THE WORDS MAKE IT SOUND BREEZY

THE WORDS MAKE IT SOUND BREEZY

The words make it sound breezy, but experience

chafes our visions of love as if it were sandpapering

our eyes with stars. Graduated grades of carborundum

grinding our parabolic mirrors into subtle refinements

no more than half an angstrom wide. So we can

see each other more clearly out in the open away

from all the light pollution. You want to see

God from this distance you’ve got to stand

on the top of an immaculately dark mountain and wait

or turning the light around meditate like an observatory

with an immanental self-reflecting telescope on clock drive.

Until you see the Beloved in a stillness and silence

deeper than your own solitude, the abyss within you

can’t be fulfilled by her presence resonating through space

and we remain as we were at the gates of her mystery,

intimate strangers with our own intelligence

because we long like nightbirds in the spring with our mouths

not our hearts set aflame like flowering stars.

You can research the sacred syllables of arcane dream grammars

until you can’t help but sing in kells of dragons and grape-vines

that bind your lyrics in golden tendrils as securely as chains

to the age they’re rooted in, as if now were all time to come,

but the wind knows the deserts of love better than to elaborate abstractions

beyond necessity. True blue star sapphire seekers travel light.

Love is tough. Not the downy fluff of a nebular flightfeather of light

you can brush off your shoulder like a snowflake

but the arc of an eagle-eyed arrow with an obsidian point to make.

The heart burns, it doesn’t smoulder like a tear-soaked loveletter

trying to get a fire started in the rain. It’s first mandate,

the acceptance of pain and courage in the face of happiness.

I’ve seen more cowards run from joy than fear.

Union is an oxymoron of the far come near. Love pours

stars in your ear like the flavours of dreams

you can taste on your tongue when you wake in the morning

urgent to write your love lyrics down like a falcon of blood

the hood’s just come off, and the dawn rising

like an English skylark that’s been nesting on the ground too long

trying to remember all the words to the song it used to sing

before it perched on the dead bough in the aviary of its voice-box.

Love is the white heal all of the moon in early April

not a way to rustproof the lilacs from decay nor yet

an hermetic science for mutating into the immutable

turning your back on evolution and change

like the first principle of a dead language in chains.

Or a miracle that’s outlived the ghost of its afterlife

like a candle watching its soul drift away like smoke.

The mystically specific details of love are not smudged

by mundane generalities blurring the starmaps with chalk dust

on the Burgess Shale of a blackboard fossilizing sea stars

inspired by a Cambrian explosion of alternative life forms.

From the alpha of the male to the omega of the woman

who gets the last word in like a farewell that says it all,

from the beginning to the end, love is always protean,

shapeshifting like stemcells repairing wounded hearts

like wishing wells the bottoms fell out of like buckets.

The bower of love isn’t a waterbed of writhing wavelengths,

not the warp and woof of a loom weaving snakepits

into a flying carpet the waning moon unravels at night

like a strong rope into a million sectarian threads

staking Gulliver to the ground in the Land of the Lilliputians.

Love isn’t petty like that. It’s fulsome in its shining.

It’s closer to your jugular vein than Occam’s razor

in the hands of God pruning roses in her secret garden,

not by the number of thorns they sport

but by the flagging eyelids of their dozy blossoms

that couldn’t stay awake long enough to see the moon rise.

Beware of love’s excruciating unconditionality

if you’ve never suffered transformatively in the name of it

and you’re happy enough o happy enough with the shame

of the truce you signed and sealed in the blood of a rose in the snow

that will never get to root deeper in your heart

than the permafrost that isn’t thawed by the hilarity

of the spring run off riding its own impetuosity to the sea

in the glee of daring the danger-fraught mystery

of whitewater rafting its own mindstream at the flood,

taking a chance your yellow, plastic, hockey helmet

might be dashed like the yolk of an egg on the rocks,

or overturned and swept out of the eye of the hurricane downstream

you’ll come up under a death trap of overhanging trees

and drown in your own odyssey beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Could happen. So what? Love isn’t the slow erosion

of a cultivated lifestyle you’re hanging on to like a kayak

or a paper birch canoe gathering wild rice in the moonlight

for a wedding of warriors with the brides of a ghost dance

whose euphoria has been unwisely tempered

by a pragmatic approach to misery that surrenders the whole

heart by heart to the crows like bitter chokecherries in the fall.

Inspiratrix of scarlet maples when the trees burn

their poems in the bonfire of the vanities in an oil drum,

love isn’t consumed in the flames of its own intensities

but rides a dragon out beyond the wild starfields

where they pasture the winged horses they put out to stud

Libyan mares turning their backs on the north wind,

as if they were playing hard to get like gypsies in the caves

above Malaga, dancing to the snap of their lobster castanets

as they stamp their feet crushing hearts like cigarette-butts in disgust.

Sometimes love flaunts its freedom like a death sentence.

As the quality of the inestimable golden fleece

can be assessed by the character of the dragons

innocence summons to the nightwatch to guard it

like skeleton keys with a mouthful of tabooed eye teeth.

Whether you call it a spell or a force, love

is the strong magic that binds the atoms together

like shepherd moons alchemically experimenting

with the waters of life heated by the fumaroles

of volcanic puncture wounds hemorrhaging with life

like the black new moon of the Mithras bull

letting go of the rose that bloomed in its heart out of love.

A sacrificial silo of grain the snake and the dog and the scorpion

all partake of as if love fell like rain in a desert

on everything alike, as the pyramids melted like quicksand

or castles in the tide, and the wetlands of our starmud

were silted by alluvial flood myths in the deltas

of our Aquarian afterbirth that made it all the way

on the crests and troughs of her breaking waters to the sea

of sidereal awareness beyond the split hairs

of our distinctive nervous systems piloting our mindstreams

from conditioned consciousness into the creative extremes

of chaos thriving in the unlimited freedom

of immersing itself wholly in its own fathomless depths

without fear of drowning in a world that floats.

PATRICK WHITE