I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING
I can still see you shining, and when
was it ever not so,
like last night’s stars, sacred
syllables
lingering in your voice like broken
mirrors of ice
and you so badly wanting to fly above
it all,
to burn like a draconian firefly that
healed its heart
with a blow torch that welded you back
together again
with scars of gold, to prove how
intensely pure you were.
And you were o yes you were so serious,
amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,
when they saw the extremes of scorching
honesty
with yourself and others you were
willing to go to
to be worthy of the excruciations of
your art,
and deeper than that, something you
knew
was there in the dark by the weight of
its eyes upon you
like a stranger with a spirit of bells
that meant you no harm.
Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier
than any running doe
because it was true and there was no
other way of putting it
that didn’t blunt the shining, that
didn’t cheat the rose,
that you inevitably didn’t when you
were the new moon
and I was wholly in love with you like
a total eclipse.
Yes, I remember how there was always
more dark bliss
in the gifts of pain I received from
you than I,
and you know how hard I tried to give
back,
ever returned to you like a sacred
grove of nightbirds.
You showed me the diamonds in the abyss
of my inadequacies.
You were the peer of the mystery of
yourself,
a black savage, one third deadly
nightshade,
two thirds nocturnal orchid and there
was nothing
strategic about your magic compared to
mine.
That made you a greater sorceress than
I was ever a wizard.
For me the birds sang, but you could
hear the sky weeping
for things I’m still trying to
understand about compassion.
When I think of the passage of beauty,
you’re always
one of the last wildflowers of the
fall, sometimes
the starclusters of the New England
asters, others,
the last pilot light to go out on the
blueweed
or one of those rare times, as I sense
this is now,
I’m attending a seance of waterlilies
that are trying
to call you back to life like an echo
in a housewell
at four in the first October morning we
spent on the farm
and were startled awake by the ghost of
a white horse
drumming on the well cap in the
moonlight
glowing in the frost on the ground, as
if we were
both enlightened like two eyes at the
same window,
burning in awe of the vision we shared
together,
knowing the ensuing silence was more
than enough
to attest to the truth of it like a
secret that wasn’t meant for words.
Just as this isn’t, after so many
lightyears
of remembering you like one of the
great joys of life
that cast the longest shadows of the
most poignant sorrow
to haunt me for the rest of my life
like a wound
even the scar tissue of the moon can’t
keep me
from flowing out of like the source of
the Nile before Egypt.
God, how I wish every time I reached
out for you
the stars didn’t burn my hands like
snowflakes and doves.
There must be some other way to kiss
the spirit
of evanescent things without putting
your lips
to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if
you were kissing
the head of an oracular snake like the
eyelid
of a lover you were trying to wake from
a dream
that lasts forever like a garden you’ve
been shut out of
because you’re still alive, and
foolish enough to love
what’s can’t be helped or forgotten
because it’s gone.
After the storm surge, in the gleaming
facets of sunshine,
death dries its outspread wings like a
turkey vulture
at the top of the totem of a pine
that’s been broken by lightning
and you lose your faith in the
thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.
At least, I did for awhile, looking up
at the stars alone
at twenty below, impossibly trying not
to accuse the gods
of anything they didn’t mean, as I
grew
colder than liquid nitrogen on the
inside, and my tears
shattered like crystal stalactites in
an ice storm,
or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I
exorcised
too dead inside to be haunted by your
memory just yet,
than any void I’ve ever tried to fly
through like space
as it was turning into glass. This,
too, will pass is not always true.
Eventually the wind stopped snarling
like a barnyard dog
as I began letting go of you, and the
pain thawed,
and the hawks were unlocked from their
aviaries of ice
in one long shriek of liberation that
tore my heart like a talon
because my grief was the last of you I
had to hang on to
and I couldn’t use the permafrost as
an excuse
not to properly bury my dead where
they’d asked me to,
as I did you, facing east toward the
lustreless black pearl
of the new moonrise of my heart on the
threshold
of a black hole as if I had nothing
left to lose but loss itself.
And who could have imagined that time
would cling to me
as it has, a habit that distinguished
it from eternity
like fresh water from the salt? Or I
could be so exalted
to that palace of stars your spirit
took up residence in
like a squall of fireflies the wind
played with like chimney sparks
from the dead furnace of this house of
life we once lived in together?
The morning glory’s overgrown the
gate. The palings
of the fence I built are down like
nights and days
crossed off in a calendar. The window
we looked through
is smashed. The housewell lost in the
rising tides
of the wild grasses learning to write
on the wind.
And that last painting of yours you
gave me,
all those truncated trees, lepers and
amputees
grotesquely gathered on an island in a
bay
you lavished in soft placental violets
and greens,
Persian silks, and auroral saris for
mutilated mannequins,
I left on the wall of your studio like
some kind of seal
on the place breaking up like Pangea
into
continents of plaster. I pried it loose
from the ice
of a snowbank slumped in the corner
opposite
that small open window you stared out
at the world through
like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m
still trying to get right,
and I hung it back up
counter-intuitively as I imagined
you would have done, something
incomprehensively beautiful
and strangely evocative of a gesture
suggestively perfected
like a long misunderstood labour of
love, masterfully abandoned.
PATRICK WHITE
