YOU'RE JUST MESSED UP LIKE NEW MOONLIGHT

YOU’RE JUST MESSED UP LIKE NEW MOONLIGHT

You’re just messed up like new moonlight

scattering its plumage on the waters like the wing

of a black swan, sweet one. Dry your eyes.

I know there’s a house well of sadness in every one

of your tears, but this is not an eclipse, not the headwaters

of the mascara that runs down your cheeks

like rivers of night. Less is not less. More is not more.

And the light’s not being cruel or trying to make a fool of you.

Love can be a constant in an Elizabethan sonnet,

but in my lean experience of separation and union

the heart’s never been true to time. It doesn’t reject,

it doesn’t defect, it pines for change like an evergreen

when the red-winged blackbirds return in the spring.

Love’s disciplined as water when it’s ice, conformable

as the eyes of the dead to any shape that contains it

like a fixed star that’s always on the graveyard shift

in somebody’s heart or other, a kind of permafrost

that thaws out in the spring like a long laneway of starmud,

or your tears as they are now, released, supple, free,

a turmoil of puddles like inkwells among a thousand lakes

that still wouldn’t be enough, I know, to fill

the eyeless, skyless, emptiness in your heart with words

like the abandoned nest of the abyss in a vacant aerodrome

that’s never going to fly again, songs in the dawn, echoes

in the dusk, and you in your boa of black feathers

billowing like smoke from a rubber tire you set afire

like your heart at a protest when things got real mean and rough.

I can’t say if you’re lover’s ever coming back.

My mystic guess is usually not, but possibly, but don’t

hold your nose like an amateur pearl diver plunging

into those depths when the moon is in the corals

and it’s a shipwreck with its hull ripped out on the reef

you mistook for an enchanted island where you

were the Circe of love, as you were, and it was,

though forever turned out to be epiphanously brief.

No good turning your tears into bathyspheres

when the seas are bottomless and your loveboats don’t float.

Every time you open your eyes another star’s encouraged to shine.

It’s clear you feel like you’re the one who’s blind,

but it’s not true, you know, if you turn the night around

and let the light look into you like the moon

through your bedroom window when there was

more rapture in dreaming awake than there was

in wasting it on sleeping, you’ll see the hidden radiance I see

deep within you brighten the light by deepening the darkness.

Forgive what you can. Forget the rest. Cherish what you must.

It’s not always an evil sign when things go dark. Even

the Queen of Cups must leak out of her heart like the moon

sometime. Mend it with gold. Or leave it open like a wound

you don’t want to get over because the pain has grown

so beautiful, and your longing so pure and poetic

it feels as if a dark angel pierced you through the heart

with a spear of fire that burns like dry ice. Finalities

and farewells numinous with supranormal significance

that can haunt you like an open gate no one’s ever

closed behind them even after stepping through it

lightyears ago. And later in life, you’ll see, you’ll

be amazed by the triviality of the mystic details

the eccentric heart remembers, little things

you never gave a thought to at the time, fireflies

that end up dwarfing the supernovas of self-annihilating emotion

that vaporized the oceans in your eyes and scattered your ashes

across the firmament like the Road of Ghosts poured

from the urn of a cement truck paving over the past

to make you forget that any path you take in life

is cobbled with the skulls of those who died to build it

like coolies on the C.P.R., or children making Nike runners.

You’re bipedal enough to know that one step forward

is one step back so where on this long, dark, waning

and waxing journey through life is there anywhere

for anyone to go except right here as we are now

dogpaddling in space as if we were firewalking on stars?

Between the first and last crescents of the parenthetical moon,

like the bay of your open arms, the systole, diastole of your heart,

the ebbing and neaping of tides, quantumly entangled photons

ten thousand times the speed of light, flaunting

the constants of life like chains we throw off

like a revolution we fought to keep things

as they always were, radically the same, clinging

like liberation and unity to the contradictory sum of our parts.

When these deserts of stars that scorch the heart grow hot enough

they go swimming in their own mirages like lovers

in each other’s eyes, trying to beat the heat

by sweating it out as if each were weather to the other,

a promise of rain, a spring in Jericho, the oasis

of Amun-Re in Egypt. Yes, your lover’s father was a god

and his mother a Pythian priestess with the grace of a snake,

and you feel you’re burning like Persepolis in the flames

of a drunken rage trying to upstage Asia Hellenistically,

but little Isis, you’re sleepwalking in the land of the lotus-eaters

as if you were following the starmap of a dream you drew

imagining what it would be like to be in love

like a secret garden in paradise you never grew tired of

waiting for him to step out of the moonlight

and embrace you under the blossoming persimmon trees

as if he were of the same heart as you and you weren’t a girl

with grass stains on your knees and your hair in hideous braids

you wanted to cut short like a reprieve from your mother’s sense

of gallow’s humour and what looked good on you

like a chain weighing anchor like the corpse of a caduceus

that couldn’t find a way to heal itself before it was too late.

It’s an injurious business losing your innocence like a lie

you told yourself as a young girl, and did everything you could

to make come true. Don’t flagellate yourself

for something that was missing in you or think

your life, his life, all life is meaningless because

even his absence isn’t big enough to contain

the emptiness that abounds in you like a darkness

you cherish like a hidden jewel in an underworld

where the Queen of Death is more ravishing

than apple bloom in the spring of life before

the prelude of love turns bitter and green for awhile

as counter intuitively, the golden windfalls of the sun

at dusk in autumn, and this can happen synchronistically

without a local habitation or a name at any time

regardless of your age or the despair of your era,

just fall in your lap like the sweetness of life

ripening the light retroactively on a survivable planet.

PATRICK WHITE