YOU'VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

YOU’VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

You’ve been gone such a long time.

Do the dead share their absence

with the hearts of those who miss them

or is the scope of the moon diminished

by its lack of a credible atmosphere?

After the flood, I believed in the covenant

the rainbows made with the disquieting day,

but late at night among the moondogs

I heard them weeping like watercolours

left out in the rain that washes their promises away

like false dawns in the third eye of the sea.

Where did you go? And why? Were you

a failure that went unnoticed? Did I let you down

in some unforgivable way and this is how

I pay by having to grow galactic to embrace you,

to close the abyss between us with oceanic forays

into time and space to say I’m sorry when

I feel you near, if I harmed you in any way

I wasn’t aware of, though never out of a lack of love?

Night after night, my heart drifts like a lifeboat

lowered from the moonset in the west

to look for you without a starmap to anywhere

only to be washed up on shore in the morning

as empty as I left. My waterclocks trying

to turn back time like a widow walk

around a lighthouse with no habitable planets.

It’s not the light of candles that I follow

it’s the wend of the smoke when they go out

that reveals the paths of the dead unravelling

like a road of ghosts dispersed among the stars.

My heart’s become a bone-box of your eyes,

your lips, your hair, your fingertips,

the nocturnal fragrance of the orchid of your sex.

I carry the ashes of your shining in a medicine-bag

around my neck in the indefensibly

dangerous human hope that one night

you’ll be attracted back to the relics you left behind

in a kind of sympathetic magic with the blind

so they might see you again, one last time

just to know that you’re ok with your disappearance

like a sundial at noon overwhelmed by its shadows

boarding the flowers up like coffins in a total eclipse.

It’s white outside right now. No topography to the snow.

Silt of the moon. A photographic positive

of the oblivion I don’t imagine you inhabit anymore

now that you’ve crossed the burning bridge

of your last threshold to make an indwelling

of the black hole you’ve left in so many galactic hearts

they’re wheeling like Sufis seeking annihilation

among the dust devils that arise at their heels

like the oldest messengers of the stars

to the mud we’re made of, some, clay bricks in a wall.

Some, dry creekbeds trying to decipher

their own crackling like pictographs

on the shattered ostrakons of a cosmic eggshell

someone got out of like the canary of a buried miner

to see how big the sky was when no one else was looking.

Is it bigger than pain? Is it the freedom of the forsaken?

Does it advance the cause of life to dance

even when you’re weeping over a purple passage

in a suicide note that was meant for your eyes only?

Can you see your reflection on the back of a mirror,

or is it enough that we abuse our tears for that,

lightyear after lightyear, trying to turn them inside out

as if the stars were always on the other side

of where we were for the night, looking out at the snow

making it all seem so irrevocably easy to let go

when you’re staring through an expressionless window

weary of trying to second guess the long view

of what you’ve had to live your way through anymore,

your grief a frozen nightbird in an aviary of razor-wire

entangling your heart in the strings of a harp

looping like the helical orbits of your retrograde descents

into Orphic modes of empty-handed, esoteric thought,

regardless of whether things eventually

come clear of their own spontaneous accord or not.

PATRICK WHITE