MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

MIDNIGHT WATER-GARDENS OF THE RAIN

Midnight water-gardens of the rain.

Train-whistle and a singer’s voice.

The darkness seems more musical

and sadder than it was as it falls to earth

like the orbits of earrings and bracelets

when a woman takes off her jewellery

like the windfall of stars from a chandelier

in the mirror of who she appears to be.

Sorrows ripen in the cellars of the heart

like wine waking up from a long dream,

and the ashes of summers that didn’t last

scattered on the wind like mourning doves

from the urns and furnaces of the mind.

The dark silence weeps before the beauty and the love

in the heartwood of yesterday because

of all I’ve been witness to, it never fails

to bring a smile to my face like the tree rings

of the rain or the feel of starmud between my toes

when I take my shoes off out of respect

for the house of life I’m always entering

like a ruined temple that’s been visited by God

in the female form of a life-fulfilling wound.

I resonate on the same frequency as the tuning fork

of the lightning tines of a snake’s tongue

tasting the air to know it’s sweet

with the occult wisdom of a sacred sibilant

caught like the shadow of a wavelength

in the moonlight strewing white rose petals

on a path of thorns. There’s a hidden coherence

in the evanescence of my voice that obeys the laws

of a self-imposed dream grammar that doesn’t have any.

I’m a poet looking out at the rain through a window.

I remember the harsh delights of flesh and blood

that made the purple passages of my solitude

I had learned by heart seem blessed by what

kept cursing them back into life, night after night,

reaching out to touch someone like the other coast

of the great nightsea of awareness you’re sailing

like the shadow of a sundial into the wind.

Light years away, a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that went down with the gold we plundered

like the patch of the new moon over our third eyes

at harvest time when the living was easier

than the songs that would later be written about it

as the ghosts of old bells dripped from the roof.

Enclosures of silence like those taboo sacred spots

you just wander into sometimes alone in the woods

until the dead tell you to get out as if

you were the demon they were driving out of them

like a scapegoat into the wilderness

with unknown sins on your back that bleed

like the stigmata of a black rose gored on its own thorns

or the childhood innocence of experienced bull-vaulters

torn on the horns of the moon and cast aside

like paint rags of love too close to the subject

to see the big picture from inside the allegory.

Less than generous to sour the wine with tears

of bitter vinaigrette. Let the ice sublimate

into cirrus clouds that catch the light of the sun

like silk that feels like the wind on wet skin

the seeds of the starfields we walked through together

cling to like root room in the lonely palaces

of our lunar watersheds peering out through

the eyes of the rain like an abacus of mended necklaces.

PATRICK WHITE