MY HANDS WERE ONCE

My hands were once the afterlives of birds

that caressed the cheeks of the sky

and brushed back the wind from its eyes,

and took a finger to intercede with a tear

not to start a pilgrimage without a little laughter,

and I am of the stuff of three stars

and a fire in my loins

that inseminated space with planets

and wrought red iron into bells of blood,

and leaned on calcium for ladders of bone

and taught the four-armed shivas of carbon to grasp life

and dance for the wheat and the grapes and the poppies,

and man lying down with woman

in waters urged by the fires of thought

furiously rooted in the gardens of the stars.

I am the ancestor and offspring of everything

and even my solitude is the loneliness of the mountains

sleepwalking over their own seabeds,

and the way I love, a trigger of oxygen,

and the way I see, a whisper of time and space,

a feather of moonlight dipped in the ink of the night.

I have within me,

deep in the vaults of my wounds,

swords from the wars of the grass and the trees,

and words that sang like arrows in the sacred groves

to answer why I live and what I’m looking for

and why all my foundation stones are shoes worn out with roads,

and who is it looking back at me like a dark echo in a dream

to see if I’m coming like a shadow with a voice.

And there are mysterious robes lighter than a breath of silk,

auroras and light storms, water skins of the water-walking stars

that have plied themselves like the rings in the heartwood of a tree,

journals of light and rain, to sailor my spirit in a chronicle of flesh,

and be a brief thing in a brevity of eras, to know

why the tiger dies looking into the open, its eyes

yellow lamps in the bluing of the early morning

as if its death were already achieved a breath behind it

and a man crawls toward a meaning on his knees.

All the deaths are mine, the births, the names,

and my heart is the shrine of the moonrise and the dawn,

the blue honey hive of the stars and the wildflowers in their fields,

and the wind takes down what the mute rocks repeat for my sake,

and every face is a blossom or a leaf or an apple from the bough

of the orchard that seasons my emotions to advent and passage,

to the transformative oceans that drink to the bottom of themselves

and leave their empty cups on the moon to be filled again.

I have within me a beginning and an end

that open like the wings of a single gate

I passed through long before the birth of time

like the prelude of a world I hadn’t read yet

because I hadn’t finished living it in tears and blood,

running my fingers over it like the tender braille of a breast,

lapping it like blood from my own skull to see what kind of drunk I was.

And there are lifelines on the palms of everyone’s hands

valleys, rivers, nerves, creases, roots, deltas, lightning

that together make a map to every dream I’ve ever lived,

all the tragedies and joys of fugitive spirits

trying to shoot the rapids with a broken oar,

and secrets that put a finger to the lips of the dead

like the horizontal threshold of a man who stands

like an infinite pause in the doorway of waking up

and just looks at himself with nothing special in mind,

a commotion of swallows in the radiant spoons of last night’s rain.

But there’s you now, who is not me,

because I long for you like a tide longs for its island,

and can find nowhere within myself the likeness of your face,

and though I know the water knows you like an ancient migration

it leaves no trace of your vines on the lips of its waves,

and there are skies where you shine among the stars for hours

where I’ve found threads of your shadow

torn on the thorns of the constellations

like rivers unravelled from your wilderness skin,

and even once I found your footprint like a boat on a beach

but you were not in it, and the emptiness was out of reach.

And I think if I find you, if I look hard enough,

if I stare into space as still as a lizard or a telescope,

if I check every leaf the doves bring back in their beaks,

every eyelid of snow that lowers the pines into sleep,

and lace the wind with fragrant spells and tragic pleas,

if I can break the code of the rocks that ore their silver secrets

like love-letters, like poems, deep in the throat of the earth,

if I grow new eyes for the seeing from the oldest wines of my being,

and the sky has to turn black forever not to have you pale like a comet,

not to lose you like a chandelier of fireflies in a galaxy,

not to reach out and touch you like the creatrix of the creator,

I can part from this life like a gift I left in the night on the stairs.

PATRICK WHITE