HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,

the moon is full on your windowsill,

and the stars haven’t gone down

over the eyes of your bells

or made a fool of your tears

over a jest of ashes. You are

the night branch that reaches for me

and I’m the bird that returns

to your cherry chandeliers,

the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,

and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood

thorns and vines, simmering eclipses

broken gates and lonely doorways

where I’ll always come to shine,

where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death

for the eyelids and bridges

in the breath of your wine.

Eternity isn’t time enough

to hold the sea I bear you

nor a mountain robed in snow

nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,

more than a wound and a toy

to the love I feel for you.

Heal softly, lover, hear me, see

in this dreamtime of the flesh,

how the lanterns

of the lady slippers glow with honey

that fill the hives with light,

and the doe sleeps softly

in the silver grass that jewels the water,

and the fireflies outlive the brass

of graver monuments than these

that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids

in apples and eglantine,

in roads and doors and thresholds,

in skulls and scars and sunspots

in grapes and scarlet runners,

in the slips of the cucumber seeds,

and the lips of the velvet borage

that kiss and overflow the stone,

you’re the harp in the throat of time

the spider weaves

to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,

no journal of summer

pressed between the pages

of the nightshift shales,

no blood on a chain,

or raven lost in the rags and ribbons

of her own black sails, not

frost on a garden that fails,

or a lock that’s lost it keys,

or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,

you are the candle and the seal

of all my mystic urgencies,

the gentle thief of my confessions

at the circuits and sessions

of a doomed man’s last appeal

to die in the bay of your arms,

a dolphin, a bottle, a snail

that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs

that follow the sun like clocks

and when your day is done

bathe in the dusk with the birds

that fly through the air like autumn,

and scented by the apricots

and peacock blues that pour out of my heart

like the eyes and inks of a prelude,

a painter, a pitcher of words,

rise from your ancient solitude renewed

and dressed by the wind

in your scarves and veils,

in your nets, your shawls and auroras,

in anklets, chokers, loops and chains

in your nebulae and orbits

and the nippled rain of your earrings,

wait for me as I will wait for you

where the nightjar sings

to celebrate his lover’s soft approach

with every quill and feather of his wings.

And no world will deceive us,

no flame expire, no radiance cease,

no fracture mar the jubilant fire

that recast its heart in the irons of hell

to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

Who could have anticipated being who and where we are

this moment? Did we imagine now, did we see

ourselves here when we were children? These windows,

that view, those stairs across the street we’ve

never walked to the top of into the stale darkness

of a room that hasn’t been used by anything

but flies, echoes and shadows for years?

The hollow stillness, the white gold ray

of winter light illuminating an emulsion of dust?

How strange to be the awareness of anyone.

To take your identity off like a name tag,

to shed your skin like a wavelength weary

of being a particle and when no one’s looking

slip into the vastness without making a ripple

like a watersnake as supple as smoke among the stars.

Peace in the evanescence of my eyes, my heart

unfeathered like the petal of a wild aster,

a forgotten poem, the small gesture of a thought

that didn’t take root on the skull of a rock.

If the rain were a flower, it would be columbine.

I’m standing on this aquiline precipice

scattering my ashes on the wind like words

that were fire once when I was younger than tomorrow

o when was that?---and sang like an arsonist

with a blue guitar about the women I loved

and the sorrows of the mysterious wines

they mingled in my blood like a seance of bells,

and the joys, out of thousands, that elected

like a moment or two of auspicious beauty and bliss

to winter with me through these lightyears of solitude

as if life were indelibly thriving under the ice-caps

of a shepherd moon like an introverted mindstream

that kept returning to itself like the solar flare

of an unopened loveletter stamped: No longer

at this address. Even a starmap can sometimes

get lost in the abyss. You are that. That is this.

Shadows of the mind, ricocheting splinters of radiance

lodged like mystic thorns in the heart, the Burgess Shale

encyclopedically contained in every fossil of a memory

imprinted on my imagination like the life forms

of words anyone of which could have been my mother-tongue.

My lyrical innocence may have passed, but not

the wonder of listening to the stars singing to themselves

like nightbirds getting on with the labour of longing

as if work were a form of worship, as the Upanishad says.

The hour liberated from its waterclocks and sundials,

the empty lifeboat of the moon from its urgent rescues,

unmoored from the wharfs and umbilical cords

of its earthly obligations, just to drift like a compass needle

in deep space, unaligned from its addiction to true north.

If I take one step beyond being, it isn’t death, or oblivion.

I’m only washing my skin off the world so I see it afresh

like the bright vacancy, dark abundance of what’s shining

through the flowing lens of an unpolluted abyss.

It’s the return journey that reflowers the wild grape vines

that lose it in the winter. Every breath, a miraculous revival

of wines that have deepened their dreams in the interim.

Images and symbols are overlaid in space

like the playbills of a visionary hunting magic

still looking after all these caves and labyrinths

for the unattainable prey of the mysterious female

I keep following like the life-giving herds of the stars,

the ghost dancers among the white buffalo of the clouds

that gather and disperse me like the world out of nothing.

I can hear my life howling like a wolf moon

over the dark corpse of these hills, but I’ve never known

where the music’s coming from or why it’s grieving.

Or why so many open windows and returning birds

greet the spring with odes and epitaphs in the same breath

like galaxies passing through one another, the ghosts

of two strangers encountering the unknown

like the harmony of infinite points of view

going in radiantly contradictory directions at the same time.

Life on the burning bridges of the stars like a lover

trying to span the universe with cosmic thoughts

reflecting the face of the other on the underside of time.

As if one were the light, and one, more vastly sublime

than even the night can find the words to speak of

shining like eye sockets of dice in the black mirror

of the prophetic skulls orbiting the prayer wheels

of the mind like interlocking mountain gears of the rain

on the downside of a species whose time has come.

Though I still think it might be crucial to know

who you aren’t as well as who you think you are

before you go extinct. Who sends a cold furnace

or an urn of the ashes of the nightbirds to speak

like a shabby messenger for the light as they knew it once

in the wildflowers of the earth sowing the starfields

with seeds on the wind about to open their eyes again

from the long dream of trying to shine from the inside out?

My starmud is rooted in light and flowers in the darkness.

The supersymmetry of above and below make one hourglass.

As many demons in the nightsky as there are angels in a cemetery.

Heaven and hell, one electron, that can be in several places

at the same time, how many worlds is my mind sustaining

where everything is an infinite elaboration of this one

and that of all the imaginary alternatives that are

necessarily bound to occur like the will of someone so free

it spontaneously has nothing to do with any of them

like the imageless image of the creator we create

in the likeness of to resemble ourselves without our faces on?

I give my oceanic thoughtwaves the same free rein

I give the wild mustangs of moonlight

an immeasurable range of emotions to roam in

without being broken, saddled or spurred

toward any destination in my homelessness

knowing that all movement is a characteristic feature

of the stillness that keeps it all going. The more you focus

the more you blur the effect. And when you look

out of the corner of your eye at life, it’s as if

a thief of fire with the insight of a wolf moon

that thought it howled alone in its own forsaken mindscape

discovered us awake at the window listening to it

and like the picture-music of a shaman on a limestone wall

put his finger to his lips to bond us like carbon

to a secret we all share without ever telling each other.

PATRICK WHITE