I MOVE THROUGH THE SHADOWS THAT HAVE THEIR FLOWERING TOO

I MOVE THROUGH THE SHADOWS THAT HAVE THEIR FLOWERING TOO

I move through the shadows that have their flowering too.

I see you blooming through the pale

of the trunks of the black walnuts

like a fire you’ve been sitting around a long time,

wondering if you’re a habitable planet

or a belt of asteroids that hang like skulls from your waist,

orbiting around a middle-aged avuncular sun

as affable as a porch light welcoming you to the abyss.

You don’t always need a beginning to get something done

or a sunset to remind you it’s getting late.

I can hear your sorrows like waterbirds

down by the lake where the raccoons drowned the coydog

by luring it out of its depths. Dead Dog’s Dream Self.

The titles of old poems invariably return

like roads that have picked up their own scent

and follow it like fog and smoke and a seance of stars

high in a darkened lighthouse full of lament.

I want to see you jump your own fire like a witch

dressed in nothing but your best tattoos.

I want to see the savage in you come out

like a rare lynx at noon when your shadows

are withdrawn like claws that could make the light bleed.

I don’t want to be sacrificed to anything anymore.

I don’t want to relate to someone’s heart through an embassy.

I just want to lie down with you in the eerie blue grass

like an astronomer with the universe in his arms

and be totally ignored by cosmic events

as I take your earlobes in my teeth like oysters and pearls.

Black. Because you’re a new moon. Hard

because so many dawns have been darker than the night.

Or we could get hilariously drunk on black pearl wine

pressed from the finest wild grape vines

without throwing them before the swine to trample them.

And you could ask me in the homeless silence

we both belong to like sketchy tenants, how

it came about I creatively visualized you

in the caldron of my heart over a fire that never goes out.

And all I’d be able to say you’d already know for yourself.

PATRICK WHITE