MOONRISE AMONG THE CRUMPLED SWANS OF THE BED SHEETS

MOONRISE AMONG THE CRUMPLED SWANS OF THE BED SHEETS

Moonrise among the crumpled swans of the bed sheets

ploughed aside like snow at the sides

of the impossible road it didn’t matter

whether we walked alone or together.

No one was going anywhere for the winter.

Your eyes grew numb with the long gaze

of windows that haven’t had much

to look at for awhile, and though you

only had to smile to convince me

the wild irises were still burning

in the water gardens down by the river

I knew you were snowblind inside

and gave you my shades like eclipses on crutches

to take the bloom off the angels’ albino rose

and remind you there were stars emerging

from the dark at the end of these

long, somnolent afternoons lazy as fog.

Sometimes people relate to each other like stones

pushed around by one too many ice ages,

meat and berries, and they start consulting

the skulls of their ancestors under the hearthstones

of the fires that kept them alive, and o

every once and awhile, didn’t they, suddenly blaze

when some spirit of the wind danced around them?

Do you still paint your face when you’re indulging

in savage sex? I’m looking at stars that no longer

exist lightyears away from where I hope

you’re shining now. I’ve got this indelible wound

in my heart with a typo in it like a thorn

that’s probably out of print by now but I’ve learned

to live with it like the arrowhead of an extinction event.

The winter was too long. The isolation too deep.

The ashes gathered around our feet like the pyres

and smokestacks of genocidal sky burials

and even the chandeliers began to fumigate the air

like the pendulous censers of our ritual heartbeats.

Dark’s one thing. But bleak’s another that’s harder

to account for like a rusty bullet after a long war

with the elements strategically arrayed against you

when the sofas go into hibernation like fat bears

and the cardinals come to the bird feeders

hanging from the locust trees like rare flames

to a candle on the greyest of days that sputter out

before you have a chance to make it to the window.

Thresholds of bark and snow we brushed off

the tree rings of the fossil fuels of two springs ago

we kept throwing on the fire as if a genie

would be born of the flames without smoke

and suggest what we might have been able

to wish for from one another when we took

our hearts out of the freezer and unwrapped them

to see how badly they’d been burnt by the cold.

Don’t expect to see you again waist-high

walking toward me out of the golden grass.

One of those moments so off-handedly forever

time’s never crass enough to repeat it, nor

need it be, given it’s occurred to me a thousand times

since that summer above the marsh

with its galaxies of waterlilies at the beginning

of the universe with only you and I in it,

as if it signified something deeper than even love

can discern between a man and a woman

trying so hard not to hurt one another knowing

there was no way to avoid it for the rest of their lives.

PATRICK WHITE