YOU DON'T NEED TO PUT A SUPERNOVA IN A WINDOW

YOU DON’T NEED TO PUT A SUPERNOVA IN A WINDOW

You don’t need to put a supernova in a window

like a candle in a telescope

to help me find my way back to you

from the next galaxy over. I’m gone

like a sixties light show after the music was over.

But I didn’t close you like a door behind me,

I didn’t find you like a threshold

in the spirit’s lost and found

and try to return you to the house you belonged to.

I’ve always been a little ahead of myself

so when I said good-bye, it will be light years yet

before you know anything about it.

It’s just that time doesn’t linger in the doorway

of enlightenment, and eternity isn’t any closer to God

than the next moment is. A hundred billion stars

two thousand lightyears away and you,

checking the wiring on blasting caps in a beaver dam

that’s threatening to flood the road you’re on

as I go off like a firefly already

two mellenia into the future that’s looking forward

to meeting you eye to eye in a brighter place than this

just to see if you recognize me as I am.

Black matter in the lifemask of a blossom

peaking through the keyhole of the universe next door

to see if I’ve returned to my room like the moon

with a curfew it’s in my nature to break forever

whenever we are, if the timing’s not right.

If you can’t see in the dark what the light owes

to the shadows who have died for it

just to attract your attention from afar again

like a man who’s been tarred and feathered

and set aflame like a phoenix in the rootfires of the sumac.

Like an immolation that scatters the ashes of a burning house

all over the garden you’ve been tending

like a urnful of flowers about to come out.

Like a candle in the darkness enlightenment

snuffed out on the dark side of the moon

to keep you from being lost in the blazing like a star at noon.

I lead you away from me, like all I’ve ever wanted.

I say good-bye to keep death from saying hello along the way

as if it had met you somewhere before I came on the scene

like a flame thrower with a flare for arson burning

like the passion flower of a dragon on a pyre beside the Ganges.

To raise you up shining out of the grave of your aspirations

like lightning and fireflies in the updraft of my expedient means.

So when you cry over someone you’re missing like me,

your tears have the power of a sunflower in the garden after dark,

and the ashes turn green. And scarlet runners bind themselves

like the happy home fires of heretics to the triune axes of your tent poles.

PATRICK WHITE