THE DAY AN EMPTY ENVELOPE

The day an empty envelope, the clouds

islands of their own in a slow wind,

gathering out of nothing, going anywhere

the blue conception of the dispersing sky urges

above the green, summer turmoil of the trees.

I wake up wondering if love is just a word

or a whisper of smoke from distant mountains

or a tuberous begonia someone tore up last night

in their madness to dramatize their exit out of ecstasy,

their roses, scalded lobsters, their heart

torn like a soggy dawn in the pincers of the moon.

And I have been here before at the end

of these long wharves pillared in departure,

standing firmly fixed in the tides of sorrow,

saying goodbye to the sky and the sea

that have cried enough stars for the night

to remember its light is the taste of oblivion.

The air breathes you in like an anchor of mist

and all the words we released like vows

gently unhooking their wings from the fishing nets

we found abandoned in the wake of a lunar desert

that had wandered off like an arsonist in the archives of its tears,

are pens that have flooded in our pockets of blood like oilslicks,

not the feather of song left that could fly.

And I should thank you for the bouquet of corals

you gave me like an island in a ocean of ashes,

and the nights my heart was a frenzy of mating eels

thrashing the silver waves in a ferocity of transcendence,

a rabble of moonlit tongues, that made me feel

the hanged man was at last a key someone would risk,

a boat moored to the wind that had at last found a door

with the eye of a water-lock and the Gulf Stream

of an infinite threshold it would take a galaxy to cross,

and there were voyages I dreamed, o, I dreamed

of naming continents after you, oceans on the moon

that teemed with startling new forms of luminous life

that did not salivate for each other like arrows on a food chain

but fell from the intensity of our wishing like rain.

I wanted to add your fire to mine on a pyre of thorns

and mounting the last constellation uttered in bliss

by the mouth of a burning rose immolated in her own beauty

rise like a kite trailing a thread of blood to show the stars

how to weave a life that breathes like silk

out of the mulberry cocoons of their nebular cradles,

auroras exhaled like the veils and ghosts of riverine light

that disclose the grace of a woman, secret by secret,

until even the stars are homeless gestures of ash,

crowns of flame enthroned in the abysmal domains

of the radiant mystery they could draw from

like water from the wells of your eyes

to refute the claws of time and space with flowers.

And it’s been four starless nights, four bleached days

since I last heard from you, no word, no sail, no wick,

no eyelid of a candle to open the darkness like a dream,

not a chromosome in a fortune-cookie to dispell my fate,

only the incremental atrocity of the cruel silence that salts the garden

with the radioactive fall-out of your nuclear absence

so that even my shadow glows like a sunspot that won’t wash off.

And I must tell myself you’re not the queen caprice

of a cherry in a hive of chocolate leaking honey

all over the sticky page of a theatrical candy-wrapper

blowing up the road like the obsolete playbill of a cliche

well attended by the ants who traffic in sugar.

I must tell myself over and over again like a wheel,

not to save myself like an enlightened pagoda

in a corner of the cones of the fools who wear

their disasters like the paper headlines of a daily heart,

not to adorn death with the lies of wounded heroes,

for I am a small planet of haunted wines

you can burst against the roof of your mouth like a grape,

and far too acquainted with eclipses and cremations

to exalt my ashes with the consolations of a reviving phoenix,

tell myself not to lawyer my sorrow with a congress of crows,

and in a crowd of placards and protesters, pretend that I am brave,

that my cause is just, that the world you’ve left me needs to be saved;

or that I can save it from myself like an arsonist

by learning how to swallow it like fire,

not to incriminate you among the cap-gun terrorists

who rage like chains in the doorways of their emergency exits,

their hearts boiling hand-picked scorpions like blackberries

to mitigate the acids of their glass wounds,

but to believe you’re still out there somewhere like a road

that has wandered off in a wilderness of directions,

though the mountains and trees all point the stars out to you,

that cannot conceive of where it leads until we both walk it.

I want to believe there’s no bodycount

behind the words of love you send me like refugees

that gather in the valleys of my heart like liberated fireflies,

that the lampshades of your poems are not wrapped in human skin

with a star pricked out by fangs and the repeating decimal

of a genocidal number too powerless to stop itself

from biting at the running sore of its own ulcerations.

I have never seen your face, heard your voice,

the wind more intimate with your skin than my longing,

but I have felt the stars within brighten in your presence

when all I could be to you over the miles, lives, the worn shoes,

was someone who charged space with gusts of ionic affinities,

hoping somehow the atoms knew, the rain, the hill in the fog

calling out to the drifting lifeboat with a disembodied voice

that there was yet a breath within a breath, a light within the light,

what I was before I was born to reach out empty-handed like this

to create you out of the nothing I am, a marvel more than me,

a clear fire that burns invisibly like breath on a windowpane,

the exhalation of a ghost startled by a spirit that lives

within and beyond it in a continuum of vital strangers,

closer to us than the patches on the underside of our eyelids.

I don’t know what I am to you; though I have hoped

and you have said things to me I could only disappoint,

but they have made me want to drink your face from my bare hands,

they have made me a fountain and a vine, a door that bleeds

among the quicksand foundation-stones waiting out the mountain,

and my heart was a pauper lavish with revelation, a glove

that felt the universe fit it like your hand, and the answers,

were as evident as birds gathering seeds in an open furrow.

We have grown over the months like the rain together

and maybe now we fall, maybe now this alloy of water

is to be threshed by the wind like wild rice

shaken into a birchbark prow of aboriginal moonlight,

and the waterlilies have finished blooming like asterisks

and the stirling is marred by the acids of black fingerprints,

and a patina of commonality makes the moon a cold stone,

but there’s a pause between accountable heartbeats,

a world between waking and dreaming, exits and entrances,

where I think everything returns without having left

like stars paled in the blazing of a lesser light that thrives,

and the heart receives itself back into its own hands like a ball,

and even in the rain-soaked journals of the autumn leaves,

the wind still addresses the flowers with its inconstancy,

and hands still find each other across the dangerous table

like the lost receiving the lost in a place of belonging

that is a stranger to them both on the same side of the river.

PATRICK WHITE