LOVE GOES EVERYWHERE

LOVE GOES EVERYWHERE


Love goes everywhere, a blue night wind

blowing the stars off the sills of far horizons,

making breasts of the heaving waves,

corrugated ripples, undulant mirrors

on the snake-scrawl skin of the shuddering lake,

kicking through the leaves of the heart

still not satisfied with its last draft of autumn,

arsenic on the tongues of the green dancers in the fire,

and twilights dripping like paint from the lips of vandalized roses.

Seabirds veer into its flesh like drunk swords

and there are cherries in its teeth that bleed,

and huge iron bells that come down like the pillars of dinosaurs

walking their funerals through a nuclear winter too late,

and doors off their hinges with their mouths gaping

at the swallows that come and go trying to paste

their clay and thread, a thatch of matted feathers

into a homely heart, a begging bowl of naked birds.

And the vases of love that are curved like the hips of a woman

Are as often, the fumaroles of spewing volcanoes,

bouquets of smoke and meteors, igneous ejaculations

refleshing themselves in sulfurus ores of glowing magma,

and the candles standing naked like studio models

in the ebb-tide sheets of their languid wax, and wine

on the palette of the sunset matador

who was gored on the horns of the moon,

starfish in the morning death carts of creaking Calcutta.

Up here on the wooden fire-escape, a look-out above

the begging crowns of the trees, and a solitary willow

easier than lips, waiting to rinse her hair in the rain

as if she had sisters, unravelled scars of snared lightning

off in the distance, the shock of electric bats

in the roseate boudoirs of the clouds, and the moon,

hauling its boat up the opposite bank of the Milky Way

to ferry its ghosts across the last abyss before morning,

and the stars ablaze in the flammable radiance of your eyes,

and the fire-iris in the blue of mine, I think of you, us,

and the miles between us in our continental bed

with its coverlet of cities, trains, highways, forests,

and the stains of deep-eyed lakes, plains and mountains,

the landscape of your body under sheets of autumn grain,

gathering prairie storms for a pillow, tornadoes for springs,

and our passion the conflagration of tens of thousands of acres,

the slipping of faults and cracks, the chafing of terraform plates

that shake the earth with apocalyptic ecstasy

and multiple aftershocks, love at the epicenter,

and the turmoil of crazy winds that sigh us away like grass,

and I marvel that in the tiniest house of time,

a breath within a breath, a berry in the sun,

as far as the silence away from each other,

we should live like a thriving planet,

each in the bridal coasts of the other’s arms.

And I want to nudge you with secrets,

whisper eels into your oyster ears,

gather up the mushrooms of your lips,

the soft moss of your sex

and wheel higher than a hawk

on a stairwell of semen and honey

then down the dizzy bannisters of your helical body

into the moist cellars of your rarest wines,

where the ghosts mingle in the fluids of life,

shapes of the watershed, longing for mangers.

And then I remember the rain in a likeness of you,

soft cameos of waterlilies that glow

like islands among black swans,

and the violet hyacinths that reed

the oboes of the dragonflies,

and the wild mink of stolen caresses

that nip your fingertips with the fangs of the moon,

and the terrible distances between your toes and your eyelids

a man walking on his lips

would take years to caress

and how many rivers I’d have to cross

before I came to the jewel in the root,

the fire-well and seed-lake of your tears.

And then the rain comes down harder,

heavy drops of ripe sorrow driving me back to myself,

smearing my clothes over my skin like wet, black leaves

and I sit for an hour, an ark on a mountain top in the legends of the flood,

all my dark abundance released on the bestial floor of the earth,

and an emptiness closer than death

bleeds me out into a vast space under a black sun

where the shadows of time are scattered like ashes

and all the trees in a dream are palatial pillars of salt

because I think of you laughing like a lamp in the rain,

your hair streaming skirts of beaded water

as both of us run into the same heart for shelter

and I find a clean towel to tamp your river face

and the cheeks and eyelids of the blossoms that fall upon it

and just when I’m done and go to give you a kiss, you’re gone

and there’s only these hot, glass blisters of grief to live on and on and on

believing in a day, a month, an era, a year, a moment ago

when I wake up in a doorway of bone, and you, in the flesh, appear.

PATRICK WHITE