EACH WINDOW ITS MOON

EACH WINDOW ITS MOON

Each window it’s moon,

and a thousand lakes around here

each wearing it like a medallion.

The spirit of a woman haunts me

as the starlings head for home

and I just want to go down by the river awhile

and sit among some companionable bones

while the daylilies tender their buds

to the hot night air, and the river runs by me

without any notion of what I see in it.

No waterlilies yet, but the wild irises

are protruding out of their blue green sheaths

like cartridges of lipstick, and the clouds clear

and the stars get me thinking about her again,

and all the tender lucidities held in abeyance

I would say to her if she were here.

My heart startles me and jumps like a fish.

The fireflies play a game with me

where I have to guess what constellation

I’m in now as they ricochet off the water like a starmap.

She’s beautiful and bright and dangerous

as a witch in heat, and she’s been hurt so deeply

she loves the stars the way I do because

distance is a guarantee of their innocence

and she uses her pain like a weapon

on behalf of other people who suffer as she does.

Who hasn’t been wounded deeply by someone they loved?

Who hasn’t thought of suicide in a bus station washroom

where the mirrors won’t leave you alone with yourself

long enough to think of a destination

that isn’t bleak and unknown and against the way

your heart’s aching to go, you go, you just go

as you throw the face you just wiped off in the trash can

and try to get on with a life that’s over?

And once the scars have healed what they could

the terrifying blandness of a world that tramples

on the absence deep within you everyone ignores

by whipping your heart with advice, as the leaves

are hair braided like feathers into the tresses of the willows,

clarity, peace, and a solitude that understands you

better than anyone else can, one afternoon

in a backyard somewhere, sitting alone

in the shadow water of the maples and black walnuts

inundating the grass as the sun goes down,

when you least expect it, resonate with your awareness

of being lost, but delighting in the fact you can’t be found,

without feeling your happiness is some kind of consolation prize.

The ant with the wing of a butterfly in its mandible

doesn’t shine like a star cluster of floral chandeliers

they way love once did, it glows like a tiny coal of life

turning to diamond in the heart. Arcturus in Bootes.

Brutal exigencies acceptable to an incomprehensible radiance,

the commotion that has stirred the prophetic cauldron

for light years now has almost always been terminally creative

and I’ve always known the absurdity I’m dying in the name of

has been accelerated by dark energy into the expansiveness

of a sublimated kind of love that evaporates

like the ghosts of a diamond of dry ice into the night.

Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been working nightshift

on the looms of the spiders weaving curtains

to hang over the mouth of a screaming window

that never got over breaking up with the moon.

No longer apprenticed to a mage of crazy wisdom

I could take it from here on my own like this river

if I had to. I could flow like a diamond all the way to the sea.

I could get drunk down here with Li Po’s shadow

and drown in my own reflection, trying to embrace the moon.

And it would be all right, all right. I could live with that.

Like a red shift in the way I paint, and sure proof

I’m not wasting my life writing poems inspired by the abyss.

I could live like the black stone of a meteorite

that was never meant to be kissed, and it would be all right,

I could always tell myself when I needed a delusion

to rationalize why I’ve come so far the way I have,

I was a nickel-iron tektite with new paradigms of life

in my core that were contaminating life

with the antidotal memes of a creative future

that doesn’t replicate like logos into the brittle corals of life

we’re all being keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon.

I could tell myself all that but there would be one black pearl

like a new moon missing from the rosary of the truth

like the unknown name of someone inconceivably absent

as I sit here waiting for her to step out of the birch groves

like a white-tailed doe. Because I’ve become too foolish

to make a fool of myself, too hermetically balanced

to damn my own salvation for the sake of a greater bliss?

I’ve always thought it was a lunar privilege to love someone

and if they loved you back with anymore light

than a reflected glory with a few stars in it

to spice up the flavour of the imported candles,

you lived in the aura of a human divinity

like a paradise without any gates and you could

write poems on the wings of the butterflies

they passed on to the wild flowers that inspired them.

You could forgive the thorns of the locust tree full of bees

for not wanting to die like martyrs to their own blessings.

Or the begging bowls of necessity that came to realize

that life was something they couldn’t afford

not to be attached to. And maybe I’ve been

looking at the stars too long for things

they don’t know themselves, but it all made

incandescent human sense to counterpoint

all that lonely fury in the cold distance,

that can be dwarfed by the loneliness of people,

to ingather all the supernovas of my expanding afterlives

and use them to kindle the shining of someone I loved.

And I was willing to tap into the heat of hell itself if need be

so she could bathe naked among the stars

blowing bubbles like the multiverse into the abyss

that always smelled like cucumbers and apricots

as greater than a goddess, she shampooed her hair

and clipped the dead ends of the willows like a woman

highlighted by the medicinal signs of her intelligence.

A discipline, an art, a devotion, a grace of human nature

in the service of a body, a mind, and a spirit

that wasn’t unacquainted with demons,

I lived like a warrior on the cutting edge

of growing thresholds in perilous doorways

as the sages of my dragon blood stood watch over her

as she dreamed, and wherever she touched me

my scales turned into the feathers of fabulous fire birds

and I was the happy heretic who burned in sin

at the stakes of desire without any apprehension

of punishment or isolation in an urn of ashes.

Immolations of the spirit in a sexual narcosis

of gratified dreams. Sex as the bread of the soul,

butter on a cat’s feet, salt on the tail of the bird,

the lyric of the mob, the muse of the poet’s ode,

champagne and mud, the mythic inflation of love,

the dark root of the white blossom in the moonrise.

The jewel in the lotus like the third eye of a drop of dew

shining translucently in a flash flood of light

from stars that bloom like the flowers of solitude.

Time for the angels to sleep with the daughters

of men again. Time for the demons to dance

with the fireflies like the shadows of candles

in a shrine to what’s holy about the devoutly insane.

The hour come round to break this windowpane

like a pact between me and the stars and return

this journey of enlightenment back to the place

it started from like a mountain in the valley of a woman.

Let my eyes thaw. And her passion be the firewalk

of a weathervane that’s never sure which way

the wind’s playing for keeps from one day to the next.

Breach the clarity of the abyss with the bliss

of a commotion that surpasses the void bound

intimacies of a peace that’s about to return to transcendence.

PATRICK WHITE