HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

HOMOGENOUS GREY WITH VIOLET TOWERS OF DELPHINIUMS

Homogenous grey with violet towers of delphiniums

so intensely purple, they’re an imperium unto themselves

in a twilight zone between night and the dawn,

a mystic state of blood when the eyes in your heart

climb down from their firetowers like stars, vacate

their watch without leave weary of being on the lookout

for two bullets to the back of your head as if

it were better all were lost than to proceed by rote

at someone else’s peril. If only we could bleed

like the masterpiece of these waiting for our eyes

to catch up to the sleeping visionary within us all.

Would we see our dreams dying in the vastness

like the fragrance of flowers that exhaled themselves

like forbidden passions in a garden of moonlight and lemons

as if every moment of life were an encounter

with what’s most strange and mystifying about us

as the cowled shadow of the figure by the blind sundial

turns as if to ask at last, can you see me now? Am I not

more beautiful than anything your imagination

was afraid to meet for fear of falling in love irreparably?

Would the seed build the rafters of a new treehouse for us all

by impregnating the earth with more intimate metaphors

that embrace their own perishing like an enduring love affair

with what remains most daringly inconceivable about us?

Easy enough to explain, but whoever understands it,

inherits a dynastic empire of afterlives in a silence

so profound no one without the bloodseal of the delphiniums

in their heart has attempted it yet as a way

of inhabiting the unattainable by reaching out

like the stars in a spearhead of flowers

to the aimless distances in a passing stranger’s eyes.

The mercy’s in the blooming and the planets

gather around like the fruits of why it should be so.

The mindstream divines the way of water as it flows.

And what could the light that unites what’s most remote

from us to the aniconic images of love that bind us

to one another like delphiniums and gardeners

to the hidden suns of the seeds in the starmud

of our shining but inspiration, that wounded joy

made manifest in the eyes of the way we express ourselves

when we encounter love as if it were never meant to happen

like the royal house of the delphiniums in inexplicable rapture

they can trace their bloodlines back to the stars

as each of us, enthroned like the king and queen,

the prince and the pauper, the singer and the thief,

the sage and the fool, for a day and a night of love, ours?

PATRICK WHITE