I’LL WEAR THIS ROBE

I’ll wear this robe like a desert;

and release the hinges on the gate

that is closing like a rib cage

on the heart of the nightbird

that returns to the silence

like water taken from a river.

I’ll pour the moon out of its stone cup

and let this vine of eyes,

this bone of light

wander where it will

in search of a face in the darkness

sweeter than the blood-vows of wine.

These flowers aren’t the rags

of the legends of radiance

and a dragon doesn’t waste eclipses

on the blind.

The wind opens its hand

and I disappear like a gust of crows

in the startled nightgroves.

I will drag this empty robe of blood along the ground

like a wounded sky,

a desolate poppy

broken like a kite

on the powerlines of its dreams.

I don’t know what hurt me;

so long, so long ago I was a child,

and now I am a man, and aging

and the water snarls

and bares its fangs of frost,

and impales my heart

inflamed with grief for so much that has passed

without understanding

on the horns of the moon.

My ignorance has been

deeply authorized by life

and more and more often now

my blood coagulates into roses

and seals my mouth with wax

like a regal mandate

to succeed myself in silence

and let my throne

avalanche down the mountain

like just another rockslide,

another round of asteroids,

another fallen temple

freaked with mystic ore that never made it to the surface.

You ask me where I’ve been

like a road you befriended along the way,

but I’d have to know where I was going

to tell you that

and I’ve come to the end of myself

like starlight in a loaf of bread,

a candle that burnt like a voice in the night

to obviate the emptiness,

to warm the abyss momentarily

with the glow of our human divinity,

to say we were here once

like the flower in the field,

the star over the hill,

the face in the window

that watches as we pass

like the shadow of a bird

cast by the flames of a hidden fire,

a pulse of the moon,

the eyelid of a wave

that imagined the sea beneath it

before it broke like a vision

on this shore of flesh

where everything must be abandoned.

I want to be with you

like your eyes are

if you’ll let me be.

I want to silver my breath

in the longest night

of your loneliest fountain.

And many have sworn,

and many along the way

have perished like echoes and flowers

at the insistence of a rootless word.

And there have been nights,

eras of darkness and sorrow

drawn from a stranger’s well

that have bent the path I took,

and scattered my footprints

like refugees and colonists

that turned native

like an exhausted emotion

when their loneliness went wild and crazy

in a solitude even the moon couldn’t fill.

And I have stared

long and deeply into the abyss of the night

and felt the stars stub themselves out

in the sandy hourglass of my ashtray heart.

How desparately

I have rummaged through

this encyclopedia of lives

to find one that wasn’t a prelude to tears,

my heart a lost boot,

laced with a snapped spinal cord,

its mouth

muzzled like a junkyard dog

with an elastic band

to keep body and soul together,

only to proofread sky after sky,

page after page of stars

pricked out in braille,

fingering my name

carved in funereal kells and runes

on another boundary stone.

Nothing binds me.

No one wants my heart enough

to consult it like a map

to where I’m buried like gold

under the tongue of a dangerous angel

who wants to wake up beside you

like a spear of fire

I will fall upon like life, like a lover,

to wound my way back into paradise.

PATRICK WHITE