OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN

Over and over and over again

you return to me each time

made more beautiful by the pain

I embrace you with

like the aura of fireflies

in the afterlife of the lightning

that was struck by you.

Over and over and over again

I have watched the birds leave in the fall

and come back in the spring

and whether they were coming or going

especially at midnight when you couldn’t see them

high overhead like the souls of the dead

I’ve always heard the same longing in their call

for something I’ve never been able to wholly comprehend

except as the way I miss you

on this journey without end

where the destination isn’t always

the friend of the road

as the stars foretold it would be.

And I don’t know why

I always associate pain with lucidity

like the price of shattered glass

when you hurl the moon through it

from the inside

to let the light in through the damage

and you back into my life again

like the radiant sorrow of a lonely tomorrow

that today already lives in vain

like a weathervane

trying to give the wind a direction

it’s never taken before.

Over and over and over again

I have looked for your hidden mystery

in the history of gone

for some living intimacy that lives on

but I’ve run out of doors and gates and windows

flowers and skies I can leave open

hoping you might find your way back in somehow

from those spaces greater than skin that fit you now

like the dress you were buried in.

The random singularity of death’s one demand

might shake the tree

into the soft hooves of the highest fruit

that gallop off like wild horses

spooked by their own windfall into the silence

but over and over and over again

I turn the fact that you once existed

like a jewel I once knew from the inside

into an act of insight

that over and over and over again

rocks me like the aftershock of an earthquake

as if your death weren’t once but many

and I would live my way through them all

listening to the geese depart at night in the fall

wondering which one embodied your soul

like a star-bound angel in earthly feathers

and whether you noticed me as you left

over and over and over again

standing in the light by the window

a tiny dark figure down below

listening for you in the darkness

like a vase full of ashes

wishing it had wings.

PATRICK WHITE