THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

The voices of dead friends, departed lovers

aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances

of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.

I’m out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,

leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing

from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks

keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge

dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross

the same mindstream they’re in up to their eyes

for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.

Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.

Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.

I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest

on their way down like blossoms of paint

flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals

revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night

like matadors and meteors with razorblades

hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.

It’s natural when opposites come together,

enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,

it’s the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye

and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.

All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant

like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere

that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry

like Icarian candlewax at the black mass

of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens

of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.

All the matches I strike like fireflies

and phosphorus flower buds against my heart

are put out by the same bloodstream

they once illuminated like wild columbine

and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters

burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.

Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light

making the rounds on the nightwatch.

The tree line blows through the open window

of the wavering lake like an old curtain

about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.

Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.

Here where she gathers up the severed hearts

of the light’s dismemberment like body parts

she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue

and staring so long and immaculately

into the darkness like a lump of coal

for the third eye of a spiritual snowman

washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage

weeping diamonds all along the way

like the excruciating tears we all shed

in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight

like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.

PATRICK WHITE