WHAT I WOULD SAY TO YOU

WHAT I WOULD SAY TO YOU

What I would say to you if you were near,

if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river

to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock

and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water

enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire

to poems I never wanted to own,

every burning lily of paper floating away

like another crown I’ve set free

from this domain of air and shadows

to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,

weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both;

I would say to you in the pyres and the petals

of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash

of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes

of these poems that confess their love to the flames

with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke

gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here

in the form of a man, I would say,

it was always the hive of your silence

that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey

rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.

And I’d try not to talk too much,

letting the fish jump for the two of us,

and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away

like things not said into the water

and I’d draw you in under the bough of my arm

that was never much of a yoke

as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,

and hold you a long time in the vastness

before I turned to kiss you for everything

and fall down back into the silver grass

to make love to you on the moon.

And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest

your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,

I would mingle blood and starlight

with the wine of your body and being

like a chalice lying empty by the river

that has brought us both to drink from one another

like the deer that will come out later from the grove

to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death

would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds

among the scepters of the cattails,

and I’d want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky

for this night of being human long enough

to understand its brevity is its beauty

and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,

burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,

like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak

look as if they’re trying to swim, and one poem

more enduring than the rest,

floats downstream under a frozen elbow

raised to take the next stroke,

and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself

levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha

into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment

that grasps at nothing. Form

is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem

had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,

and though you’re not with me now,

we’ve never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird

lands on the water, and then another,

and I think of them as you and I

arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night

and the bright vacancy

between the sidereal knots

in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile

weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing

love is I wonder what love is,

as the fireflies flash their assent,

and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,

and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here

as much for the island that spreads the stream

into the waterlegs of a woman

like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself

like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,

to launch my fleet of poems

like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.

I like being a child alone on the shores of things,

turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance

among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick,.

and I’ve always asked questions no one could answer,

awed by the fact of being here at all

under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,

everything’s got a mouth of its own to answer,

and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I’m never as old by these waters

as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon

you told me to watch as you would

is always so much more on this undulant black mirror

than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.

There’s a birch and three willows

and the third of the three is you

dipping your hair in the water

as if you were trying to root in glass.

And it’s no surprise to know you know how

to drink the whole river in a single gulp

and swallow a whole star with your eyes

in a single glimmer

the way a solitary drop of water

at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass

entirely fits the entire skin of the sky

because I already know how you can consume the whole of me

from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice

and from a single hair of your head,

or the eyelash on your cheek

that is all that separates us now,

from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,

so I can be here with you as I have always been

on the other side of death

where everything in creation

above and below this river of night,

from the furthest galaxy

to the dragonfly on my right

is expanding like a lily of fire into us,

as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.

So it’s easy to know where it’s all going;

releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,

raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream

rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,

it’s always, like birds and stars and fish

been flowing into us.

PATRICK WHITE