SOME FEW OF THE WOMEN I'VE LOST

SOME FEW OF THE WOMEN I’VE LOST

Some few of the women I’ve lost

and it was like giving birth to the moon

so much was ripped out of my heart

I had not known I had so much to lose.

Still shudder like space with certain wavelengths

of a gamma ray burst that burns like a memory

of an abyss all my rivers flowed into

like my mindstream plunging off a precipice

into the haze of the maid of the mist

down below the falls, a ghost of ice,

my blood unravelled from my heart,

tears flowing from my eyes like hot glass

on a good day when I could melt time

with the absolute intensity of the way

I stared at things like a mad child

transfixed as a lens on the tragic onceness

of change that threshes the antennae

of the swallowtail butterflies that used to

touch the world so lightly in love, eyelids

and fingertips, with the last crescent

of the full moon at harvest time, reaping

the burnt loaves of what love sows

like starwheat at the vernal equinox,

spring as much a gate of departure as fall.

Love is stranger than plutonium

and only the greatest of mystic heretics

can stand in its fires and not be utterly consumed.

O how enviously young I must have been

to believe that nonsense. Each, after

their own nature hangs on the same hook

prophesying in voices that are devastated

by what they communicate. Too late. Too late.

Absolute pain splits everybody’s tongue

with a razor blade like a cedar shake

witching for water in a private hell

so impersonal it’s not even interested

in punishing you for mistakes you may

or may not have made. No point in trying

to improve the mirages of polluted water

by taking a bath in your grave everyday,

but you do just the same to approach

your absurdity proactively to distract yourself

from a black hole enticing you to let go and jump in.

Even if it’s radioactively surrealistic

eat the pain as you lie down in your bower

of stinging nettles trying to cauterize your heart,

no secret love potion, no sword of moonlight

between you and your beloved now foresworn

not to violate the taboos of the mythic diminishments

that have come between you incontrovertibly as you realize

how many eras of darkness it takes for the light

to cast a single shadow in the shape of someone

you loved as indelibly as the night loves its stars.

Mundanity becomes a feature of mercy,

an anodyne of pettiness, a placebo that helps

you brush your teeth in front of the mirror,

wash your face and comb your hair as if

you were performing some kind of religious ritual

by scrubbing the blood off the altar that tore

your heart out, a hefty directory from a telephone booth

you consult like an oracle in a Pythian snakepit

and then hang up for fear of disturbing the bones

of the dead you buried in the deserts of the moon

swearing you’d never dig them up again like a dog,

though there you are, caught red-handed, lapping

the marrow out of the receiver in your hand.

We all get dropped off eventually on some

lonely dirt road in the abandoned countryside

with half a chance of surviving the excruciation

like a declawed pet no one wants anymore

without knowing what our offence was or

how to fend like a beginning without end

against the odds of having been disarmed by love

like a sword thrown from a bridge in tribute

to the elixirs of the water sylphs we surrendered to.

But let me tell you this from the heartwood

of a tree that’s been made sacred by lightning

and rootfires more than once, love, like poetry,

isn’t for petty people, daunted as they should be,

by living through their own incommunicable death

like the unwanted poster child of their estranged absence

longing for someone to call them back

out of the vastness like a seance that could

channel the ashes of the cremations that fill

the urns of their heart like the last trace of smoke

from the firepit of a dragon weeping in the rain

for what befalls whenever you swallow the moon

like a cosmic egg from the love nest of a widowed crow.

Like the other wing of the fly that falls in the milk

of human kindness like a meteorite in Antarctica

you’ll eventually find the cure in the heart of the disease

by dipping the other wing like an antidote into it,

or going down on the Medusa without turning into stone,

hoping it doesn’t wear off before the sands

of the albino tattoo of an hourglass on her back runs out

and the world is overturned again like the shocks

and changes Shakespeare says keep us sane,

though love’s an occasion to doubt that at the extremities

of an oceanic devotion dismembered like a sea star by pain.

Or Orpheus rent asunder, gone insane on his own music.

As anyone who’s ever mainlined the stars

of the Via Galactic knows, love is more

of a dangerous gateway drug than lust is.

If the surfeit of joy in the mystery of the spell it casts

doesn’t kill you bobbing out of your depths

like a prophetic skull in the deep end of reality,

then the withdrawal of all your life masks

from the artificial paradise of fool’s gold

and tinfoil badges of star-crossed milk caps will

as you shoot up the sheriff and die like a wounded deputy.

But if the curse isn’t lived immensely you give birth

to a feeble star, a penumbral blessing, disappointed

as a shepherd moon you’re not shining down

on a habitable planet of your own where love thrives

like an afterlife in the open star fields of a great wind

that once passed through your life like a wildfire

that consumed everything in its path like a comet

dislodged like a jewel from the black halo around the sun,

o the bright vacancy of the radiant coronas,

o the dark abundance of the total eclipses,

impacting the earth in the Gulf of Yucatan.

PATRICK WHITE