IF I WERE TO GIVE YOU A BLACK SHAWL OF WOVEN RIVERS

IF I WERE TO GIVE YOU A BLACK SHAWL OF WOVEN RIVERS

If I were to give you a black lace shawl of woven rivers

would you wear it over the moonlit hills

of your bare shoulders like a spell I cast

to keep you as warm as a firefly on a cold night?

Or would you mistake it for a bird net or a spider web

or think I’m fishing in the depths for the black pearl

of a new moon to hold in an old moon’s arms?

Or milk your last crescent as an antidote to your charms?

If I were to show you a back road out of hell

as Orpheus did Eurydice, would you look back again

at the long path that came to this and think

you’d rather drink black cool aid in Jonestown

than follow a goated footed sherpa up

into the mountains of the moon that cast their spells

like the shadows of sundials in a flowerless garden?

Would the stars that are flowing between us

suddenly harden into diamonds, would an ice-age

come of a spring thaw, or would you neglect it all

like global warming, or just another butterfly

in the mouth of a dragon that doesn’t know when

to keep his shut. Should Merlin fall on the sword

he embedded in rock like iron ore when iron

was still a magical metal, or should he fire up the forge

recast his sword, and crown himself the king of metallurgy?

I’m not rich, but if I were to stand on a streetcorner for you

and play the songs I wrote for you the night before

on a blue guitar I managed to save from the housefire

of a weeping violin that couldn’t put it out for love or money,

would you still love me for who I am and was,

or look for a just cause to hand me a suitcase full of ashes

and show me the door like a snowflake

to the furnace of your Fukushima heart

like a crumpled loveletter you read like junkmail

meant to suck you in to a romantic scam for life

without any heavy water to speak of to cool your eyes?

Or would you let me risk my luck up against yours

between the wishbone of your thighs and give me a break?

Tine the tongue of the snake like a tuning fork

that can taste the lightning to come in every chimney spark?

Or if I were to lose, still cherish me for my own sake,

and give me a rain cheque until my lifeboat comes in

like providence on the last high tide of the moon

to sail the skull and crossbones among the angel fleets

like a cheap thrill off the coasts of Atlantis?

Or would you treat me as just another seagull

looking for scraps in the waning wake of moonset

unweaving by night what it wove by day

like Penelope among a hovering flock of unwanted suitors?

I could teach you how to fletch the arrows of love

like hawks that never missed their targets,

or the flightfeathers of skylarks and mourning doves

should you prefer them to the quills of the peacocks

that never fly any higher than the lowest rung of the tree,

a hundred eyes open like hand mirrors on a vanity

but none that can see you as I can like an ageing man

who can find nothing to compare you to yesterday

but a few rogue stars that whispered between the lines

of their unnamed constellations, things that I want

to say to you today out loud as if I had wings

on my heels and a secret crane-bag around my my neck

with an hermetic alphabet that could talk

to your body in tongues like a morning snail

riding its own smear of love like a skyful of mirrors

flowing like unholy rivers through a sacred garden of starmud.

PATRICK WHITE