SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN
ICON
Someone lingers in your absence like an
icon, a gate
to an open field where the white horse
that stood in the tall grass, grazing
on its solitude
like a phase of the moon come to earth
is gone. A bird, a purple martin with
so much
distance and disappearance in it wings
and the open vastness of the skies it
was absorbed by
I can barely hear you singing from here
over the raving of an unkempt wind on a
crazy night
when the ghosts are rioting in their
graves
like old leaves without attachments at
the feet of the new
and gravity receives the grave goods of
the tree
as do I these strange epiphanies of you
that haunt me retroactively like
apple-bloom.
And the depth of the emptiness that
informs
the substance of my imaginings,
devastates me
like an eclipse slowly swallowing my
heart
like a black cataract of snake skin I
keep
trying to shake like a cosmic egg
without much luck.
As if I were bleeding out like a rose
after
the green thorns have hardened into
fangs
that are killing and curing me at the
same time.
Some nights I just want to join my
emptiness to yours
and be done with it, no more of this,
no more.
No more of watching the beauty of the
world
burn out into a dark radiance that
makes me
want to gouge my eyes out so I can see
it without wincing.
Without feeling so wounded by the
abundance of the rose
that blooms and disappears like the
auroral apparitions
of a widow in veils of spider webs and
black lightning,
thinking it might be you under there
somewhere I can’t go
without losing you again. Check-mate.
Pain.
And it isn’t anything either of us
can do anything about.
It just goes down that way. The absence
of your shining,
small nonrenewable gestures of your
heart and hands
vividly recalled like modest butterfly
volumes of poetry
blowing down an abandoned street at
night in the rain, you
sewing a patch on my heart with the
delicacy of a needle
mending a flying carpet grounded like a
wavelength of light.
As I am now that you’ve become that
rip in my heart
all the stars are pouring out of like a
puncture wound
I let go right through me like needles
and gamma rays
piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of
dark matter
that makes me feel like wooden puppet
of light
carved out of one of these black walnut
trees.
Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.
Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next
best thing.
And when you’re hurting your worst,
sing.
And even when I’m soldiering my way
through stone
like a flying fish in the wrong medium,
or walking alone with the Alone through
the woods,
just to meet you where you ask me to
when you call
and I come like a burning bridge down
to the river,
wondering if I might have lived here
once in another lifetime,
I do say these things to myself like
medicinal chants
and preventative medicine, healing
totems with benign effect
hung in the medicine bag slung around
my neck.
Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred
earth, just in case
I forget how to dance on my own grave
with grace and flare and style and an
enigmatic smile
that really means it if it really means
anything at all.
Or not succumb to this ice-age of a
bell
my tongue is stuck to like a child’s
to a wire fence,
or this black diamond nightbird
that cuts my darkness to the quick
because it’s got nothing to sing
about
that can answer the call of the living
for someone
on a foggy hill to come to the rescue
of the empty lifeboat
drifting like the corpse of a dead swan
downriver,
except the dead air of this strange
place
where space is indelibly bruised by the
passing
of the beauty it once contained like
stars in a Mason jar.
Like a candle in the lantern of a skull
I’ve carried before me like a
nightwatchman
on the edge of a dangerous precipice
for lightyears
until I lost my footing and fell in one
night,
as I once did into love, and learned to
see in the dark
I was growing wings where I had none
before
and looking up from the bottom of an
empty wishing well
noticed the dead still blooming like
stars
in the white shadows of the sun at
midnight.
And out of the corners of my eyes
when what I can’t see what need to
know about being alive
comes looking for me like the sacred
syllable
on the lips of a pearl diver on the
moon in total eclipse
like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like
the singing bird
to the dead branch in my heart
that’s having trouble remembering how
to blossom
after a long winter, as if you’d
summoned me to the trees
like a purple passage in the Book of
the Dead,
to teach me how to take the pain
and through the alchemy of the grief
that flows through my heartwood like
light and rain
turn it into life again, as if every
leaf
were a new loveletter from the dead
I’ve been saving for years like
expurgated starmaps
illustrated by exiled constellations in
Braille
to a spiritual lost and found at my
fingertips
where they know who you are, and
they’ve seen you
like a soft moonrise glowing through
the willows
down by the river that weeps like a
black mirror
for the stars and waterbirds in passing
that appear and disappear each in its
time
and you wait for me like the longing of
the dead
to make some kind of sign, however
simple and austere,
the withered star of a wild rose
without a flower,
that let’s me know you’re near,
you’re here
rooted in me on earth where we’ve
both come
to renew our shining from the bottom up
to the blossom.
PATRICK WHITE
