SWEET AS A SUMMER NIGHT YOU WERE

SWEET AS A SUMMER NIGHT YOU WERE

Sweet as a summer night you were,

wild and beautiful, astonishing as the stars

through an open window, simple and stylish

as a single-petalled rose, amorous as

a strawberry as brash as it was shy,

and you had a literary bent for fucked up poets

inspired by the succubi that drank from their hearts

like bloodbanks that paid high dividends

without taking much of a creative risk

you’d get thorns in your mouth

from eating too much cactus. Dangerous

fragrance of a forbidden flower in the dark

that cursed you in the same breath it blessed you in,

what misery and mystery of the nymph phase

wasn’t mythologically attributable to you and the moon?

And that dark side? When your eyes would cloud

with the ghosts of old transgressions from

the firepits that made a lunar mindscape of your soul,

and I’d sit like a circumspect mammal quietly

out of sight listening to Jurassic Park amp up at night

as if I were some iota subscript at the foot of a species

worthy of my wary respect, did you even know

why you penumbrally slipped into an eclipse

of the new moon sometimes and looked at me

like the sign language of another eyeless night?

I loved you like the nocturnal side of life.

You were the asterisk that alerted me

to something stirring in the urns and furnaces

of my starmud firing up the ashes in the kilns

I was tempered in like a waterclock of wombs

hardening into a new alloy of water and fire

like a sword no one before me had fallen upon.

It wasn’t easy keeping my edge around you.

I didn’t want to be blunted like something

sleazy on the moon that couldn’t draw first blood

if it wanted to, and when did I ever, then or since?

Part of the art of loving a rose with a black heart

is not to disarm it of its thorns, or put on a crown

and a crucifix like a sacrificial king on a hill of skulls.

I always sat in the corner with my back to the wall

when I went out with Calamity Jane,

but one look at you and I knew I was holding

the Queen of Spades. Digging my own grave

on Boot Hill, knowing it would kill me to call your bluff

and because I loved you enough I never did

and bit the bullet through the back of my head

like the ricochet off your last relationship with the dead.

PATRICK WHITE