SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,

a profound tenderness,

something to cherish

in the loneliness of being human

in these vast, cold spaces,

as I read your words

like poppies in my blood again.

What stars could I call upon,

what roses could I ask for their skin,

what darkness charge with radiance,

what ploy of dancing buddhas

could I summon

to let you know

you are all my sky within,

and the assent of my soul in the morning

and the bough of my homing at night,

that there is within me a blind fire,

an invisible flame

that consumes me in the ferocious beauty

of its unseen flowering

even in a flurry of faces

and the business tugging the donkey of the day

braying like a knot in a stream of wood,

and all the objects and forms of the world

are burning mirrors I look into to see

the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,

the irridescent luster of your shining,

how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,

and a dark shrine of desire

that can wake the valley dragons

with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.

I want to kiss your kneecaps;

I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips

and feel my kisses break like bread,

I want to feel my mouth

blossoming on the nape of your neck

and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields

of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,

I want to taste the silk

of the inside of your thighs

as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,

and approach your breasts like crowns,

and under a full moon

tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue

like a stranger in the doorway

of an infinite longing to make you shudder

like the void into light

with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids

that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.

I am the luminosity and shadow

of your green lamp that glows like the sea,

and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries

over the alluvial plain of your stomach

and touch you like a prophet

running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,

savouring the revelations

that throb like a pulse in space;

and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves

over the blue thresholds of your hills

and root their lightning in your body

like a tree of light, a new map of rivers

for your blood to follow back to me

like the echo of thunder in a well.

And all through the day

with its curbs and functions

I imagine the lilt of your fingers

on the rim of a coffee cup,

the cougar in the glance of your eyes,

the way you put a knife down on the table

like a smile without a script

and what it would be like

to circumnavigate the equator of your waist

with a rosary of kisses

to raise you like a sunken continent

out of your depths

and explore all your tides and passages

with the fervour of a dolphin in a bay of wine.

I want to be tangled like a kite

in the turmoil of your hair,

the night watchman of your dreams,

the one who notices

what no one else looks for,

the stone of the small grave

you sweep with your eyelashes

when the leaves of autumn

lie down with the shadows of spring

and the virgin windows of your tears

that no one has ever looked through

weep like glass over the secret root

of a flower only a child could see.

Beyond reason, gates, words,

where the bridges take off their shoes

to admire their feet in the water

and the waterlilies kiss the thorn

of the star that tore them like skin

and whisper ancient pollens to the night

softer than flour and saffron,

and everything I say to you

isn’t a wound in the light,

a mouthful of shadows,

a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,

fleets of butterflies

learning how to sail the oceans of the rose

like the keels and wings

of love-letters you can read in the dark,

I want to fold you in my arms like the moon

and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes

for a gold rush of fireflies

in the all night boomtowns

of a heart that struck it rich

digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE