WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,

you will not see.

What I wanted to give you,

you will not receive.

The wind may mourn your passing

like an abandoned dog

and the leaves of the silver Russian olive

may be baffled into silver

by the way you left the gate open

to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was

before you told me you loved me

like an arsonist in a wheat field,

a comet above the willow tree

that wept its way into autumn.

Go. I lay no claims or obligations

at your feet anymore than I would

try to smudge space

with the black rose of the night

that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.

You say ebulliently

you want to know passionately

the depths of love,

but like the fools before you

who blundered into the fire,

you’re only witching for volcanoes

with the tongue of a snake.

As well look for fishroads

under the dead seas of the moon

as follow the path you’re on.

And your beauty is no excuse,

your body no sanctuary,

your blackberry heart

no pilgrim to anywhere

you can’t stand in the light

trying on shadows like lingerie

in the mirror of the delusions

you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble

that has smeared the reflection of the world so long

you think you’re a planet with trees.

You’re a spiritual junkie

jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable

to animate the dust and galaxies

you have no life or love to breathe into

other than that little wind

you carry around in a bottle

in case you’re ever stranded

without an emergency exit

from all the lies you tell in paradise.

You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism

of your own unbearable insignificance,

and abase yourself prophetically

before the mountain of your own lostness,

hoping for a map

of your wandering in stone

that would authorize your confusion

as holier than the rest.

Lonely for converts,

you tell me I’m sure of heaven.

Just as lonely I reply

if someone like me

were to show up in heaven,

it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to

and how could the blessed

not feel cheated?

But you don’t get it;

you really don’t understand

that life isn’t an auditon of angels

and the black cartoon

you’ve made of yourself

to win a feather

isn’t a prelude

to the main feature

when the lights go out

and the ushers

who conducted the dead to their seats

evaporate in the aisles

and you upstage the movie

with your nakedness

as if God couldn’t see

the snake-flute of your body

dancing with serpents in the dark.

Lust alone would have been enough

to keep us together

but waking from your dream

of forbidden undertows,

washed ashore again

on your oracular island,

you kept trying to weld the right light

to the wrong shadow,

and eventually

even the most exotic futility grows boring.

You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead

of your aboriginal heart

in the toxic fires of your own undoing

and pointing it at mine

tried to deceive yourself into a direction.

And now you want,

now you long,

now you want to come back

and immerse yourself in the life

you once stepped over

like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.

You’ve suffered and grown,

you’ve wept and derived humility

from irreparable loss;

you’ve trembled before

the first, terrible intimations of the vastness

of the sky in your heart

like the virgin flight of a lost bird,

and you want to be given another chance,

to surrender yourself at the gate

you once walked through backwards

so enamoured were you of your shadow.

And you promise the river your tears,

the moon your scars, me

the rarest of your orchids in the night.

But when I ask you

what the drunk was dreaming

you still look blankly around the room

as if everything in existence

were merely the baffled clue to your beauty

and the answer

something black and revealing that clings.

You still can’t imagine

how easy it is

to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE