YOU CAN'T EMBRACE ME WITH YOUR MODERATE LOVE

YOU CAN’T EMBRACE ME WITH YOUR MODERATE LOVE

You can’t embrace me with your moderate love

as if two arms were one too many to give someone a hug,

or one eye were enough to look at the stars in your lover’s eyes,

and make up constellations you’ve never seen before.

I’ve never fallen in love with anyone who ever

made my whole body feel like it was a ghost amputee

who had never gotten over the memory of having one.

You can’t read Braille without fingertips.

And it’s either brave and suicidally noble, or something

drastically real about me but I’ve always preferred

the dark, dangerous muse, to the sunny cheerleader

who cut the bananas into my cereal just for the potassium.

No moon. No music. No slumming in heaven

when we take every other nightshift off from hell

and then walk out on the job permanently like a Tarot deck

to see how it feels to be a shipwreck on the bottom of a prophecy

that foretold, one day, swimmers and drowners alike

would be in it way up over their heads. And that’s

when I learned to count on my heart

like an overturned lifeboat to keep things afloat

for me and anyone I love who went into exile beside me.

Got to be ancient starmaps in her eyes

like the return address of extraterrestials

who promised to come back one day

and make crop circles in the hay together.

And fireflies for back up in the long dark halls

of what we were reading when the stars went out

and we opened up to each other about our secret research

into the comparative mythology of each other’s psyche.

Even at high noon I want to look out of the corner of my eye

and see in the depths of her silence, stars

hiding out in the shadows on the bottom of her wishing wells

and know that she’s ok at either end of the telescope.

And I’ll show her the sun shining at midnight

and the moon among the corals, and come up like a pearl diver

with new metaphors to show her how I can still see her radiance

like a lunar eclipse in a mystic moon rise just behind

the guile of her veils and the eyelashes of her tree line.

And there shall be no shadow upon the earth

that she casts behind her that shall remain starless.

And it must be well understood from the very start

that you can’t put the wing of an eagle on one side of the heart

and that of a sparrow on the other, even less so, a dragon,

and expect it to fly very good or straight to the mark.

And no broken arrows of the promises

we make to each other at a rain dance for the waters of life.

And no sipping from the river when there’s a chance

to swallow it all in a single gulp and satisfy all wells at once

without getting the waterbirds stuck in our throats

like the high notes of sacred syllables above the reach

of the black swans that live in our chimneys for free.

By all means, I want to see the light

but coming out of the dark like a nightbird

with a message that wasn’t meant for anyone else.

She can be swarmed by faeries, she can

live on a menu of mushrooms and toadstools,

all the soft gilled things without hooks in them she wants

I don’t care, as long as she includes

a banshee or two scratching at her wings like windows

to be let in to the inner sanctum of her devotion

like a black candle at a white mass for wounded voodoo dolls.

And if she wants me to jump through her wilderness fires

to satisfy her occult desires in a coven of one

that’s ok too as long as she’s enough of a firemaster

to know when I’ve been done well. Not medium rare.

And I won’t have things fifty-fifty, a hundred and fifty percent

and a hundred and fifty percent, or die in the attempt,

because anything less than that is nothing at all.

Love when it comes to the hour of gates, becomes

the best of the other in the leaving, as your lover

absorbs in the turn-counterturn-stand of the perennial dance

things about you she loved at first glance, jewels and virtues,

and all the wildflowers a suffering soul puts out with generosity

that were meant for her eyes only, even you

couldn’t see in yourself at the time because even

among the most enlightened of us, the deepest insight

into ourselves as embodiments of thoughtless reality

is always blind. And if you couldn’t find what you wanted

together, you always find it under your pillow

once the other who left it like a parting gift is gone.

Don’t want anyone after we’ve broken up

who doesn’t know how to honour the memory of what we tried

to be to each other before we outgrew what we meant

when we vowed to console our loss of happiness

with peace and a gentle release of the moon

like a blossom from a dead branch in the middle of winter.

She can come to me flawed, she can come to me wounded.

She can come to me like an apostate sunflower

who wandered off the beaten path to follow the moon.

Selfless as we all are behind our delusions of probity

who remains to be a judge of character except

the most doubtful and disdainfully vain among us?

Let the death masks argue it out among themselves

who is real and who is not, who’s been true and who forgot,

as for me and my house, I’d rather be loved than right.

I’d rather have my lover’s head in my lap at the end of the night,

or mine in hers. I’d rather stand beside her

and look up at the stars together as if they knew

more about us than us about them, than feel them

hemorrhaging like supernovae in both our eyes

arguing like medieval theologians painting

a picture on the third eye of the telescope

we’re looking at through both lenses simultaneously

eye to eye, tooth to tooth, one false idol to the other,

squabbling over whose lop-sided view of the paradise

we planted to live in together, is most worthy of worship,

the hunter or the farmer, the hunter or the farmer,

keeping in mind women invented agriculture.

Intrigue me, berate me, teach, upgrade, or refute me,

just let me feel your hand when I suffer

as if it were the wing of a bird

I was scrying aviomantically to see

if it had healed enough to fly, to make

my homelessness a big enough sky for her

to spread her wings in and wheel

on the passionate thermals of joy

that arise within me like double helices of inspiration.

And in return, I would promise her to never think

I’d found an answer to her mystery, or a reply

to the silences that abound within her

like nightbirds that just won’t answer.

And if she’s not in her shrine when I come to lay

a bouquet of stars at the foot of her temple stairwells,

or off at a coven somewhere with the Horned One,

trying to get a handle on my polyphrenic diversity

that can speak to the angels as well as the demons in tongues.

Shapeshifter though I may be, I promise her

by the time she gets home she’ll always recognize me

in the form that most becomes her. I’ve always thought

that death was shorter than life, because

death isn’t lived through even for a moment and if

anything lasts forever anywhere, it’s right here

where we can dance like rootless trees to the songs of the nightbirds

and listen to the squirrels in the walls in the morning

stacking black walnuts like prophetic skulls,

and reach out to the waterlilies like dragonflies

that know how to interpret them like loveletters on the sly.

PATRICK WHITE