THE ENORMOUS SIGNIFICANCE
The enormous significance of a little moment
recollected years later more vividly
than the details of the original event
and yet I still don’t know what it means
to remember you sitting stoned in the windowframe
of that old Victorian head-house high on the hill,
in a slip you wore like moonlight,
strapped with a thirty-eight under your armpit
complaining at my approach you didn’t know anyone
who was worth shooting
as you smiled at me like a dangerous idea
whose time had not yet come.
I still don’t know whose avatar you were,
though, for awhile, you were the muse of my revolution
as we wore lust out like a parachute
plunging into each other
as if all we were
were endless space and atmosphere and falling
in that A-framed attic where the candles pooled
like the paint on your easel
and I’d fall asleep wholly gratified
with your breath like the sea in my ear.
I wrote four hundred poems for you
and gave you the only copies
as if they were the shedding blossoms
of your own private orchard on the moon
just to prove that my love had no signature.
You were always certain of things in a way
I could never be,
and if I was a lost well in a desert
puzzled by the strange stars that were reflected in me,
you were the dark watershed
that fired up the radiant themes of the night
like a furnace that burned like a prophet
to clarify the dead
like the fine print of a fateful conversation
you hung over my head like a new constellation.
You wanted to feed and teach
the children of Africa
but you wound up
working on a kibbutz
and to this day I still wonder
when the seeds you carried with you
like pilgrims into the promised land
turned into bullets?
When did the ploughshares
turn into swords
that would spill blood
for a few, stupid, ghostly words
that were vampiric abstractions
devoid of flesh?
When did you embed yourself
like a mine in the starmud
and wait like a toad for rain
to wash you out of your creekbed
into a flash flood;
when did the amaranthus who bled for love
throw all that imperial passion off like a robe
and let it fall to the floor
in gouts of blood?
Did you think you could fill the table
for the hungry and unable
by killing the people
who ate Africa down to its diamonds?
And did you expect me
to receive you like a hero
when you got back from making a difference?
You talked a lot about manifestations
of economic autonomy
in underdeveloped nations
that had more reasons than rations
to drink blood like wine,
but you never mentioned the harvest,
you never mentioned the burnt vine
or the scorched earth of the child
that was anointed with gasoline
and cremated with her straw dolls in bed
until all that was left of her flesh
broke like black, bitter bread
in the mouth of the militant multitudes
who had come, like you,
to liberate the starving with food,
but the only thing she received
in the way of loaves and fishes from your hand
that freed and filled her was death.
And then you went on to better things
like a guest lecturer
with a new book and a slideshow
on the academic, cocktail circuit
revelling in the unambiguous celebrity
of someone who had been there and done that
like fat in the fire.
Been a long time since I last thought of you
like a scar I had almost forgotten,
but never, since that day I left,
with compassion or desire.
And even now when I recall
how we never hurt anyone
making love all night long
in that tiny apartment above the sea
where the sun would lay its sword down on the waves,
and I stand in your doorway again
and think about knocking
I remember the thief
who wanted to give something back
and made a fact of her belief
by stuffing North America into her knapsack
and thumbing all the way across Europe to Tel Aviv
blooded her abstractions by killing a child
to prove what she didn’t believe.
PATRICK WHITE
