I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH
PACIFIC SUNSETS
I could never remember you in garish
Pacific sunsets
or the luster of opalescent Ontario
dawns.
These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong
wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in,
you
who loved to wear the moonlight like
water on your skin
and your heart like the blood of a
black cherry on your sleeve,
that the rain, and I saw how hard it
tried like a watercolourist,
could never wash out. When I looked
as deeply into the nightsky of your
eyes as I could,
six thousand stars lavished on the dark
to the naked eye,
I always saw a white tailed doe looking
back at me
from the brindled woods where they
opened into the starfields
and I let the silence surmise old
dangers had made you shy.
I could never remember you as you were
and fix
the image in amber like a butterfly in
a paper weight
as time wept glacially by like an
ice-age in an hourglass.
Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a
passionate forest fire,
you were the elegant daughter of
dragons, the willow witch
of your own desires, and you spoke to
my body
in the occult languages you kept alive
for the sake of the dead
who were always with you like voices in
your sleep.
I put this albino abyss of a snowblind
canvas on my easel
like the negative starmap of the
nightsky I imagine
death to be, so the wind can colour
outside the lines
of the constellations as you were fond
of doing
with an elfin kind of glee like a happy
bell
you’d hung around the neck of
something bleaker
as you often did with your life as if
you were
bending space to your will like a black
hole
at the nave of your galactic prayer
wheel
turning in the wind like the golden
ratio of a sea star.
I paint you in the picture music of a
wounded heart
punctured like a matador on the thorn
of the moon
as I looked upon you haunting your
solitude
and knew like the last crescent in the
book
of waning scars, there were some roses
just too beautiful in what they’d
made of their pain
to heal. The eyelids of black roses
shadowed
by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous
mascara.
The deepest starwells of our sorrows
flower
into the most expansive fountains of
compassion,
and what a tender champion the small
things of the world
found in you. The starling under the
windowpane,
the Monarch butterfly that just stopped
like
a slim volume of poems, intact, at the
moment of perfection
denying death its deconstruction, and
those
dozens of shepherd moons that showed up
like the skulls of racoons and
groundhogs in the grass,
relics of a tragic past you arranged
like asteroids
on the windowsills of your studio like
the eastern door
of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned
with the feathers
of red-tailed hawks until the autumn
moon
could free their spirits from their
bones.
I could never remember you as a
blue-jay
among the sunflowers, you were never as
abrupt
and decisive as that. You beaded all
parts
of the disassembled world into the
flowing
of one long continuous wavelength of a
rosary
like different skulls with a variety of
names
for the same spinal cord of a narrative
theme
that whispered, like your life, louder
than the savage sparrowhawks of your
emotions
shrieking out in predatory pain and as
I remember well
how your eyes would grow wider than
owls
or the new moons of Spanish guitars
when you were astonished by the
symbolic depths
of some black pearl of transformative
wisdom
you’d discovered dreaming on the
seabed of your heart
like a lunar eclipse among the
feathered corals.
The red violet that lingers over a city
on a cloudy night
and saturates the air with tinctures of
iodine and diluted blood,
I will add that hue to the palette of
your likeness,
and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate
of your moonrise
with ultramarine blue and fleck the
lapis lazuli
of your nightsky with gold paint on the
bristles
of a toothbrush to simulate stars
pouring out of
the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the
scorched roots of things
in sacred pools and fountains
inextinguishable pain
found its way to as if you were some
kind of Gothic cathedral
cratered out of the moon like a river
of stone
that taught the outcasts and the
damaged fruits of life
how to flow up the stairwells of their
renewal
with the courage of wild salmon called
home from the sea.
I knew it was crucial not to make a
mess of my dying
the night you left, to honour the
spirit of the life
we had lived together, to make the end
as charismatically intriguing as the
beginning had been.
So something inspired by our separation
could keep growing beyond us like a
bridge
where incomplete solitudes could meet
as strangers
and say farewell to one another like
full siloes
in the plenum-void, whole as the sun
and the moon
who go on shining in the darkness of
ten thousand lonely nightfalls
not as the undoing of the dawn in the
broken mirrors of the stars
but as a way of housing the buckets and
bells of their tears
under the strong rafter of the well by
the locust trees
blossoming among its thorns in the
spring to summon the bees
that once sang to us, as if honey had a
voice so poignantly sweet,
however deeply gored the heart by the
horns of the moon,
waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it
never left scars on the music.
PATRICK WHITE
