YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

YOUR FACE WAS A MOON I HAUNTED

Your face was a moon I haunted, and your body

twisted me into agonies of sexual driftwood

that wanted to burn at midnight under the stars

like the last signal fire of an isolated survivor

high up on your affluent shores.

I wanted to do dark things with you

in the shadow of eclipses that put their hands over

the eyes of the flowers and sent the birds to bed.

With you, I would have asked for closure

from the spring constellations swarming overhead

like free radicals paroled to the wind

tuning up the larnyx of the birch-trees,

I would have lain down with you in the bedlam

of a thousand cares and zirconium delusions

and lived beside you like an island and a telescope

drunk on the wine of your circus mirrors

that crash before they talk; all night, all night,

wave after wave, I would have caressed

the famous reflection of you in black carnation panties,

and lavished the wealth of the sea on your ears.

And we could have built a little shelter among the shipwrecks

or lived rent free with the swallows

in the silo of an aging lighthouse,

listening to the foghorns bellow like slaughtered cattle.

And it’s sad and lonely and fearful

watching the sky fall on the swords of its own horizons every night

and no one to mourn the sunset

that unspools from the wound like a bewildered snake,

and it’s dangerous the way I go erect as a symphony

around the hives of killer bees

still swinging from the old steeples believing

they’re just a misunderstood form of fruit.

And I’ve tried to master the dictionary of razorwire

that’s propping up the blase window, but I don’t like the way

I’m always a rose short of blood at the end of the day,

and the bouquet of startled flashlights

you placed on the nightstand keeps blacking out

like the eyes of dying bees in pollinated coffee-cans

and you keep looking at my balls

as if they were always nesting pelicans with something to eat,

and I haven’t talked to you about

dismemberments and Orphic skulls

in a good all-night asylum for years. What a shame

I won’t get a chance to toke with your firing squads,

or be secretly committed to one of the volunteer rehab centres

you’ve franchised like a brain selling straitjackets to lightbulbs

suffering the opprobrium of their maladjusted shades.

There aren’t more pages in the book of sorrows

or ghosts on the moon compared to the cults of the silver tide

I would have filled you with

like dolphins swimming ashore

to get their landlegs back. And think of the horns we’ve missed

charging through the labyrinths of our blood enraged

by the stungun behind the cape of the corrupt matador

gored and trampled like a bat in a blaze of honesty; how

some conversations would have hung in the air for years

like the get-well elegies of postcard suicides.

And maybe worse, because sooner or later,

I would have been compelled to confess

three mountains I didn’t name after you

to honour your breasts on the last lunar landing I made

to read the fine print between the lines

of the pre-nuptial tatoo of the anniversary spider

I signed on your chest

when you took your bra off like an hourglass

and there were questions just too momentous to ask.

PATRICK WHITE