I COULD BRING YOU A SHATTERED WINDOWPANE

I COULD BRING YOU A SHATTERED WINDOWPANE

I could bring you a shattered windowpane,

I could bring you a musical whip that’s been trained

to read the stops of your flute

and how your fingers move like windproof spiders.

I could bring you the red brick of dried blood

that was left of my heart when I threw it through the window,

and it broke into a thousand chips of rose petals

that shed like flakes of dried paint off the eyelids

of a revolution that hasn’t woken up yet

to finish what it started in a recurring dream

of mystic junkies flagging their fits

until Faustus sees Christ’s blood

streaming across the firmament like mother’s milk.

Should I ever come to know you well enough

to let you drink from my hidden starwell in my field of view,

I could raise your spirits up like a candelabra

to be whatever constellation you wanted

among all these myriad stars dying to be given a focus.

And if at first you didn’t know where you were, I’d be your locus

until you got your sea legs on the moon,

and learned to walk on fire without getting burned.

You could be the punk mermaid who beguiled

the seasoned sailor of my oceanic awareness

you were still flinging your nets far and wide over

like spatial tides of ionized wavelengths

keeping time with the stars in a Babel of voices

that stratified the lyrics of the seven visible celestial spheres

that could be seen with the naked eye

like the black grammar of the multiverse

trying to keep the light in some kind of context.

And if I drowned to compliment your singing.

You could write a biography of bubbles

about my life and times in the depths with you

and I’d be happy to sign it in the cursive spring

of the year’s first seance to prove

every word I’ve said to you is a cult of the true,

even before I began to write secret loveletters to you

in the nebulae and clouds of unknowing in the stars

that precipitated out of my breath on a glacial windowpane

of an ice age that couldn’t thaw fast enough

for me to open my eyes and see you shining

in ten thousand lakes all at the same time

like the orbits of a prophetic skull at vernal equinox.

PATRICK WHITE