YOU ARE CRAZY

You are crazy and beautiful

and wounded and wild

and the youngest daughter

of a coven of poetic sea-witches,

and dangerous as the moon in your changes,

the fragrance of night

hovering over the blue star-honey

of your seductive hive of candles,

the skulls you drink from naked,

anointing the fire

with libations of blood and wine,

dancing to the passionate lament

of ancient serpents

unfolding their wings

like eras in the lives of stars,

constellations that have come and gone like leaves,

seasons that are only distant whispers

in the hourglass of the hills,

voices that have outlived the ears to hear them.

And we are no more contained

than is the wind, the white cloud

in our approach to lucidity,

and we have been wave and shore

many times for each other already,

and I have heard how

the night flute of your solitude

suffers like an island,

and the wizards have worked

an extra contemplative shift

to make you the gift of a gate

when my love of you

alloys my will

to the light of the urgency.

There is a wholeness to your being such that

even when the night shatters like a mirror,

all of you is reflected in every piece,

and your eye at the keyhole

unfolds me like a starchart

trying to locate a deep sky object

burning ferociously in wavelengths of black.

I am enrobed in your mystery like a waterfall

and you swim, a silver fish,

through the roots of my mind like the moon,

and the shadow of every thought

is a likeness of you

that I’ve conjured out of space like an aurora,

a feather of smoke

to limn your features mystically

in apricot-violet fires that flower like paint

and I take you away with me sometimes

where I can savour you alone like a mountain

where the silence prowls like a cougar

and you keep the wilderness to yourself

and your presence is enough of a fountain

to turn my heart into a mouth

entranced into speaking in the tongues

of the hidden grammars of blood

that pi the spirit with golden ratios

and passionate incommensurables.

You are a star caught

in the curtains of my seeing

and we are only eyelids away

from finding a flower

worthy of the sight

as you seed the darkness with light,

and I carve your face,

your transformative beauty,

out of a block of eyeless uranium

that glows invisibly like an emotion

that only blooms in exile,

a genius among elements

that gives herself away

like an orchard in a storm,

a serpent in the labyrinth,

the blessing of a weapon.

How could I know you in any other words;

how could I win the trust of your riddles

and climb the stairs of your neglected shrines

to the reluctant priestess

chanting in the shadows

of her own eclipsed altars

for a sacrifice that would answer

the impiety of a lifetime?

If I don’t touch you there,

if you don’t feel my breath upon the nape of your neck

like the wind on a lake,

if your blood

doesn’t turn into a red light district

without emergency exits

at the thought of being caressed

on the other side of your skin,

on the other side of the tapestry,

how could the hidden clarity

ripen into the crazy wisdom

of the bird that was born of a jewel

and you exceed yourself like wings?

You are all flavours of the fire

that bewitches the tongue of the snake

to divine the air for grails of water

with a branch of conscious lightning

that wants to taste you through its fingertips

like a note in a tuning fork

that will open the dark gate of your radiance

like the key to a secret release.

And I know how often

love is a dream in a graveyard

where only the rootless flowers say

what they can about severance

and the abyss of the heart that falls from its crown,

and the urgent vacancy of a throne

that governs lying down

beat like grief against the cageless door of a cold stove;

I have wept on stone,

trying to make a lie come true,

a mirage turn solid,

a ray of light linger in my bloodstream

like a locket dropped from a bridge,

I have been the timely extinction

of mystic alarms

that woke me early to grief

and what the thief left of my afterlife,

and I have been the razorblade,

the knife that bled to death,

that cut itself out like the tongue of a wound

rather than inflict a law upon love

that would tin the waterlilies

with savage indignation.

I have made one infinity of two zeroes,

and handcuffed myself

to the top of a tree

to throw the pack of chainsaws

that chased me up it like a scared messiah

off the scent of blood

that rippled through the heartwood,

and climbed down

like a quiet last judgment

when nobody was around

and stood in the doorway of my grave

like a letter delivered to the wrong address,

and cursed myself

for all the things I couldn’t save.

I have tried to knit honey

from the smoke of the fire

that spread like pollen over the fields,

but it was always tainted

by the taste of a black saint

retreating into a starless night

like the shadow of a bird

that had nothing to sing to the dawn.

And I withdrew from life

like the cult of virulent addiction

and lived like a ghost in detox

parsing planets like flaws on a rosary

and idling among the late night shadows on the walls

like a stone fish among the reeds.

And my name

was a word in a foreign language

I didn’t understand

until you said it like a wind of light

that had wandered like a road through time

to breathe me again

and pick my body up like a lost glove

lying by the lifelines in the wineskin valleys of your hand.

Until you were you

among the veils and interpretations,

black swan enthroned in a sky of fire,

the ghost of a bell

in the rain mirror

that arrayed your face like a whisper of islands,

I had never looked into my own eyes

as if they belonged to someone else.

PATRICK WHITE