LIGHTYEARS AWAY FROM YOUR GREEN GREEN
EYES
Lightyears away from your green, green
eyes
in this labyrinth of black holes and
cul de sacs
where the entrances to love are as
inescapable
as the exits, and still, legends of the
inconceivable,
unlost, unfound as I am, how could I
have imagined
time and distance would not diminish
the intensity
of your power to make the dark bloom
within me
like a rumour of flowers on a
previously
uninhabitable planet that keeps jumping
orbitals
to release this ghost of a photon like
an enlightened memory
of the interlude we were to one another
once,
when all you had to do was glance at me
with that ferocity of intent to live
life immensely
and I could hear my dragons singing in
your flames
like heretics in the bliss of a
revelation they never denied.
The myths of origin we attribute to the
light
may lie over the course of time to
protect the truth
like a passport that identifies the
thresholds we crossed
like burning bridges to get to the
other side of nowhere
real fast as we swore allegiance to our
homelessness,
but the constellations we translated
each other into
were the conflagrations of real dragons
born
of the fictions of fireflies.
Root-fires in our starmud.
The truce we both made with the
warriors
of our solitude that ate our hearts
like wild strawberries
if we ever did lose it for awhile like
a holy war
that left Jerusalem undefended. I
always loved
the metal in your spirit like an alloy
of water and light
and the darkness of the ore they were
embodied in
as I stood there beside you like the
urn of a lighthouse
looking at the stars at the beginning
of the Bronze Age
over the expansive starfields of the
wine-dark night sea
as if all journeys had been woven on
the loom of the moon
into the aniconic wavelengths of the
flying carpet
we were riding on like serpentine
picture music
over the precipitous event horizons of
albino worlds to come
where blazing is the blindness and if
you want
to see each other in the dark as we did
you have to
blow the candles out like the masts of
white canes
on a liferaft without a star to guide
them.
You overwhelmed me like the eclipse of
a hurricane rose
as I fell on your thorns, the crescents
of your lunar moods,
and the antidotes in their fangs
repeatedly like a junkie
on the white nights of a Saturnalian
paradise
that shone like the sun at midnight on
the winter solstice.
Even the shadow of your absence was a
lost eyelash
brighter than this road of ghosts on a
summer night
thriving with life I’ve wandered down
alone ever since
the phoenix was fledged like the
flightfeathers of the sumac
in the fall and it was time to abandon
the nests
we laid upon each other’s heads like
laurels and crowns going down
like Corona Borealis shedding its
flames like the leaves
of the abandoned birch groves it’s
still a delight to remember
once burned like a green dragon in the
saline taste of your tears.
The black arts people practice upon
each other’s hearts
in a shallow time shore-hugging their
passions
like the eyes greater tides left in
their wake might long
for love to sweep them away in the
undertow of their dreams,
but at the deep end of the pool you
knew how to hunger
like fire for the waters of life you
wanted to dance upon
like the graves of your enemies where
the skull and crossbones
marks the spot where you buried them at
sea with hasty honours
from the flashing sabres of your
laughter as they went overboard
like the moon in the way they fell for
you on their own swords.
Imp of my spirit, water-sylph, rogue
star and demon,
there aren’t enough tree rings in my
heartwood
or skulls on the abacus of my calendars
and rosaries
to count the times I stopped for eras
along the way
and wondered what rivers you walked
beside on your own
as if your tears were solely reserved
for the stars
like broken mirrors and intergalactic
chandeliers
that fell like a glass blown ice storm
thawing into rain.
It’s not my place anymore to say much
to you,
but I saturate the space around you
with millions of eyes
that run like sacred syllables along my
tongue
like a blade of stargrass on the
cutting edge of love
that’s mastered the silence like a
foreign language
only the two of us could ever
understand. And I know well
the darkness within you that is deeper
than the watersheds
of night, but even for a moment of
insight
if I could shine for you one more time
like a star
through the distant veils of your
treeline, even
as it descends like Vega into the
Orphic darkness
of its renewal, black Isis, Queen of
Heaven,
who keeps the sailors from drowning who
wear
the prophylactic of your sidereal
tattoo
on the left palm of their hand like a
lonely constellation
of one, what could I possibly say at
this remove
to indelibly impress you with the
staying power
of the furious tenderness of love
except to thank you
for not blunting the sword on the stone
you drew it from?
PATRICK WHITE
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