I COULD HAVE BEEN WHAT YOU WANTED ME TO BE

I COULD HAVE BEEN WHAT YOU WANTED ME TO BE

I could have been what you wanted me to be.

You would have hated it. The windows

would have burst out laughing and the mirrors

would have followed suit. I wasn’t

a real estate agent who was going

to provide you with a house. I left that

to better men than me. Though I would have

said I forty years ago before I was objectified.

What a smile. And your hair and your body.

Beautiful breasts. A savage hippie when

it came to sex. Intelligent. Ambitious

and emotionally wrecked. Mommy

had a harpoon. Mustn’t go too deep.

And she thrust it straight into your heart.

It used to hurt me to see how you hurt

in silence and irrationality. Before you

took it out on me. The people we were.

The person you wanted so nearly to be.

An artist. And you were. I was raised

in the gutter so no one but my mother cared

and I was free before I had a word for it,

but you were anchored to your upbringing

like a waterlily in swamp. You wanted

to turn all that festering into something beautiful.

I always admired your courage. You

plunged into things. Me, for example.

I can relate to that kind of bravery, except

in me as well as you that always led to a kind

of self-destructiveness, for better and worse.

Hey, but the quality of your verse

was much improved. Your rage grew

surrealistic enough it took on an edge

of concerted madness. You began to see

how everything was quantumly entangled.

That didn’t stop you from leaving

or me letting you go. Fly, fledgling, fly.

And, yes, there was a sadness that hung

over everything like a bell that’s sung

at its last funeral. And the moon was

terrifying at times. The sheer impersonality

of it. The experience of forever as an absolute.

I inherited a lot of powerful memories

that comfort me sometimes on a winter night

when the snow is so silent and everyone’s

inside, warm, being buried alive in drugs,

movies, alcohol, kids, fights, canvases and poems,

or walking around town in a solitude

that melts the ice behind me as if a glacier

were throwing salt and gravel on the road.

I think of you as the first woman I ever loved

unconditionally, and I shudder from

a deeper cold that comes from deep within.

Your youth and your beauty won’t be mine again.

Watching you amazed by something

you’d accomplished without any help from anyone

is a pleasure I’ve long forgone. The gate

is as open as it’s ever going to get, braided

in vetch, and the door you left through

so many times, only to return later in sorrow,

I split up on a chopping block for kindling.

There was always something irrepressible about you.

A volcano on an Italian mountainside.

You sacrificed what you loved to get what you want.

I preserved what was good about us

and the rest has vaporized into eccentric ghosts

I talk to when the wind is rattling the windows.

When the dead branch drags its fingernails

down a blackboard and it feels, o yes, it feels

like the shrieking of a snow owl made of chalk

just after it’s seized the deer mouse by the throat.

Sometimes reluctantly, I’ve always been on

your side, like your eyes are. It’s the shadows

that made a mess of everything. Darkness

I can understand. The ambergris of blackholes

spewing the starlight back like prophets and perfume.

At the end, all we ever wanted from each other

were our bodies. Sex with a friend who wasn’t

the answer to what we were looking for,

or was for awhile. Someone you didn’t need to kill

because they’d already died for you. And that

was more than enough to drive you over

the edge with guilt for being true to yourself,

wasn’t it?--- as if murder remained innocent

by virtue of the madness that had laboured to achieve it.

PATRICK WHITE