IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

IF YOU WERE TO GIVE ME YOUR HANDS

If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer

and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,

I would make one burning dove out of them

that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,

a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,

a message to God she couldn’t ignore, a wild flower

that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss

like a star waking up from a bad dream

in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.

If you were to give me your eyes for a moment

like the lily pads of two eclipses, I’d put my lips

to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,

and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,

and when you opened them at moonrise,

where I touched you, there’d be two waterstars

shining as if they’d just fallen from the Pleiades

among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.

Spare me a tear, and I’ll return it to you like an elixir

that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree

that’s been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,

with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn

like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.

And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage

like water sylphs, even when your mindstream

breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads

flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,

you’ll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon

reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes

as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix

with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer

of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations

far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.

If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,

your arms, your legs, I’d come like spring to a landscape,

clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird

to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well

full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,

that’s just realized all she ever had to do was ask.

I’d make your flesh feel like the shores

of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness

and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide

of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.

I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,

knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight

of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,

and even the wind can’t hold them for long

like leaves and kites, when autumn says it’s time to move on.

But if you were to give me their chains,

I’d retool them into royal cartouches,

ellipsoid orbits, halos, and shield-shaped lozenges,

to distinguish your name, like a waterclock

in an hourglass of desert queens firewalking across the sky

by the Milky Way, as if you were on pageant

sailing up the Thames or the Nile in a barge of moonlight.

And should, never perish the thought, you see fit

to offer me your heart, not as a fortune-cookie

with a happy ending, but like the complementary colour

of the world’s biggest emerald, or the red berry

to a crown of prickly holly leaves, never

would any of my thorns ever draw even so much

as a drop of blood from you to gray the greening

of this lyrical innocence that sings in the urns of autumn

as if Eurydice raised Orpheus out of the grave for a change,

or wild geese carrying the souls of the dead south

out of a threshed cornfield under the first frost of the stars,

or awoke the Sleepers in the Cave, to a new age

that believes if you can’t dream it with your third eye closed

it isn’t real. It doesn’t sail. It isn’t champagne that’s breaking

like a bottled wave against the bow of a moonboat

that’s been in drydock long enough to heal its wounds

and drift down the mindstream of the muse

like a feather of life, with a leaf for a starmap,

a message of love, with no astrolabes or compasses up its sleeve

and a fleet of poems flying high over head across

the lifeless sea of shadows below, the crane bags of Hermes

reaching your delta where the river greets the sea of bliss

breaking into bloom like a third eye from its chrysalis,

a dragon at dawn, a planet in the sunset, a dream figure

that woke reality up from a firepit of illusion

like foxfire in the scorched roots of an old growth forest

where lightning sows the seeds of illumination

like fireflies and transformative storms of stars

under the heavy eyelids of the pine-cones

that have fallen into a deep meditation on the koans

that have rooted love like an unlikely windfall

of constellations, whether your walking on stars or their ashes,

in the unsalted soil of its own galactic immolations.

PATRICK WHITE