I FEAR I HAVEN’T GOT THE VOICE TO
SPEAK TO YOU
I fear I haven’t got the voice to
speak to you
as gently as I would. Just a whisper
shy of silence.
A star in the dusk of an oncoming
nightfall.
I want to suggest an arcana of secrets
to you about
the wisdom of life and love you weep
for now
like a bruised apple on the ground that
yesterday
smothered in bridal apple bloom. Your
solitude
and the sorrow of that lunar wound that
encumbers
your heart like a bell you keep pouring
your life out of
as if it were bad wine, makes you a
sacred grove
not any crow on the wing can roost in
with impunity.
I’m a shipwrecked sailor and I’ve
got the scars
of the moon to prove it. My arm’s
been replaced
by the talons of a grappling hook, and
the white whale
of the moon mourns for a lost daughter
like a harpoon
that triggers a thorn of sorrows in the
rose of my heart.
I know the taboo that surrounds a young
woman
walking like the moon on the sea in an
atmosphere
that’s never going to clear like fog
from an ocean of shadows
lashing her heart like breakers of
grief and confusion.
Presuming upon nothing is the fairest
form of exchange.
Don’t raise me up from the bottom,
and I won’t ask you
to get into the lifeboat. I don’t
burn my tongue on the stars
as readily as I once did, and I’m not
saying
that I’m not as susceptible to an
injured lamia
with a snakeskin around her waist,
drakaina Sybaris,
as I’ve always been, or I haven’t
learned how to milk
one fang of a crescent for the sake of
the antidote in the other,
that’s how many times I’ve been
bitten. Slow
but thorough, I suppose. It’s been
transformative.
And I know it’s weird encountering me
way out here
in this abyss where even the most
severely abandoned
can’t remember whether they’re
exiles or not, but
I was summoned by that seance of
razorblades
you’re trying to thresh the
starfields with hoping
if you cut deep enough you might
uncover a hidden harvest.
If you don’t act like a sparrow with
a broken wing
gleaning seeds like the lockets of
leftover gardens
I won’t speak to you like a scarecrow
trussed up
for the occasion like a hobo that isn’t
going anywhere
in a dead man’s suit. Abyss to abyss,
I address you
with the greatest tenderness for what
you’re suffering through.
Time isn’t going to heal anything.
You just learn
to flow around it like a skull in the
heartstream
like the beginning of a bridge you’ll
cobble
like a hydra-headed lover in the course
of time
trying to nurse your absence on the
dark side of the moon.
Time isn’t hiding daggers like
assassins in the shadows
of the sundials so there’s no need to
fence with your paranoia
out of fear the same thing’s going to
happen all over again,
because it doesn’t, if you don’t
let your pain lose its nerve.
You can make a pearl out of the dirt
that’s been heaped
on your moonrise like the luster of a
black swan
out on the lake alone like the
reflection of a new moon
or you can cover the orbiting telescope
of your third eye
in the eyepatch of an eclipse like a
falcon in an executioner’s hood
that can taste the blood of the dove
like a rose torn on its own thorns.
I suggest you learn to befriend your
solitude
so you’ll never be alone again
without someone to talk to
like an intimate familiar that won’t
lie to you
about the loss of your shepherd moons
like beads
on a broken rosary of Canada geese
bearing your dead away
like lambs that lay down with a
mountain lion without a truce.
Those moments of bliss you experienced
have not gone amiss.
They’re still shining like first
magnitude starmaps to the past
as they were then, and as they always
will be, indelibly
as the blue fireflies in the Pleiades
that are as radiant tonight
through the keyhole of your emotional
cloud cover
as they were when you left the door
wide open to the sky.
Though your lover become anonymous as a
defaced idol
whose magic wasn’t a peer of yours,
the spell you cast
over each other like the dream-catching
fishing nets
of the vernal equinox, are not cast out
by the meteoric ostrakons of the
autumnal Leonids
trying to break the light barrier of
their radiants
by throwing the first stone into a
diaspora of shattered mirrors.
Some dreams disappear like the smoke of
distant fires
or ghosts lifting off a lake like a
prequel to the morning
and others cling to you for the rest of
your life
as if you’re skin had been touched by
the moonlight
in such a way your nakedness was robed
in the subtle weave of a silver raiment
undulating
like lunacy and enlightenment on the
waves
of an oceanic awareness of how far from
shore you are.
You don’t need to hire a troupe of
foghorns and lighthouses
to act as professional mourners and
warners
not to ever give your heart away like
salvage to the sea again.
And I won’t say you’re not the
first mermaid
to get washed off the rocks she was
singing on
by a passing tidal wave that deepened
the lyrics of her song
and smashed her lyre like a wishbone
that had lost its charm
on the lunar coral reefs she
keel-hauled her heart on
like the maiden head on the dolphin
prow of a damaged schooner.
Pain is a lot more mystically unique
than that.
It’s a snowflake on a furnace that
doesn’t repeat itself.
It doesn’t happen to you in quite the
same way
it does to everyone else, or to each of
them separately
like a river breaking into a million
water droplets as it plunges
over the precipice of some unknown
abyss within itself.
Separation, too, is a means of
sustaining the delusory unison
of the discrete continuum we apply like
screening myths
to the discontinuous narrative themes
of our lives
as if we needed a stronger rope than
our umbilical cords
to moor ourselves like barnacles to an
avalanche of moon rocks.
I apply my words like a poultice of
lunar herbs to your heart
to draw the possibility of infection
out like a flute
the toxic arrowheads fletched with
pentatonic scales
in the snakepits of a tone-deaf
snake-charmer
that approached you like a young
Medusa, long before
your eyes began to stare at the moon
like a cold stone.
I come before the oracle, not in her
crone phase,
but as a beautiful young woman I ask to
prophecy
without the usual ambivalence, what
walls she can hide behind
by launching her sorrows like empty
coffins in the rain
she inaugurates by breaking Molotov
cocktails of champagne
across the bleeding edge of her bow in
drydock on the moon.
You, who are the shape of the universe.
You,
who are the black madonna of the
Merovingian Aquitaine.
You who fletch the arrow of wheat in
the hand of the Virgin
with feathers of grain within the
wingspan of the golden scythe
of the waxing crescent of the moon.
Your longing
the muse of an empty silo. You, the
creatrix of poems
that fulfil your deepest desire to be
known like a secret
unto yourself like a messenger alone
with her medium.
A man might offer you his hand as the
measure of all things,
but how many lightyears have your fires
burned
in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven with
her gaze fixed
like a star on the palm of a sailor to
keep him from drowning?
The one who wears the lifemask hurts
the worst, it’s true.
The generalities of victory are chaff
compared
to the mystic specifics of the lavish
jewels that are uncovered
by the wind blowing away the ashes of
the bed clothes
that once covered you in flames like a
hot-blooded gust of poppies.
Queen Cassiopeia’s throne abdicated
her arrogance and things
went circumpolar ever after like a jinx
wheel of lapwings.
May I remind you, in a great silence
worthy of a devoted heart,
you are a child of Isis, not one of her
sacred whores,
however much reverence they accord her
under as many names,
the stars flow in your blood as lucidly
as they do in hers.
And there’s no mirror of tears in
your ancestry that could ever
put them out like fire on the water
shadow dancing with the stars
in the eye of a mystery that disarms
everyone
with the unspeakable beauty of their
enlightened scars
looking upon the sorrows in the face of
someone like you
and opening their eyes to the real
flesh and blood
behind the carrara marble you’re
turning into
like the Pieta of their own souls
forsaken like corpses
in their laps like wounded voodoo dolls
they can’t
lift the curse from until you return to
the living
like the black sail of a funereal
moonboat in mourning
sidereally surrendering to the tidal
ebb and flow
like the red algae of your own
concupiscent renewal
washing you up like a galactic starfish
on the gleaming beaches of a
biophosphorescent Milky Way
shining by its own light to illuminate
every step you take
like the footprints of a young,
prodigal goddess
returning from a long starwalk of
celestial heartache.
PATRICK WHITE
