YOUR INTENSITIES

Your intensities dissipating in the silence

that follows your urgent avowals,

it hurts to be subjected to oblivion

like a burnt out streetlamp in a city of light,

to stare into the invisible blaze of the vastness

without eyelids

like craters on the moon aghast with shadows

scabbing the nightshift of a crown factory,

love’s labour locked out,

a footprint on the neck of a flower,

trampled like a protest sign by the crowd

of platitudinous slogans that defame it,

and the pain growing wider than the bridge

that can cross it

and my heart trying to pretend

it’s still a scratched poppy

when everybody knows

it’s a haemorrhaging rose.

And the stars have hardened into diamond thorns

that score the eyes like rocks

striated by arctic runes

in the path of advancing glaciers,

and there’s a hawk in my chest

excavating the message of the dove

I sent to look for land,

and every moment is the era

of a lingering why

that hauls me out to sea like a death barge

to dump my severed body parts

like scrapings off a plate

and no matter how eloquently

I rehearse for a role

in a farce of infinite agonies,

I’ve played the part too many times before

not to know

it’s all just birdseed in a cemetery

that’s tired of hearing itself moan for the dawn.

The wind blows through me

like the ghost of a curtain

long after the window it hung from has thawed,

blows through me like the slash

of a long, fluid incision

as if a knife were learning how to master

the serpentine penmanship

of a sacred crescent of the moon,

and there’s blood all over the page.

And even as the schoolhouse

of a famous arsonist’s childhood,

even as a sacrifice bunt at home plate

I feel neglected and trivial,

a butterfly, a blossom, a rag of blood

torn on the razor-wire of vehement absolutes.

Blood. Passion. Muse. Love;

the submerged foundation stones

of an Atlantean temple

kissing the feet of starfish

or the live walking of aspiring mountains

rising like stairwells up to the doorways

of unnamed constellations,

someone with the courage at last

to step into the open

without their shadows on,

disrobed of all eclipses,

all the inkwells of their spiritual indelibles

ready to taste the wine

that would make a drunkard of a desert for life

and wakes the dragons

in the throat of the well

to dispell their dreams like rain.

Lime in the grave of a used resurrection,

detonating leaking explosives

in the quarry of a black hole,

pouring igneous iodine over the fang marks

of the delirium of toxins and elixirs

that follows the colon of your silence

like the sloughed skin of the moon,

bleached, isolated, more apprehensive

than a field of harvest wheat

watching a scarecrow play with matches,

the clouds of an overhead storm

arcing blue lightning over the grain,

I break black bread with myself in a private hell

where the only way to smuggle in a firefly

is in a fireproof pocket of ashes

and the moon passes secret mirrors through the bars

and the only visitor to log in

is the death mask

of an old vacancy from the past

that has stood by me all these years like a key.

Is it circumstance, inclination, mood, a sloppy heart

that dips this noose of vinegar in the wine

to blow bubbles

in the eye of a hurricane,

or are you just amusing capricious reflections

in the mindflow of a wishbone river

that cracks like a bough

under the weight of its mute bells of ice?

And if it’s death you toy with

like toe-nail clippers,

I had thought to die more originally

than a paring of the moon on the floor,

the mediocre cremation of a shabby fire

I could swallow like a swab of cotton candy

laced with lighter fluid

to smoke the bats out of the attic

and amuse the dazzled bumpkins on the midway.

I have roared with the ghosts of glass lions

and wept like time with ashen wizards

and danced with prophetic shadows

in the lairs of demonic clarities

that could melt thought

in the creative heat of their ferocities

and I wear the scars of ancient claws

worthy of the sword that wept

like wounded ore on the moon

to plunge through their hearts

like a meteor without a warning.

And I have been torn like a page

out of the mauled journal of the rose

like a heretical orchard of blackthorn

and stayed up all night

like an unfinished poem

drinking down to the lees

of the seabeds of oblivion

until I emptied the cellars of my own darkness

down to the last good year of stars

and I could hear the whisper of a palace

in the hovel of a bottle

raise my skull to a throne.

My death is not a stranger

to the pillars of my own domains,

and there are skies that wait

with the dignity of mystic robes

every time I wash the stain of the world off

in my own grave,

and silver oils distilled from attendant ravens

that supple the agony of the worst sunspots

with the tender fountain-mouths

of the unsayable encounters that inspire

the bruised grail maidens

that bloom like nocturnal wildflowers

in a far field

to come looking for me

like the cure for their own eyes

in the labyrinthine courts of the hidden king

that rules the afterlife of the night

at the visionary discretion of a living man.

Behind the door of every affirmation,

the assassin of a denial,

as every flower engenders the frost

that will snuff it

and every candle is a pilgrim

on the road to its own extinction.

And I know it’s hard to live beyond the obvious

without a map back to your face

or breadcrumbs in the wilderness,

a voice beyond the clamour of worldly echoes,

the first feather of an abyss

that’s never known wings,

and your heart the rumour of an avalanche

that’s buried you alive

in the valley of its own debris before,

but I thought you had died enough already,

not to be looking up

at the blue bones of heaven like a shovel,

or weeping like shattered glass

at the graveside of a sparrow

that mistook the burning kites

of your midnight love-letters

for fire lilies blooming like reversed torches

on the extraordinary translucency

of a sky as yielding as silk spun from the cocoons

of the rarest stars to ever burn on water.

And it’s not that I’m not grateful

for the little eras of life that go by

like urns and rosebuds,

or the undulations of flesh and gold

that silt the hungry deltas with siloes of sacred grain,

I have been empowered by many deaths

that have slain me deeper into life

than the roots of the veils and delusions

to squander my blood like an ocean

at the feet of their busy altars,

knowing even space

must fall like a petal at last,

and the silence

of these eternities that pass

through the eye of the moment

like little red threads of blood

must give up their dead

like stories the wind tells around a fire

to make the stars tremble

with the secret lives of water

that unravel like embroidery

on the soiled pillowcase of a dream

that woke up without a tongue

in the shadows of a floodgate

that gapes like the mouth of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE