DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

Shape of desire. Hurt one. Lost. Holiness, grieving.

Who could make love to someone as melancholy

and beautiful as you? And that face. Erotic innocence

baffled by a world that doesn’t quite know how

to receive your gift, however happy you are to give it.

Even in a small town where the virgins

who’ve turned everyone down get called slut

by six adolescent boys with the windows rolled down

like purple tinted skies just after sunset

to bluff the bruise out of the rejection by punishing it

as if it happened to someone else, you wear your face

more like a soft, sad atmosphere around an uninhabited planet

than the brittle carapace of an overturned begging bowl

like a turtle on its back most people wear for lifemasks.

I can see a milky aura of white hovering around your face

like an auroral scarf of light glowing with tenderness.

I’ve seen it before in the faces of both sexes, though

I’m heterosexually suicidal, and it lasts

about two years and then disappears for good

between a night and a dawn like the death of morning glory.

I’ve been into seeking other things myself,

but in the whole orchard when I’ve seen it in the past

I’ve often thought this must be the hour of the perfect blossom,

when a face isn’t an expression of anything, but a seance

that calls the gentlest spirits to it like night mist on a lake

and everyone mourns as if beauty were predestined to be forsaken.

Genius ever was so. And I suspect good people, too,

with quiet virtues kinder than plants returning oxygen

for carbon dioxide like new lamps for old, are just as betrayed

by the anonymous sacrifices they make in private

as they are commended in public by people who hate them.

I’ve got to be careful here because I don’t want

to dig a black hole in your heart, when I was out witching for water.

I’m trying not to use lightning bolts of insight

when a gust of intuitive fireflies would do the job.

I don’t want to be an unwieldy dragon among

the blue glass menageries of your exquisite tears.

Aggrandize the thorns and diminish the rose.

You can judge for yourself by the capacity of your eyes

to hold so many stars all at once that shining

can’t be stamped out like a cigarette heater on the carpet

anymore than the heart can doused like a burning house

and learn to live like a fire hydrant out of gratitude.

There’s definitely something seeking about the way you look.

Explore the loneliness. The sadness. The abyss.

Don’t lose the opportunity to learn to mindscape your pain.

As they say in Zen, intense heat unusual sprouts.

Orchids have been known to bloom in the shadows of outhouses.

Listen attentively to how even the most buff bells of life

seem to swing between the sentimental and the vicious

like two extremes of the same enzyme when it’s hard to tell

whether love’s still the lifeline it was reputed to be

or at the end, doubles back on itself and loops into a noose.

And don’t kid yourself. Not all waterclocks make it to the sea

nor do the salmon, however nobly they answer the call

to a higher vocation of oceanic consciousness, make it back up.

Spring no more favours the fledgling in its nest,

than a baited leg hold trap a wolf in mid-winter.

Many people talk and act as if they know what they’re doing,

but most of us are living like a secret that keeps us going,

so don’t be afraid when the unknown becomes inevitably vast

and space turns into glass you’re trying to swim through

like a goldfish or the flamingo fantail of a comet

and everyone’s got a precipitous attitude about what you should do.

It’s your cliff. Jump if you want to or enjoy the view

like a star that’s just been given your eyes like its first telescope.

But don’t let yourself be pushed. Make sure

you’ve got the feathers for it because timing in life

is synonymous with the whole of its content, and suicide?

That’s like asking antimatter to come to the rescue

of a lifeboat with a positive outlook going under

as your life flashes before your eyes like lightning without thunder.

If you want to respect yourself for the immensities

of the myriad annihilations you’re willing to risk,

go all the way like a dragonfly uncurling from its chrysalis

like a question mark that crawls out onto a limb

into an exclamation mark that unfolds its wings and flies

when there’s no where else to swim. Do it creatively

and take a much more dangerous leap of absurdity

by risking it all on a beginning that starts with a fall

and ends up a mountain climber with a base camp among the stars.

What aviator laments the broken egg-shell on the ground,

cosmic or earthbound, when the whole sky lies before it

with a smile on its face as wide as your wingspan

and a heart as big as any abyss, as if it always knew,

as the wind comes to the fireflies and the stars

in a perpetuity of unperishing perennials that refuse

to bloom like traffic lights and triggers, one night,

maybe now, in a blaze of self-immolating transformation

as surely as the Pleiades coming up like the chandelier

of a lost earring in the east, just as beautifully,

in the great lost and found of sorrow and bliss

you, too, no less bravely, would come to this.

PATRICK WHITE