INDELIBLE, THE SALINE TASTE OF THE TEARS

INDELIBLE, THE SALINE TASTE OF THE TEARS

Indelible, the saline taste of the tears

like words you can’t get out of your mouth

at the bedside of a dying swan,

slowly turning into the summer stars

forever skimming over the Milky Way,

wings outspread, as if childhood

had been a lonely dancer and now age

had made her bones and tendons ache

like tent-pegs trying to keep a night sky

over her head, her head above the waves

of an ocean of skin on her body

to keep her from drowning in her own flesh

as she shed what she used to be

to make a vast space in her heart

to embrace what she was becoming.

A gazelle of light on a bridge

that could leap with taste and art

like the moon from one shore

to the next, as if her last breath

were a gust of stars that kissed

all her weeping mirrors on their foreheads

like the lunar dew that used to renew the morning.

I watched her breathing disappear

like the warmth of life in the Orion nebula

on a window colder than a smudge of blood

that won’t come out of the sheets

of a universe hung out to dry in hyperspace.

I grieve the smokey ghost of a dead candle

that tied itself to its own body, the stake

of a heretical dancer consumed with keeping

a single-petalled rose of fire alive

even as she drowned in a lachrymal pool

of her own flesh like a star that could walk on water.

Inviolate, the mystery of death. No one knows

where the waterbirds go with our unburdened souls

once they’re over the hills of where they were buried.

I’ve spent my life looking into mirrors

I ground like templates of death with corborundum,

gazing into eyes and stars, the faces of strangers

I was never convinced I could call my own,

and death, always death, somewhere

in the silvered patina of the background

like the cosmic hiss of the Big Bang, the white noise

of an auroral afterbirth washed up on the shores

of my island instincts, a sea star

learning to breathe in the galactic waters of life

breaking like the skin of a grape

into undated dreams flavoured like a wound

of ripened wine with the untimely joys and sorrows of night.

O brave housefly, buzzing at the windows of death

you’re never going to penetrate like the black dwarf

of an insight that burned out with exhaustion

long before you were cancelled

like an underfunded experiment to prove

the will to absurdity is pangenic to all life.

Our eyes go extinct in the midst of the vision.

Immaculate death, like a vow of silence

in a cult of old ladies, first word of creation

to cast a shadow of life like an aspersion on the abyss

that couldn’t care less whether they existed or not.

I listen oceanically to the stars in lonely clearings

out in the woods where just to stand alone

like a pillar of solitude in a forgotten temple

is to summon the more intimately compassionate feeling

we’re all in the same lifeboat together adrift

on the same nightsea of heart-wrenching awareness

calling out in the fog to voices we’re sure we overheard.

Delusion, dream, or some transubstantiating hallucinogen

distilled like a love potion from the tears of life,

I swim in the feeling there’s something perennial

about the human experience of just being here

that isn’t the passing rumour of a false superstition,

but an insight younger than the dawn of time, more ancient

than the fossils of dusk embedded like constellations

in sedimentary starmud at the beginning of life

well before the universe became conceivable.

Old women don’t just kick the bucket

like a waterclock of wombs bearing the waters of life

back like mythic mindstreams from their own wellsprings

weeping their way down into the valleys of death.

They go on flowing like rivers of light brimming

over the distant horizons of themselves like moonrise.

Or the spiral arms of the Milky Way dancing

with starfish and the sunflowers of the golden ratio

waltzing under the subtle chandeliers of their discrete tears

breaking into fireflies, their eyes damp with prodigal atmospheres.

PATRICK WHITE