MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

MORE PEACE THAN DEATH IN THE QUALITY OF THE SILENCE TONIGHT

More peace than death in the quality of the silence tonight.

In such a vastness, after so many turnings at the crossroads,

I can feel you breathing in the dark within me

as I used to watch you dream for hours

in the glow of the fire on an ice bound night

when no one was on the roads like buttered mirrors

and only the shadows and moonlight moved

like ghosts that were sure of their footing

and the elastic cats were stretched out in the warmth

like deserted shorelines as far as they could go

as if they never wanted to come back to themselves.

My love for you burned like a poppy of blood

in the white gold of the wheat of my body

I offered you like bread, as you, yours to me,

wine that had been crushed like wild grapes

from the vineyards of a thousand new moons.

Though space and time be one continuum,

dimension and direction, vectors of shadows on a sundial,

two feathers of the same flightpath of a nightbird

that disappears into the silence of its longing

as if it had found its voice in the stillness of the immensities

that enclosed us like two secrets that revealed

what was intimately human about the mystery of life,

just to feel the light gathering in my eyes

as I looked upon your face the way the stars

shine down upon the earth was always and only

as far as I ever had to seek to know why I lived.

The journey finds itself like a planet around a fire at night.

And all that is huge and incomprehensible about love,

is contained in the watershed of a single tear

we shed in joy as it floods the heart to realize

how wrong our starmaps were for so long about so much

though they try to fix our brevity to a time and a place

and a myth we could look up to when we’re lost

all we ever had to do, rooted in each other’s starmud,

was let the shining find us, even on the coldest nights,

like flowers blooming in the soporific aura of a fire

while your eyes were dreaming like a nightstream

under its eyelids of ice, and mine, for all the lightyears since

my seeing has ripened in time, and this night is no exception,

were grateful to witness the poppies flaring

in the gardens of the afterlife of Orion as near

as a pair of cardinals taking shelter in a snowbound cedar tree.

We burned brightly together for awhile, did we not---

two flames of a root fire folding its wings

like a love poem I wanted you to find in the morning

that didn’t return to its grave like a ghost of smoke

lingering long into the dawn of that hour you awoke

beside me, the sun gleaming in the crude chandeliers

of the icicles and the snow fronds of the ferns on the windows,

though things that were near and familiar have been

estranged by space and time, and the melting roads we once

walked down together in the spring are long gone, I write to you

in warm tears as I did that night in the glow of a fire

even after all these years, that can still take the chill off the air

as if the flames in the heartwood of the lives we are consumed by

refeather the dragons on the pyres of sumac, even time, though

it’s cold and cutting, can’t blow out like stars flowering on the wind.

PATRICK WHITE