WHENEVER I REMEMBER YOU

WHENEVER I REMEMBER YOU

Whenever I remember you. Heartwood knots.

And the birds go silent. After all these years

of trying to flower my way to fruition in the light

of the effortless vision that’s been the engine

of my life. Windfall of blossoms. Windfall

of warm apples. Windfall of burning leaves.

I can still feel your arrow of moonlight in my throat.

I can still feel how you peeled back the rind

of the moon and pieced out my heart calendrically

like sundials that lost track of the time

in the bluing of the lyrical distances in your eyes.

Taste it. You’ll like it, you said. Acidicly sweet.

Indelible. Like the first time you ever smell

the dead. Love is a pear. But I wasn’t listening.

I was looking at you as the embodiment

of lust and love and death and dream and karma

summoned out of my psyche to give me

what I’ve always been in danger of wanting.

You made the dark shine when I put

the powerlines of my most courageous poetry

in my mouth, and spoke in tongues

to the naked ghost dancers that brought me

my totems like owls of smoke and crystal skulls

of dragon fire, only you, with your finger

on the trigger of the silence, could put out

like a candle with a word. And things hardened

into wax tears as if a switchblade just showed up

and cut the jugular of the wick with a flick of the moon.

The only rational approach to what we

were doing together in the same dream for awhile

was insanity beyond reform or reproach.

Night in a blackberry patch maligned as razor wire.

Intensities met like two stars passing through

these immensities like virtual solitudes looping

around each other in a prayer wheel of a dance

both knowing in advance, though you were more

inclined to fly off centripetally like a bucket

you whirled over your head the bottom had fallen out of,

we didn’t stand a ghost of a chance, however

well we conducted the seance that brought us

back to each other like a table with the manners

of a ouija board. And the silence, do you remember

the silence as I do that overcame us like a surrender

we’d resigned ourselves to? Nothing left unsaid?

No. That’s a lie. I went to the block protesting

my love of you like a death bed confession

you’d have no reason to doubt, though at that

late hour of the night in the torchlit tower

it didn’t much matter anyway. I felt

the blade of the moon on the nape of my neck

and my head fall into the basket like an Orphic dismemberment.

You added a prophetic element to my voice

but my future’s been a quiet kind of voodoo ever since.

I sing alone in the woods at night under

the willows rinsing their hair in the river

that’s keeps me company when I want

to unburden my heart of the sorrows

that have deepened it beyond comprehension.

O how many of the grains of dust on the windowsills

of these worlds within worlds once boiled

like guitar strings in the impoverished begging bowls

of a coffin open on the corner of a bank

and the tone-deaf cosmos of love on the fly.

The way it was was the way it had to be,

I suppose. Not exactly scar tissue. But at least

I can go out in public without space

fracturing the nervous system of my reserve

of dark energy shepherding the stars like lost sheep.

Take a look at the Milky Way. Doesn’t it

remind you sometimes of a scarf that got

strangled in the axle of a zodiac winched up

from the bottom of a black hole where we

were both drawn to each other like singularities

that weren’t given much of a voice

in what the wild geese cried out in transit

across the moon like an ancient farewell

that always heralds the sad beginning of new world?

PATRICK WHITE