SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS

SOMETHING DEEPER THAN TEARS

Something deeper than tears to weep for you.

I weep blood. I weep the silence

on the backstairs with the screen door

that bangs like the sound of one hand clapping

all through the night at the slightest gust of wind

as if a constellation were trying

to strike up a insightful conversation

with a wet match, the sceptre of a spent blossom.

I need a moon deeper than water to drown in.

I need to dance the pain away

in a sword dance of serpents

that know how to carry a tune

like a well fledged arrow, a beautiful toxin,

straight to the heart of the mysterious apple

that’s sitting on top of my head like a prophetic skull.

No flower can say. Not any number of song sparrows

returning to the budding tree in spring,

no green leaf of an innocent tongue,

not even this dry leaf of mine in autumn

writing lyrics on the wind no one can read,

not even among ghosts, can find a voice

that isn’t already the dead language

of an absence that can’t be adorned

by a seance of words.

I light no candles. I summon no gods.

No pretence of knowing where you’ve gone.

No black hole that’s as empty as

your ring on the table, no halo

that ever fell as far from heaven.

Good-bye’s too optimistic and farewell’s

the rudder of a grave on the rocks.

And if I were to raise the paper sail

of another poem like the waxing phase

of the funereal moonboat

that carried you away,

I’d make it black. I’d raise it

like the shroud of a black magician

that can make things disappear,

like an eclipse at half mast

and patch it with the skull and crossbones

of a different phase of the moon on the dark side.

I wouldn’t return your personal belongings

back to the morning like starlings and doves.

But there aren’t enough sacred syllables

swimming like moonlit fish

in the watershed of the silence

to open this fountainmouth of grief

like an aviary of flightless birds.

Nor would I risk having you remember me,

and turn around like a false start,

supposing you can still recall anything at all,

like a light you left on in the hall

the night you left home for good.

You were magic while you were here to work it.

You were the black nun of an enlightened cult of one.

You were the black mass of the sun at midnight

and the blood sister of the moon

that nicked your finger

on both her crescent thorns at once

so one was the cure to the other’s wound

like the eyes of a cat, the fangs of a snake.

Given how close to the moon you were

it didn’t come as a surprise

when you started writing me loveletters

inscribed in bone as if you’d just invented

a whole new language out of your claws

to make love to a poet in the nude when the moon

didn’t lay its silver sword down between us

to keep us a threshold apart from our fingertips.

And it wasn’t long before the elixir began to work

and I lost count of the number

of consensual metaphors I had for your lips,

similitudes for the night skies

that surrounded your eyes in a delirium of stars

that revelled in the crazy wisdom

of their mystically inspired atmospheres.

As just as beautiful as they were,

so were they irresistibly dangerous.

How many light years now

have I poured this memory of them

like a love potion over my roots

and waited for you to bloom in my bloodstream

like stars and blossoms streaming

through the heartwood of an ageing tree

that has as many dead branches on it as it does leaves,

and like an orchard anticipating moonrise,

knew you weren’t coming anymore,

and the night bird had no one to sing for?

But, hey, I’m still a better seance

than I am an exorcism and if you can hear me

calling the faithful to prayer

in all directions at once like a paper airplane

the boy in me has sent out to search for you

like a loveletter in a hurricane of razor wire,

dripping with clusters of blood

the size of hemorrhaging grapes,

fireflies caught in a spider-web

of starless constellations that aren’t a sign

of anything except I miss you worst at night.

If you could sense the tremor

in even the slightest wavelength of light

I’m trying to shine on the darkness to find you,

I’d write you a holy book of sacred silence

inspired by the shadows in my blood

that overtake me like strangers from behind

with an urgent message not to return home

to what isn’t there anymore.

I’d sit out here all night by myself

beside the black waters of this night creek

unravelling like a ribbon in mourning,

that’s been talking to itself

as it walks in its sleep on the water,

and I would beseech the stars with my eyes

to let me know if they’ve seen you,

and in my heart I would entreat them

with the solo of a wounded wolf

raising its head up in a wild prayer

to catch a trace of you on the chilly night air,

to give me a starmap to when and where

I can see you face to face again

and touch your eyelids in your sleep

like crocuses coming up through the snow.

Like moonrise in the apple blow of the storm

that scattered us to winds like all these poems

I’ve tried to write for you ever since

as if you were still somewhere nearby

like another pair of eyes

in my pain and my solitude

watching from the woods

the stars, the water, the moon,

under the stones in the river

that mark your grave and name

above the flowing of this endless epitaph

of leaves and blossoms and poems

as if you alone could still read them,

like the comings and goings,

of waterbirds on the moon,

the first draft of words on the wind,

maple leaves and keys on the mindstream,

and still understand what I was trying to mean.

PATRICK WHITE