YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come

to me written on the breath of urgent windows,

and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come

with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems

that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses

on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume

of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,

and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart

and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,

and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets

and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind

and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,

and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,

earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos

that have pierced your body with sad revelations

of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks

of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels

caught like words in the throat of a mountain

that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences

that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,

and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit

in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,

your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings

that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits

to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets

you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,

and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges

of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness

with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,

from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,

in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows

that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again

for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;

looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night

to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves

and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals

that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves

that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.

Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze

and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers

that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,

fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet

out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness

that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

PATRICK WHITE