WERE THERE STARS
Were there stars in your
hair that night?
I cannot remember,
so taken with your face
and the mystery and the
silence and the sorrow
of the tender bell in
your eyes
that could summon ghosts
of yesterday’s
embodiments to the fire
of any passion that lost
itself prophetically
at a rave of shadows
among the trees.
You eased out of your
wardrobe of rivers
like a snake on the moon
sloughing its skin like
the eclipse
of a far more vulnerable
shining,
and I couldn’t tell if
you were
a doe or a lynx
stepping out of the alder
groves warily
to lap the moonlight
that flaked the shore
with the silver petals of
an undulant rose
older and darker than
nightblood.
I could feel the danger
within you,
the abyss of the early
grave
that waited for you like
a key
to come in out of the
pain
that bled you like a
shadow
pouring out of an open
wound
that whispered to you
like a secret scream
only the dead who owned
you could hear.
Your hunger desperately
sought salvation
from the eyes
that pleaded with you
to blow yourself out like
a candle,
cancel the inevitability
of your suffering
with the shudder and sigh
of sex.
We lay down naked
together
by the willow-stained
waters
in that summer of flesh
and sought oblivion from
each other
like two compatible
cremations
that concealed a ravenous
phoenix
ending its fast of fire.
Purified by the depth
and darkness
of your intensities,
I burned in you
and felt the flames
of a dangerous angel
who had broken her
afterlife like a curfew
flow over me
like dawn at a keyboard of
feathers.
Your breasts still come
up overnight
like supple mushrooms
against my chest
and the moist heat of your
mouth
throbbing
with flowers like July
as you seized your joy
from the agony of the
roots you tormented
to give up their dead
like bruised cherries.
I have never died as fully
since
at the insistence
of any woman’s appetite
nor known a night so
final,
so brutal with time and
beauty
as the pendulous moon
swung
like an executioner’s ax
over the nape of its own
reflection
swanning on the waters.
We made love as if
we were both defying
the truth we didn’t
need to say.
I wanted to plead with
you,
I wanted to call out into
your emptiness
like a beseeching bird
disappearing into a dark
valley,
but my voice ran ahead of
its echo like light
and the things I would
have asked you
not to do
had already been
achieved.
Heroin, your asp,
at the funeral I stood
back
beyond the baffled
wreaths of flowers
and the ambivalent
silence
of the modest gathering
that mourned you,
maculate in the shadows
of the Japanese plum
tree
we once made love under
and I kissed the rose of
your blood
shedding in mine
like a wound
my
love was never sword enough to heal
as
they closed
and boarded you over like
a well.
I spent the night like an
empty vase
beside your grave
until the stars that
bloomed above you like wildflowers
thawed my tears in the
morning light.
I walked out of the
cemetery
through the hard harps and
spears
of its iron gates
and I have never been
back.
The years since have been
chameleonic as a hooker
who plys her art
on the stairs of a temple
even the priests of my
lust
are forbidden to enter,
but as you said I would
as you lay with me that
night
like a knife beside the
sea,
I have returned to you
over and over again
like a witching wand
looking for water in
hell,
like a cult of one to a
lost island
that holds you like a
secret
and wept like a candle
of honey
in the dark hive of your
unanswerable silence,
intoning the names
of an impossible god
on a rosary of black suns
until my heart hangs like
a bell
dumb with grief
looking up at the stars
you rinsed like a tide
from your hair.
And I lean on the crutch
and the crook
of a shepherd’s
question,
looking everywhere for
you
like the wind
sweeping the shadows of
fireflies
like the fall of hair
from your eyes
that night you tore
yourself away from me
like a veil of blood and
sorrows
wounded by the terrible
light
of the black pearl
that ripened within you
like the skull
of a full eclipse.
O my poor, broken angel,
you might have been fat
and frumpy by now
if you had lived.
I could have watched
your beauty
shed like the moon over
the years,
and smile like an island
to remember how lost I
was in your tides once,
a constellation of
starfish
tumbled like dice in your
dark undertow,
trying to shine, god,
how
I tried to shine for you,
how
I ached to embrace your
planet safely
in the mandala of an
empowering radiance
that could show you
I was worth living for
if nothing else.
Given the freedom
of the emptiness that
engulfed us both,
we could have lived
within each other,
we could have evolved our
own atmospheres,
appointed our own stars,
written our own myths of
origin
on the black pages of that
journal of skies
where you scribbled down
the events
of your per-emptive
afterlife
as if you wanted to make
your ghost indelible.
As it was, the only thing
I could do,
was take you in
like the last breath of a
summer night
I could never let go of
without following it
like a shadow of you into
death.
I haven’t wished for
much over the years,
and the dreams have come
and gone as they will,
and my hair has gone gray
and my eyes are looped
like powerlines
and the sad bells of a
heavy solitude
that has yoked me to
grindstone of the turning world
to mill the stars like a
tide
on the bloodwheel of a
worn heart.
I finally burned and broke
all the weeping mirrors
I consulted like
half-assed mediums
to see if I could
restore you somehow
to the more intimate
shining of that last night
you turned and ran back,
your shoes in your hand,
to make sure your final
kiss would endure like a temple.
You pitied the agony of
shapeshifting
you knew the black water
ahead
was about to go through
as it smashed like
goblets and crystal chandeliers
on the roaring skulls of
the rocks;
you pitied me because you
knew I loved you,
because you knew you were
already
a future memory
and I was a prophecy from
the past
that had ridden beyond
itself like light
to illuminate nothing
but your absence
measured in the filaments
and lifelines
of eyeless oceans like a seabird
circling a blind
lighthouse on the moon.
PATRICK WHITE
