YES, THERE ARE PALE GARDENS

YES, THERE ARE PALE GARDENS

Yes, there are pale gardens, wings ribbed

like the eyelashes of butterflies, and roses

of flaking blood rooted like something

that was said between the lines of lovers

in a book of fossils in the Burgess Shale.

Even the silence that binds the sacred

to the mundane when the margins of beauty

are feathered by the eyes of peacocks

in the apple green dusk bleeding into mystic blue,

as if one weren’t enough to anticipate

the stars emerging like a gentle rain,

the breath of your lover on the hairs of your arm,

as if the dark were crying through tears of light

from the clouds of unknowing, from

the fathomless watersheds of life and death,

even these tender precipitates of the light

that come on like porches and fireflies

and lamp-posts in this breathless interim

where we neither let things go nor take them in,

nothing born yet of its native waters

and no corpse to wash for burial, neither

prelude to the night, nor epilogue of the day,

even the silence, unliving, undead, unborn, unperishing,

can sometimes seem as dessicated and stale

as the bread and the salt we laid out

on the kitchen table as a feast

to welcome our ghosts back as if they

were the guests for a change, and we

their absent hosts only a threshold away

from revealing the mirage of our own origins

to those who have dismissed us like the wisdom

of old wives’ tales vaguely remembering

the distant legends of our own mythic past

that animated us once like dragons in the dawn

that vowed never to be false to its own beginnings.

So I have not forgotten you like the tattoo

of a starmap inked indelibly on this

paper-thin skin of water like a gravemarker

of the oceans of the moon that have dried up

since the heart has stopped flowing into them

like a waterclock of shadows trying to top off

the overturned hourglasses of better times.

No other place the past has ever lived

but in the specious present, in the same

house of life it was born into and you

have gone on morphing where sacred rivers join

at the meeting place of tribal fires

that have grown brighter over the lightyears

than ghost dancers inspired by the shadows

of things to come out of these penumbral sketches

as I have always done and do like quick studies

of your face since I met you like someone

I would keep on encountering for the rest of my life

in the charcoal and ashes of first magnitude dragons

that still burn like candles beside the beds

we lay down in where we couldn’t tell

if we drowned in the oceans of the rose

like the waves of the vast night sea

that overwhelmed the bodies of our lifeboats

in rogue sunamis, or the flames of desire we were

cremated in prophetically like butterflies

that burned like furnaces in the infernoes

of our mouths as we drifted off like satisfied fire hydrants

into the mindstreams that flowed like rose petals

strewn in the happy gutters of dreams that didn’t

long for anything more than what our arms could hold

of blood and hair and eyelids, lips and breasts,

and the mystic defaults we fell back upon

like the feather pillows of our dishevelled humanity.

No urns, but the kilns have remained hot

as the Pleiades, and the vases we turned

like our bodies back then are still arranging

the constellations like wildflowers that haven’t

shape-shifted into kitchen pots and garden plots

where lovers scatter their ashes on the roots of roses

mummified in bark and burlap, hoping

they’ll make it through another long winter

that drags on like the extinction of spring

in a homely afterlife awaiting the return of everything.

PATRICK WHITE