YOUR INTENSITIES
Your intensities
dissipating in the silence
that follows your urgent
avowals,
it hurts to be
subjected to oblivion
like a burnt out
streetlamp in a city of light,
to stare into the
invisible blaze of the vastness
without eyelids
like craters on the moon
aghast with shadows
scabbing the nightshift
of a crown factory,
love’s labour locked
out,
a footprint on the neck of
a flower,
trampled like a protest
sign by the crowd
of platitudinous slogans
that defame it,
and the pain growing wider
than the bridge
that can cross it
and my heart trying to
pretend
it’s still a scratched
poppy
when everybody knows
it’s a haemorrhaging
rose.
And the stars have
hardened into diamond thorns
that score the eyes like
rocks
striated by arctic runes
in the path of advancing
glaciers,
and there’s a hawk in
my chest
excavating the message
of the dove
I sent to look for land,
and every moment is the
era
of a lingering why
that hauls me out to sea
like a death barge
to dump my severed body
parts
like scrapings off a
plate
and no matter how
eloquently
I rehearse for a role
in a farce of infinite
agonies,
I’ve played the part too
many times before
not to know
it’s all just birdseed
in a cemetery
that’s tired of hearing
itself moan for the dawn.
The wind blows through me
like the ghost of a
curtain
long after the window it
hung from has thawed,
blows through me like the
slash
of a long, fluid
incision
as if a knife were
learning how to master
the serpentine penmanship
of a sacred crescent of
the moon,
and there’s blood all
over the page.
And even as the
schoolhouse
of a famous arsonist’s
childhood,
even as a sacrifice bunt
at home plate
I
feel neglected and trivial,
a
butterfly, a blossom, a rag of blood
torn on the razor-wire of
vehement absolutes.
Blood. Passion. Muse.
Love;
the submerged foundation
stones
of an Atlantean temple
kissing the feet of
starfish
or the live walking of
aspiring mountains
rising like stairwells up
to the doorways
of unnamed
constellations,
someone with the courage
at last
to step into the open
without their shadows on,
disrobed of all
eclipses,
all the inkwells of their
spiritual indelibles
ready to taste the wine
that would make a
drunkard of a desert for life
and wakes the dragons
in the throat of the well
to dispell their dreams
like rain.
Lime in the grave of a
used resurrection,
detonating leaking
explosives
in the quarry of a black
hole,
pouring igneous iodine
over the fang marks
of the delirium of toxins
and elixirs
that follows the colon of your silence
like the sloughed skin of
the moon,
bleached, isolated, more
apprehensive
than a field of harvest
wheat
watching a scarecrow play
with matches,
the clouds of an overhead
storm
arcing blue lightning
over the grain,
I break black bread with
myself in a private hell
where the only way to
smuggle in a firefly
is in a fireproof pocket
of ashes
and the moon passes secret
mirrors through the bars
and the only visitor to
log in
is the death mask
of an old vacancy from the
past
that has stood by me all
these years like a key.
Is it circumstance,
inclination, mood, a sloppy heart
that dips this noose of
vinegar in the wine
to blow bubbles
in the eye of a
hurricane,
or are you just amusing
capricious reflections
in the mindflow of a
wishbone river
that cracks like a bough
under the weight of its
mute bells of ice?
And if it’s death you
toy with
like toe-nail clippers,
I had thought to die more
originally
than a paring of the moon
on the floor,
the mediocre cremation
of a shabby fire
I could swallow like a
swab of cotton candy
laced with lighter fluid
to smoke the bats out of
the attic
and amuse the dazzled
bumpkins on the midway.
I have roared with the
ghosts of glass lions
and wept like time with
ashen wizards
and danced with prophetic
shadows
in
the lairs of demonic clarities
that
could melt thought
in the creative heat of
their ferocities
and I wear the scars of
ancient claws
worthy of the sword that
wept
like wounded ore on the
moon
to plunge through their
hearts
like a meteor without a warning.
And I have been torn like
a page
out of the mauled journal
of the rose
like a heretical orchard
of blackthorn
and stayed up all night
like an unfinished poem
drinking down to the
lees
of the seabeds of oblivion
until I emptied the
cellars of my own darkness
down to the last good
year of stars
and I could hear the
whisper of a palace
in the hovel of a bottle
raise my skull to a
throne.
My death is not a stranger
to the pillars of my own
domains,
and there are skies that
wait
with the dignity of mystic
robes
every time I wash the
stain of the world off
in my own grave,
and silver oils distilled
from attendant ravens
that supple the agony of
the worst sunspots
with the tender
fountain-mouths
of the unsayable
encounters that inspire
the bruised grail maidens
that bloom like
nocturnal wildflowers
in a far field
to
come looking for me
like
the cure for their own eyes
in the labyrinthine courts
of the hidden king
that rules the afterlife
of the night
at the visionary
discretion of a living man.
Behind the door of every
affirmation,
the assassin of a denial,
as every flower
engenders the frost
that will snuff it
and every candle is a
pilgrim
on the road to its own
extinction.
And I know it’s hard to
live beyond the obvious
without a map back to
your face
or breadcrumbs in the
wilderness,
a voice beyond the clamour
of worldly echoes,
the first feather of an
abyss
that’s never known
wings,
and your heart the rumour
of an avalanche
that’s buried you alive
in the valley of its own
debris before,
but I thought you had died
enough already,
not to be looking up
at the blue bones of heaven like a shovel,
or weeping like shattered
glass
at the graveside of a
sparrow
that mistook the burning
kites
of your midnight
love-letters
for fire lilies blooming
like reversed torches
on the extraordinary
translucency
of a sky as yielding as
silk spun from the cocoons
of
the rarest stars to ever burn on water.
And
it’s not that I’m not grateful
for the little eras of
life that go by
like urns and rosebuds,
or the undulations of
flesh and gold
that silt the hungry
deltas with siloes of sacred grain,
I have been empowered by
many deaths
that have slain me
deeper into life
than the roots of the
veils and delusions
to squander my blood like
an ocean
at the feet of their
busy altars,
knowing even space
must fall like a petal at
last,
and the silence
of these eternities that
pass
through the eye of the
moment
like little red threads
of blood
must give up their dead
like
stories the wind tells around a fire
to
make the stars tremble
with the secret lives of
water
that
unravel like embroidery
on the soiled pillowcase of a dream
that woke up without a
tongue
in the shadows of a
floodgate
that gapes like the
mouth of the moon.
PATRICK WHITE
