GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY
Grey day after grey day, little nicks
and slashes
of insight, the Mongol compound bows of
her lips
or the angel, Jabril, when he enveloped
Muhammad in Hira
like two bows placed symmetrically
opposite each other,
embraced by a Sufi experience of
inclusiveness,
or was it the neck of a black swan
enthroned in its own reflection,
free association of the word made
light, but at this late date
I don’t think I can forget anymore
than I already have.
Nor really want to, wholly, though the
pain
sometimes burns like a matchead of
white phosphorus,
tentacled jellyfish when I think of the
translucency
of her aquiline eyes, the terrorism of
their beauty
when they fixed on me like an innocent
walking by.
I sleight nothing. Not a hair on her
head, not one plinth
of the starmaps she smashed at my feet
like chandeliers
in a sudden ice-storm in November. I
was her tree.
She was my nightbird. Things were
always as clear
as a glass menagerie between us when
she wore her horns
like the moon in a china shop, or a
viper, or a garden snail.
Always knew a day would come when
all I’d have left of her would be
these memories
like fossils of the constellations we
used to walk under
as I pointed out through the gaps in
the wild apple trees
the Andromeda Galaxy, two million
lightyears away,
as the furthest thing in life the naked
eye can see,
though it was obvious to me at the
time, once gone,
o is it still so inconceivable, she
would be.
Just look at me, I’m weeping like a
window
for the lost phases of a moonrise
that’s never
going to startle me again with the same
madness
I felt around her as if I could see for
the very first time
in eras of trying to imagine, what a
dangerous drug
love is to be addicted to after a
single taste for life.
Demons revel in their sins in the
darkness and dance
with slumming angels on an eye-level
with paradise in hell.
The temperate homogeneity of these grey
days doesn’t know it,
but I remember, I’ve lived it,
apocalyptically
when joy grows so intense it’s a
darkness that burns
like the portal of a blackhole
hourglass that tears
the sea star of your soul apart
galactically
like trillions of stars passing into a
whole other world,
worlds within worlds in every one of
them
and life and love and wisdom and who
you
thought you were reverses spin
omnidirectionally
and you can see more deeply into the
heart
smeared like a rage of lipstick on a
black mirror
than you ever could into the guileless
blazing of the white.
PATRICK WHITE
