THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

The dark silence you embodied, twenty years later,

speaking to me now in the quiet of the night,

Jupiter flashing in the northwest, still trying

to shine by its own light after all this time. The air

so cold and clear, it’s a burning mirror

I can see you in discretely entranced

by the shapes of sadness cast by your small body

like a lamp of fire that swore never to go out

except in a blaze of light, supernova, one

last, wild, limitless, open-throttled ride

shrieking across the firmament as if at last

all that light, the wary tenderness of your compassion,

your wonder and your puzzlement at being so young

to have such heavy bells of sorrow tolling in your soul,

as if you carried within you the memory

of many rivers and seas and storms ago,

so when you shone you never dazzled

like a carillon of light on a shallow mountain rivulet,

but shine, you always did, even in your worst eclipse,

as if the romantic generosity of your expansive heart

had finally grown big enough to contain

the creative liberation of your enlightened madness.

Your intensity broke out into genius like fireflies

in a fog, the Pleiades out of the blue cocoon

of a nebular cloud. You could think

with your whole body as only a few artists

ever could. What most could only intuit at a distance

like someone weeping deep in the woods at night

as if they’d lost a child, or a lover for life,

and had come to rave in secret among the owls,

the darkness in the eyes of your blood intimately understood

without saying a word, and for a moment, you

were the shrine of a lost humanity

that used to forgive us for what we prayed for.

I can still hear the beginnings of wisdom

in the love and the laughter you squandered

on the ruinous amusements of the world,

without any fear of ever bankrupting your wine cellar

as if life were one long, surrealistic journey

of wandering scholars, defrocked Druids,

sacred clowns, lunatic poets and baffled pilgrims

each looking for exits and entrances on and off

the spiritual highway we were all hitchhiking on

as if all you had to do was cock your thumb

and the moon with one headlight blown out

would pick you up on some lonely backroad at night

and you’d see God everywhere on the way

to your mysterious destination. Dragons in exile

summoning rogue planets to orbit their homelessness

like the infinite ripples and wavelengths

of black holes standing like strangers in the rain.

Where the rivers joined we flowed into one another

as we danced like binary stars around

the invisible fires of our gravitational eyes

and where the roads parted like the wishbones

of the wounds we exchanged like the farewells

and witching wands we afflicted upon each other’s hearts

as if there were something deeper, a darker whisper,

a more compelling summons than the lightning

we were divining for in each other’s eyes

to strike the dark jewels of the dead we carried

within us, urns of our childhoods back into life

like an occult paradise of underground root fires

that could travel for lightyears in the valleys of death,

we were about to firewalk like barefoot stars alone,

I bowed like a gracious ice-age to thank you

for the ghost dance, and you went off

to carve the sphinx out of your tears

like rain on the fertile plains of a green savannah.

Many stars have flowed like sand through

the hourglass of the mirages we’ve become since then

and covered the grass and the eyes of the lakes

with lunar seas more desolate than the deserts of earth,

and though I’ve stopped at many wells along the way

and luxuriated in the oases of the soul alone

with the moon on water that ached like I did

to be loved by more inseparable reflections,

I’ve never been so far from you I needed to ask

anyone in my vagrant travels among the fixed stars

if they’ve ever seen your constellation rising

like a legend of love that only appears once in a lifetime

to leave an indelible impression upon the heart

like the thorns of a black rose still burning subliminally

on the star charts of the unearthly mystery

that wholly consumed us both in the radiant flashfloods

and ineffable ashes of starmud we emptied out of our urns

like two spirits of the wind swept up in the fires of life for good.

PATRICK WHITE