NOT EVEN THE LIGHT
Not even the light of the
stars
shining like the keys to
the ancient love-letters
bound among the secret
jewels
of the queen of heaven
penetrates
me as deeply as you do.
The
planet wheels into the night
bearing its burden of
humans
murdering each other
to enforce one state of
ignorance
upon another
as the rabid bees
strafe the demented
flowers
on the far side of the
world
for enriching their
radioactive pollen,
convinced in their
madness
more honey than blood will
flow from the wound.
I walk by myself
along the brittle banks
of a frozen stream
among the detonations of
the cattails
waiting like Napoleonic
cannoneers
to stoke the charge of
the next volley.
The snow in the sunset
is stained a spectral
apricot
that disappears like
breath on a cold window
and the sky is vast with
my insignificance.
Two or three decades of
life left,
if I’m lucky,
and though I have tried to
use my time
to leave a gift for
someone I will never meet,
long ago I realized
there is no way of
assessing
what they will find
after the coffin closes
like an eyelid
on this long, dark,
radiant brevity
that once shone like the
moon
in the ores of my blood.
Like the wandering of this
rivulet
my heart has always been
a pilgrim without a
shrine
and the direction of
prayer has encompassed all
like a man getting up off
his knees
and walking through an
open door
to drink from the cup of
his lover
in the shadows of the
autumn willow
that sways like
kite-tails
from the flights of fire
she ignites among the
stars
that gather in the dark
like strangers
before their own ghosts.
What the wind
has torn away from me
like apple-bloom,
like poems, like smoke and
leaf, like skies,
like tears and blood and
faith
it has replaced
with these deeper
revelations of you
that hang like a windfall
of scarlet bells
from the branch of a
dead tree in winter.
The wine of your life and
light
has matured in the
ferocious crucibles of the sun
and you have been poured
out
like the passion of a
sword
to
cleave the stone of my heart
with these truant rivers
of wounded silver
that flow through me like
blood.
A young breeze
tries to hone the edge
of its blade
on the rising moon
as a black ribbon of
water
runs like a snake of oil
between the enclosing jaws
and cataracts of ice,
tiny wavelets scaling
its skin
scintillant with the small
commotions of stars overhead.
The bush wolves
have been nosing for
muskrat
and you can almost taste
the steam
rising from hot meat on
the air.
I squeak like a pulley
through the virgin snow,
following the banks of my
own meandering,
owing nothing of myself
to anyone,
wholly my own solitude,
as I pass through the
gates
of the enclosing darkness
trying to enter the
abyss and the mystery
of what I have lived so
precariously
over the last sixty-three
years,
what it means, if
anything,
to be a human among these
paper birches
on an island in the
stream,
looking up at the
intimate unattainability
of the stars,
knowing you are growing
old,
that death is more
populous with friends
than life, that love
has sloughed you so many
times
like a viper’s skin,
like the phases of the
moon,
like a shrine of smoke
and ashes,
that the phoenix
hesitates
to robe itself in the full
glory
of
its former plumes of fire.
My
mother will die soon.
I must say it,
voice it in my blood
to be able to bear it
and my children are clouds
in the world
that no longer look for
their reflections
in the eyes of the lake
they arose from
as if they were merely
breathed out.
And
how in any god’s name
can a man define the
absence
he has grown to be,
except he standardize his
own spinal cord
as the only measure of
loss
he has to go by?
And even after
all the millennia of my
walking,
standing up,
I’m still only six feet
closer to the stars
though my mind can
embody all of space
in a solitary thought.
And the deep, inner
silence
in the empty throne-room
of my heart
where even the most
profound events of my life
are seen to be ultimately
no more
than the antics of a
jester
playing with shadows,
turns out after all to be
just another mode of
weeping.
It takes a lifetime
for a drop of water
to gather the courage to
fall
from the tip of a blade of
stargrass,
and the tongue has tears
the eyes know nothing
of.
I admire the cool crimson
on the brushes of the
ground willow
as they try to catch my
likeness
on the ice-primed canvas
of the snow,
but suggest
to portray me as I lived
they need to be loaded
with blood not paint.
Like the moon
I have worn the same
blossom
as a face
for
years now
and I still don’t know
the fruit
that ripens beneath it;
whether my life has
sweetened
in orchards of light,
or black dwarf of the
forbidden apple
on a dead tree,
I taste like a full
eclipse.
And what could it change
even if I did know?
When the diaspora of my
starseed
breaks bread
at a harvest of thorns;
who is the host
and who is the guest
and who asks for a menu?
And no matter how far
from home
the journey takes him,
whether down a dead-end
alley
or further than the stars
was there ever a man
who didn’t walk to his
own funeral
like a bell
looking for any beginning
that might not be lost in
the end?
Or does the snake
that takes its tail in its
mouth
as a gesture of eternity
eventually end up
swallowing
its own head
like this stream before
me
making its way to the
sea?
I stepped across a star
sill
through a vertical door
into life
and in the leaving of it
I shall knock from the
inside
on a door that’s
horizontal
to continue my descent
toward earth
down a ladder of
thresholds;
and what began so
earnestly
among family and friends
and lovers
will be concluded by a
stranger
who will wear my name
like a gravestone.
But here among the
tangle
of these fallen trees,
their roots
fleshed out
and washed like a corpse
by the water and the snow,
Venus peers through the
fingers
of the branches above
where two crows have
paired
like quotation marks
around the hearsay of
the night
though I am left
speechless
by the random beauty of
the scene,
as if my voice had been
released like a bird
into its own most
intimate, inward vision
and that vision were
everywhere you like the sky
it disappears into like
I do
everytime my heart is
opened
like one of the lockets
of time
and I stare into your
eyes
and the universe stares
back
as you breathe out the
night with all of its stars
and then I breathe you
in
just as a golden feather
of the moon
lands without a ripple
or unravelling wake
on the mirror of these
lonely, black waters
I have followed deep into
the darkness
like the urgent secret
of my own lifestream,
and I know it’s you. I
know it’s you.
PATRICK WHITE
