SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

Sweeter than the beginning of a delusion

it wouldn’t be wisdom to resist, I see

waterlilies burning votive candles on the Fall River.

Even in winter, chandeliers of blood red chokecherries

feting the pheasant, the quail, the hermit thrush.

Mutable mind, mutable heart, out of this bleak night

of frozen waterclocks, I summon irrevocable time

to break the ice on my eyes and let me drink the stars again

from the unattainable grails of a prophetic skull

tormented by impossible longings the way I once was

when I walked with you beside the whisper of this river

after a summer rain, knowing it wasn’t me

you were crying for. You befriended the cure,

but you were in love with a wound, and I,

unwise in the way a lover’s blood

could taste of thorns forever as if each

were the gravestone of a rose you tried

to bury deep inside yourself like a moonrise

that came up every night to shed its petals on you

like the phases of the dead opening the fresh scars

of their eyelids over and over again to shock you

with the hydra-headed budding of your pain---I

who was an exorcism, could never hurt you like that,

even as you were a seance summoned by a ghost

I never tried to dispossess you of. Love, but not with me

as my voice disappeared into the silence

like a waterbird through a curtain of broken prayer beads

falling away like tears from my wings, like a carillon

of tiny bells that knew they’d never have anything

sweeter to sing about than that moment

they held their tongues and listened to the way

you talked about the moonlight gracing the waterlilies

as if you were addressing a loveletter to someone

so deeply embedded in your heart it made

the distance to the stars almost seem intimate

though it was your eyes I listened to in silence

as the river passed for the next thirty years not certain

if I bloomed like a man or died beside it like a child that night.

PATRICK WHITE