I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,

stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.

Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters

that used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts

bleeding through the snow, wild roses in an ice-age

with flint knapped thorns and the lunar horns

of a dragon of desire for firesticks. I would have

smudged my ghost with a noose of sweetgrass

from the highest rafter in this house of life long before this

if you hadn’t left the gate of your absence open

to the dark paradise of the abyss I’ve been falling through

ever since love got precipitous as a Clovis point with a razor’s edge

and every nightbird in the repertoire of the songs I wrote

started playing with my jugular like a one-string guitar

strung like a highwire act over the voice box

they’re still looking for close to where I crashed.

Some people focus like telescopes on what they can see.

And some look under the eyelids of their deathmasks

at the dreams disappearing like the fragrances and vapours

of the spirits that changed the way they look at life

like a waterclock of endless nights that write their names

in their breath on the black mirrors of a seance of new moons

that can’t meet the same stranger twice, given once

is enough of an afterlife to make death seem petty

compared to the nightmare of the exits we have to go through

to get here, alone and homeless as a welcome mat

on the threshold of a fire escape that descends into a dark alley

where I jam with the feral cats on the urn of a burnt guitar

I carry the ashes of my love poems in like a moonrise in my throat,

birds of the morning singing in the false dawns

of the creosote clinging to my vocal cords like boat-tailed grackles

on a powerline that came down in a storm, how

could it have been otherwise, like a bullwhip across my eyes.

Fireflies are intimate with the tenderness of pain,

but the dragons of love wreak utter destruction in their wake.

And everybody dies in the intensity of the conflagration

like a savage heart on the bone altar of its pyre

just to keep the fire fed like a star that consumes itself

for the sake of shedding a little light on the immensity

of its solitude, many, many nights without curfews ahead.

I resent nothing. I regret less. I don’t plead

like a rosary of skulls beaded like black dwarfs

on an abacus of love that renders an account of all I’ve lost.

If I’ve grown wise as an enlightened eclipse from the encounter,

it was an accident, and if I’ve deepened my ignorance sufficiently

to understand the evanescence of dark matter, there was

never any intent to seek shelter under the wing

of an evil portent that mentored me to see in the dark

that the petals of your loveletters had stopped blooming

in the Jurassic greenhouse of your eyes, like the flowers

and feathers we hoped would evolve out of our scales

like guitar picks into the quills of an oracular snakepit

of picture-music singing back up to the hidden harmonies

in the lonely ballads of the cosmic hiss that puts a finger

to the lips of the silence in a command performance of bliss

that made the darkness shine for awhile, and aged the wine

in the bells of the sorrows that emptied the urns

of the skulls we once raised to celebrate fire on the moon

like lunar starfish burning under water like a shipwreck

of white phosphorus in the Sea of Tranquility

you had to learn to handle like fireflies piloting the Pleiades

through the earthbound starclusters of the New England asters

as if it would always be September ever after

like the crossbones of a harvest moon perishing

like an outdated calendar with the scenic view of an abandoned house

where life once happened in the shadows of the candles

in a wax museum I’ve never been able to put out

like a nightwatchmen that keeps all the doors to his heart unlocked.

A gust of stars settling like dust on the windowsills of the past

and if I don’t say it in a rush of light, I forget

all the words to the song and start making things up

like the flying buttresses of fossilized dragons

I dredge up from my starmud to support the loss

of the faith I used to have in my memory not to lie to me

about how rapturously intimidating it was to see you

walking up the driveway to the door

that keeps opening me up like an unread loveletter

as if you were always standing on the other side

of the pain thresholds I’ve crossed out like the tree ring

of my name carved into the heartwood of a scratched guitar

just to see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again

and maybe sing, o yes, sing a little in the dark

of what you meant to me like a star in the willow boughs

of the saddest poetry I’ve ever recited like a fire in the night

I ghost dance around in the war bonnets of love

I shed like the swan songs of summer stars in the autumn

as our flightpaths arc like arrows fletched in flames toward earth.

PATRICK WHITE