IN YOU

In you I come to the end of roads,

and an alphabet of burning wings

falls from an indigo sky

like meteors trying to write

the unsayable in a slash of light,

in a language of luminous scars

the night beatifies with mystic knowledge

that wants to name you

so deeply in thresholds and stars

the charged silence

is giving birth to an indelible mouth,

a doorway of blood,

an ancient grammar of fire

the wind puts on like a robe

to scry the darkness for a voice

that could fill the goblets

of the moon’s dead seas

with the wine of a radiant wound,

so much within me

already the tongue of a bell

that can taste you like blackberries.

The whole of you

in every single drop of your eyes,

you are the black swan

of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,

the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon

that sways like a bell in the night,

even your absence a shape of cherishing,

a harvest of shadows beyond the light

of the lamp that burns for you.

Within the deepest abyss of myself

where the heart stands alone

like a single black pillar

in the twilight wasteland of the world,

a mysterious temple to the ultimacy

of having been here once

to suffer the passage of form and time,

everything a gesture of space

that thaws back into itself,

I have written your name

in the hourglass of my blood

like a whisper of secret ink

that once voiced the light to be

and shook the stars like wheat

out of its blind abundance

and will be remembered forever

as the first intimacy of the sea,

and there is the rumour

of a dream in the air,

the fragrance of an approach,

that out of an ocean of light

the tide will embody a woman

like the shore of an island

littered with fingertips and kisses

enmeshed like galaxies and starfish

in the exhalation of her veils

and our lips will meet like archers,

and our bodies will sing like arrows

sunk like orchards through the heart

and long after the last flame of life is shed,

the night will silence the birds

in the groves where we bled like poppies

to open the gates of the mystery

like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls

that chants its prayers to the night

like the slow alarm of autumn geese

in the eyes of a human face.

I try to say what can’t be said,

pouring my spirit

into the wineskin of every word,

but my heart is a larger apple

than the bough of my voice can bear,

and the silence

that would erect temples everywhere like flowers

spun from the auroral silks of my soul

and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,

every emotion a priest with a shaven head

to honour the moon

climbing the stairwell within me

of a million horizons at once

in every breathless step,

falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship

that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat

or a message in a bottle

that pleads like wine with the emptiness

for an alphabet that isn’t in arrears to time

to say you to the night

in a lightning breath of life beyond

these elemental likenesses I carve

from a quarry of stars.

And I know I ask for immortal children

from a human womb,

and wide as my powers are

to exceed the sky with homing birds,

to adorn the dead branch with windows

that dazzle the roots of dawn,

I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,

a stone man with a chain for a tongue

when I try to swim like Atlantis

through the depths of your shining within

and the last word, the last life

to flash across my mind as I drown

again and again like a pulse

in the embrace of your beauty

is always the world as it is

before anything was said.

PATRICK WHITE