

and I must blow on my longing to be with you

like a spoonful of hot diamonds

just to keep the deserts of my thought

from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,

my eyes evaporating like crucial oases

in the heat of these visions

that burn the air

with fountains of fire

in this tavern of mystic passions

where I drink alone to you,

the furnace of my blood

silked like a black poppy

when I reach out,

a tree in winter,

the afterlife of lightning,

to touch your face like the moon.

I have been a lonely crusade of one

fighting for the gravestone of a dead god

enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,

lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,

stars in the seed of the apple,

a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.

I am an era of scars

inspired by the talons of the moon

seizing my heart like a rag of meat

in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.

I have been a poet among humans,

an indignant warrior of the heart

with an army of seasoned candles

reconnoitering distant fires in the night

that bloomed like the breath

of insurmountable divinities

gathering like birds

in the border hills of the darkness

that always took the form of a luminous woman

bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.

Crowned like an apple star

for the brilliance of my defeats,

I fall like a key of crazy sugar,

a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,

a squall of renegade stars

into the transformative valleys and bays

of your forbidden paradise,

happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,

singing into the abyss of an unknown god

that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,

a solitary on his island,

in these auroral tides

that play my blood like the pulse

of this keyboard of light

where I drown like a stone messiah

true to the excruciations of his faith

in these delinquent oceans of you.

All my poems, chalk-dust,

all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes

bent by the lightning toward earth

like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,

all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,

and the sincerity of the ways I got lost

in this labyrinth of mirrors

unspooling like a thread of blood

from an immortally wounded star,

an agony of human fire

rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird

the abyss of a night without bounds

squanders on the supremacy

of the oldest silence

time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,

the perjury of a perishing light,

if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,

the way you tear your constellations

on the thorns of the moon

and bleed like black silk

for an innocence that never found its way home.

I can taste the dark prophecies

and oracles of infernal delight

written in scars on the dangerous mushroom

of your nuclear body,

and flow like the silt of stars,

white mountain gold and night honey,

through the hives and deltas

that enshrine the ore of the rose.

I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note

broken like a harp

in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.

I can blood the night with a fever of poppies

and scoop weeping diamonds

from the black fountain

in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.

I can wield ecstasy

like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.

I can untie the knots and nooses

in the spinal cord of the butterfly

pinned like a calendar of eclipses,

a quarantined blossom,

to a dead branch under a bell of glass

and wire Eden back

to the infernal nerve of the lightning

that severed the afterbirth of the moon

from the dark mother in the garden

like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.

I know how to make love

like an embassy of shadows

to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.

I can pour the oil of winged serpents

into the lamp

and entice a ghost of snow

to dance naked in the fire.

I can lead the lost cloud

out of the mountains of the key

to the doorway of candles and stars

enshrined in the skulls of seeing.

And even when I turn my back

on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots

to rise up like rain

into the immeasurable wingspan

of these desert clarities

that bead me like a caravan

of nomadic moons,

no more than a breath of light

in a gust of stars,

I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away

from stealing you away

from the refugees and shadows

that crowd your room

like the night sky

through the astounded vowel of an open window.

PATRICK WHITE