I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice

if you were still here. If you were even as near

as the stars commingled in my breath,

I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls

and let my mindstream run wild at your feet

like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up

from its long dream of making the desert bloom

with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.

I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars

to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps

waiting for you to bless their colours,

because wonder’s never been known to start a war

with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail

without annihilating itself first, bursting

its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,

and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools

receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades

of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first

like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me

show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids

of dark abundance and bright vacancy

where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish

that never swim out of themselves

or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously

immersed in up to their gills in the clear light

of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons

I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself

and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet

I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades

and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes

grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes

waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night

and watch how they’d dance and leap for you

like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet

who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way

to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe

imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants

might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings

like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,

but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind

that I take as a sign that you are near in the night

and who has to worry about snow,

when they can live in your light on an occult planet

where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity

and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?

Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind

climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,

dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones

beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips

like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs

of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together

and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies

that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis

or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers

conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana

we can read in each others eyes like loveletters

written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in

when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE