AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES

AND SHOULD I RECALL WHOSE EYES

And should I recall whose eyes made the stars most beautiful,

and set the mindstream that flowed though us aflame with fireflies

a moment there and gone and come again like light

in the keyholes of the feral cats that prowled the graveyardshift

wholly to the top of the broom-swept path up Heartbreak Hill,

where the bones of the seven hanged men lay buried

in the duff of our childhood legends, a shadow and a name,

trying love on shyly like new clothes in the shadows of the pines,

where we lay down with the dead on beds of rusty compass needles,

out of sight of the windows of the town, how could I not feel,

here alone now by the Tay, thousands of miles away,

and more years later than it takes to walk a burning bridge,

waiting for the flower moon to appear above the horizon,

the waterclock in the nightbird’s song of longing?

And if I were to say what it was like to be touched by her

when she was brave with hunger and my body

all loaves and fishs in the innocence of her hands

and her breasts and lips magic mushrooms without the flies

that swarmed the garbage cans in the back-alleys below,

and though it was not wise to begin a new life

on the last night of the past we were ending together,

like a bell and a cannon that had been melted down

from the same dark ore of a life we were cut out of

like a wound in a loveletter we left unsigned for one another,

because good-bye was harder to write than just to let things go,

what words could I use that weren’t already

denuded of their shining like a windfall

of black dwarfs on the windowsills of time,

and the stars that night that clung to the sky

like bubbles in the evanescence of glass

or the grass to our flesh, all washed off now

as if they were grime, the quiet patina of time

gilding the dust like rainbows on the wings of flies?

And the wind asks, and the water sylphs want to know

and the wild willows are holding their breath like a veil

and the Tay is pulling a curtain of water aside in its wake

to hear about another stranger the earth swallowed

like a sacred syllable in the mouth of a snake

that envied the waterbirds their wavelengths and wings,

and though the skeletal birch and prophetic skulls

in the riverbed plead like the end of a dream

for one more lullaby in the ghost story of the moonrise,

I show them the black pearl of my heart

lustrous as hard coal to burn again in the furnace of dawn

on the dark side of the moon in partial eclipse

as I weep like a dragon for the secrets I keep

like myths of origin in the urns of things that are gone

like the irrevocable flightfeathers of the words and waterbirds

under the lost petals of fire that bloom in the eyes of the flower moon.

PATRICK WHITE