WHAT I WOULD SAY TO YOU

WHAT I WOULD SAY TO YOU

What I would say to you if you were near,

if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river

to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock

and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water

enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire

to poems I never wanted to own,

every burning lily of paper floating away

like another crown I’ve set free

from this domain of air and shadows

to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,

weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both;

I would say to you in the pyres and the petals

of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash

of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes

of these poems that confess their love to the flames

with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke

gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here

in the form of a man, I would say,

it was always the hive of your silence

that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey

rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.

And I’d try not to talk too much,

letting the fish jump for the two of us,

and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away

like things not said into the water

and I’d draw you in under the bough of my arm

that was never much of a yoke

as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,

and hold you a long time in the vastness

before I turned to kiss you for everything

and fall down back into the silver grass

to make love to you on the moon.

And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest

your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,

I would mingle blood and starlight

with the wine of your body and being

like a chalice lying empty by the river

that has brought us both to drink from one another

like the deer that will come out later from the grove

to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death

would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds

among the scepters of the cattails,

and I’d want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky

for this night of being human long enough

to understand its brevity is its beauty

and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,

burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,

like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak

look as if they’re trying to swim, and one poem

more enduring than the rest,

floats downstream under a frozen elbow

raised to take the next stroke,

and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself

levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha

into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment

that grasps at nothing. Form

is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem

had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,

and though you’re not with me now,

we’ve never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird

lands on the water, and then another,

and I think of them as you and I

arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night

and the bright vacancy

between the sidereal knots

in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile

weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing

love is I wonder what love is,

as the fireflies flash their assent,

and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,

and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here

as much for the island that spreads the stream

into the waterlegs of a woman

like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself

like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,

to launch my fleet of poems

like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.

I like being a child alone on the shores of things,

turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance

among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick,.

and I’ve always asked questions no one could answer,

awed by the fact of being here at all

under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,

everything’s got a mouth of its own to answer,

and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I’m never as old by these waters

as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon

you told me to watch as you would

is always so much more on this undulant black mirror

than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.

There’s a birch and three willows

and the third of the three is you

dipping your hair in the water

as if you were trying to root in glass.

And it’s no surprise to know you know how

to drink the whole river in a single gulp

and swallow a whole star with your eyes

in a single glimmer

the way a solitary drop of water

at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass

entirely fits the entire skin of the sky

because I already know how you can consume the whole of me

from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice

and from a single hair of your head,

or the eyelash on your cheek

that is all that separates us now,

from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem,

so I can be here with you as I have always been

on the other side of death

where everything in creation

above and below this river of night,

from the furthest galaxy

to the dragonfly on my right

is expanding like a lily of fire into us,

as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.

So it’s easy to know where it’s all going;

releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,

raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream

rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,

it’s always, like birds and stars and fish

been flowing into us.

PATRICK WHITE

WERE THERE STARS

Were there stars in your hair that night?

I cannot remember,

so taken with your face

and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow

of the tender bell in your eyes

that could summon ghosts

of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire

of any passion that lost itself prophetically

at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers

like a snake on the moon

sloughing its skin like the eclipse

of a far more vulnerable shining,

and I couldn’t tell if you were

a doe or a lynx

stepping out of the alder groves warily

to lap the moonlight

that flaked the shore

with the silver petals of an undulant rose

older and darker than night blood.

I could feel the danger within you,

the abyss of the early grave

that waited for you like a key

to come in out of the pain

that bled you like a shadow

pouring out of an open wound

that whispered to you like a secret scream

only the dead who owned you could hear.

Your hunger desperately sought salvation

from the eyes

that pleaded with you

to blow yourself out like a candle,

cancel the inevitability of your suffering

with the shudder and sigh of sex.

We lay down naked together

by the willow-stained waters

in that summer of flesh

and sought oblivion from each other

like two compatible cremations

that concealed a ravenous phoenix

ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness

of your intensities,

I burned in you

and felt the flames

of a dangerous angel

who had broken her afterlife like a curfew

flow over me

like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight

like supple mushrooms against my chest

and the moist heat of your mouth

throbbing with flowers like July

as you seized your joy

from the agony of the roots you tormented

to give up their dead

like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since

at the insistence

of any woman’s appetite

nor known a night so final,

so brutal with time and beauty

as the pendulous moon swung

like an executioner’s ax

over the nape of its own reflection

swanning on the waters.

We made love as if

we were both defying

the truth we didn’t need to say.

I wanted to plead with you,

I wanted to call out into your emptiness

like a beseeching bird

disappearing into a dark valley,

but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light

and the things I would have asked you

not to do

had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,

at the funeral I stood back

beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers

and the ambivalent silence

of the modest gathering that mourned you,

maculate in the shadows

of the Japanese plum tree

we once made love under

and I kissed the rose of your blood

shedding in mine

like a wound

my love was never sword enough to heal

as they closed

and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase

beside your grave

until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers

thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery

through the hard harps and spears

of its iron gates

and I have never been back.

The years since have been

chameleonic as a hooker

who plys her art

on the stairs of a temple

even the priests of my lust

are forbidden to enter,

but as you said I would

as you lay with me that night

like a knife beside the sea,

I have returned to you over and over again

like a witching wand

looking for water in hell,

like a cult of one to a lost island

that holds you like a secret

and wept like a candle of honey

in the dark hive of your unanswerable silence,

intoning the names

of an impossible god

on a rosary of black suns

until my heart hangs like a bell

dumb with grief

looking up at the stars

you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook

of a shepherd’s question,

looking everywhere for you

like the wind

sweeping the shadows of fireflies

like the fall of hair from your eyes

that night you tore yourself away from me

like a veil of blood and sorrows

wounded by the terrible light

of the black pearl

that ripened within you like the skull

of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,

you might have been fat and frumpy by now

if you had lived.

I could have watched your beauty

shed like the moon over the years,

and smile like an island

to remember how lost I was in your tides once,

a constellation of starfish

tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,

trying to shine, god, how

I tried to shine for you, how

I ached to embrace your planet safely

in the mandala of an empowering radiance

that could show you

I was worth living for

if nothing else.

Given the freedom

of the emptiness that engulfed us both,

we could have lived within each other,

we could have evolved our own atmospheres,

appointed our own stars,

written our own myths of origin

on the black pages of that journal of skies

where you scribbled down the events

of your pre-emptive afterlife

as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.

As it was, the only thing I could do,

was take you in

like the last breath of a summer night

I could never let go of

without following it

like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,

and the dreams have come and gone as they will,

and my hair has gone gray

and my eyes are looped like powerlines

and the sad bells of a heavy solitude

that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world

to mill the stars like a tide

on the blood wheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors

I consulted like half-assed mediums

to see if I could restore you somehow

to the more intimate shining of that last night

you turned and ran back,

your shoes in your hand,

to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting

you knew the black water ahead

was about to go through

as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers

on the roaring skulls of the rocks.

You pitied me because you knew I loved you,

because you knew you were already

a future memory

and I was a prophecy from the past

that had ridden beyond itself like light

to illuminate nothing but your absence

measured in the filaments and lifelines

of eyeless oceans

like a seabird

circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

I AM A DRAGON

I am a dragon,

but I’ve got cloudy teeth.

You are a vase among jars,

a feather among scales.

Obviously you are the sea

and I am the seabed.

In the darkness you are the shining.

I come to you

like lead to an alchemist,

base metal to gold.

Already I am transformed

by your mirrors of fire.

There is a light, a glow,

invisible but more illuminating,

not of the moon, or sun, or a star,

but of the heart and mind,

the light of life itself

when it’s the only candle in the room

dancing behind its veil of shadows,

and in the least filament

of the down upon your thighs,

there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,

mystic lanterns

ripening like apricots

over the open doors of worlds within,

over eyes that bloom like wild asters

rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.

I have been a ghost

trying to say itself into existence;

and my bread and my blood

have been the whisper and breath of you.

Not the mountains, not

the mothering floors of the wheat seas,

not the forests or the hills or the rivers,

not the ladders or roads or miles between us,

nor the seasons of the threshing clock,

have kept us one eyelash apart;

we have been wings to each other;

we have been the secret tides of the rose

in a bay of blood to one another;

we have been the substance of a dream

that lingers like the impression in cool grass

of where the deer slept the night before.

In the flights of winter birds,

on moist winter days,

I have rehearsed endless summers to come,

when the sky whispered your eyes

in bells of sidereal fragrance

into the abyss of my longing for you

and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,

and you were that petal,

and I was that wind.

And though I have stood for eras

on this bridge of night alone

waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,

a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars

I want to live with you,

we have always embraced, not two,

arrow and bow,

pilgrim and shrine,

release and enlightenment

reflected in these visions

the insistent palettes of the heart

paint on the impassioned waters

of the deepening lifestream.

I have been a storm of blood and stars;

I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears

and learned to breathe through a new medium,

set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,

and bloom in a mythically enhanced

immensity of sorrows,

and the shadows under my eyes

have mourned for me

like black bells in a tower of thorns,

two horses of night chained to a heart

that dragged itself around like a hearse

looking for a lost grave.

I buried myself in women

who were torn like the satin lining

out of a coffin just

when they were about to give birth.

Their pain always tasted of an afterlife

that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue

until my blood caught fire

like a rose with a voice of wine.

Black, apostate, madonnas

of body, heart, and mystery,

even the moon a bead of devotion

on a thread of their blood,

a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.

I never knew what to say

that wasn’t a life shy

of an inadequate skeleton

trying to reflesh itself with the ashes

of its last sidereal cremation.

I was born again and again

like a sword drawn out of a stone

to hurl my humanity

like a sparrow

against the windows and eyes of the gods.

They knew I was right

to live the prophecy

written in the book of my wings by the wind,

but their tears fell like glass rice

on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors

that wept like silver serpents

at the heels of the moon

and whatever road I walked,

whatever direction I wandered in

like a drunken river

I passed through my own ribs

like an opening gate

to a sealess exile on the moon,

a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.

Events of the spirit,

and the imported executioners

of tormented ecstasies

that made our bodies shudder with oblivion

until even our shadows glowed

like feathers of light

that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone

to lay our heads down upon and dream,

every emotion,

keyed like a highwire

over the infinite emptiness

of a guitar in the corner of a tomb

eating the dust of a blackboard

that schooled the scrawl of the angels

into the writing on the wall.

How many lovers have perished in me

like the rings and eras of a tree,

and what enormities of childhood it takes

to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,

what tides of blood and light

collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus

that pulled off miracles

under the sheets and skies and skin

of our lascivious tents:

now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,

a cone of light,

the pillar of a fallen shadow,

freeing the wings of wounded birds

from the nets and mesh of the stars.

I am a dragon

with the soul of a bridge to here and now,

a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple

to a god that sweeps me away like ashes

with the broom of my shadow,

and my face is the footprint of the wind

as flowers are the footprints of the light,

and my heart is a pebble

I keep dropping down a well

to listen for an echo from the depths,

for a whisper of fire on the water,

to deliver me like a burning dove

with a leaf of the moon in its beak,

a letter from you,

to say there is a south of the heart

that can thaw this arctic desolation

that overtakes me like an ageless night

as my thoughts fall away

like the flames of descending matches,

like angels and demons

tilted from heaven,

from the plane of their orbital hearts,

toppled like towers and lighthouses

by an urge to kiss their own reflections.

I am a dragon

chained to the nightrain

that inks the roots of the locust tree

with thorns and stars and flowers,

and my blood is a dusky mess 

of dawns and ancient sunsets.

My heart was scaled like the moon

by the phases of an empty cup,

my eyes were birdless skies

and nothing flew higher

than the feathered shadows of the trees

that roosted in the grass like water,

and there were no tears left

in the wineskin of the heart

withered like a lily that bloomed for a day,

the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.

Now I think of you

so many nights and miles away,

and I walk like a bridge toward you,

and my wings are spread out

like the pages of ample skies

that have yet to be written on by the stars,

and I must blow on my longing to be with you

like a spoonful of hot diamonds

just to keep the deserts of my thought

from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,

my eyes evaporating like crucial oases

in the heat of these visions

that burn the air

with fountains of fire

in this tavern of mystic passions

where I drink alone to you,

the furnace of my blood

silked like a black poppy

when I reach out,

a tree in winter,

the afterlife of lightning,

to touch your face like the moon.

I have been a lonely crusade of one

fighting for the gravestone of a dead god

enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,

lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,

stars in the seed of the apple,

a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.

I am an era of scars

inspired by the talons of the moon

seizing my heart like a rag of meat

in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.

I have been a poet among humans,

an indignant warrior of the heart

with an army of seasoned candles

reconnoitering distant fires in the night

that bloomed like the breath

of insurmountable divinities

gathering like birds

in the border hills of the darkness

that always took the form of a luminous woman

bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.

Crowned like an apple star

for the brilliance of my defeats,

I fall like a key of crazy sugar,

a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,

a squall of renegade stars

into the transformative valleys and bays

of your forbidden paradise,

happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,

singing into the abyss of an unknown god

that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,

a solitary on his island,

in these auroral tides

that play my blood like the pulse

of this keyboard of light

where I drown like a stone messiah

true to the excruciations of his faith

in these delinquent oceans of you.

All my poems, chalk-dust,

all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes

bent by the lightning toward earth

like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,

all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,

and the sincerity of the ways I got lost

in this labyrinth of mirrors

unspooling like a thread of blood

from an immortally wounded star,

an agony of human fire

rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird

the abyss of a night without bounds

squanders on the supremacy

of the oldest silence

time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,

the perjury of a perishing light,

if I did not love your ashes and orchards more,

the way you tear your constellations

on the thorns of the moon

and bleed like black silk

for an innocence that never found its way home.

I can taste the dark prophecies

and oracles of infernal delight

written in scars on the dangerous mushroom

of your nuclear body,

and flow like the silt of stars,

white mountain gold and night honey,

through the hives and deltas

that enshrine the ore of the rose.

I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note

broken like a harp

in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.

I can blood the night with a fever of poppies

and scoop weeping diamonds

from the black fountain

in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.

I can wield ecstasy

like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.

I can untie the knots and nooses

in the spinal cord of the butterfly

pinned like a calendar of eclipses,

a quarantined blossom,

to a dead branch under a bell of glass

and wire Eden back

to the infernal nerve of the lightning

that severed the afterbirth of the moon

from the dark mother in the garden

like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.

I know how to make love

like an embassy of shadows

to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.

I can pour the oil of winged serpents

into the lamp

and entice a ghost of snow

to dance naked in the fire.

I can lead the lost cloud

out of the mountains of the key

to the doorway of candles and stars

enshrined in the skulls of seeing.

And even when I turn my back

on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots

to rise up like rain

into the immeasurable wingspan

of these desert clarities

that bead me like a caravan

of nomadic moons,

no more than a breath of light

in a gust of stars,

I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away

from stealing you away

from the refugees and shadows

that crowd your room

like the night sky

through the astounded vowel of an open window.

PATRICK WHITE

SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE CONES

SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE-CONES

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.

Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow

on the withered stars of the wild rose hips

attaining the unattainable like Buddha

enlightened by what’s become of Venus in the dawn.

Beauty in the truth of abject desolation.

There’s a war going on somewhere

to judge from the number of amputations

the fingers, legs, arms, toes, hands,

the limbs of the dead trees

lying all over the ground as if the woods

were the collapsed tent

of an army field hospital in the Civil War.

The Fort Delaware Death Pen

if I were to take a wild guess,

or maybe Andersonville, who knows,

but I feel I’m walking more like a warden

doing his rounds through the woods at night

than a visitor among these who lie here

in this graveyard of wounded swans

glazed and broken like the handles

of old china shop teacups

butting their empty skulls

against the horns of a bull.

Not like mine. Pure crystal

from glassblowers in medieval Germany.

At least these get to thaw.

And you can see in the withered eyelids

of the leaves whose choraphyll vision

was once poetically green,

now laced with strychnine and arsenic

when they burned like solar flares in the fall,

and the curtains caught fire

like the veils of an open window

with no one’s face in it

to reveal the mystery of who she is

behind the of the northern lights,

the works of an entire lifetime

clacking like abandoned fortune-cookies,

the hollow carapaces of crabs across

the silver pates of the blunted snowdrifts

ground down like the Appalachian Mountain Range,

older than the Rockies, worn down

like molars and glaciers

grinding their teeth in their sleep

but infinitely more habitable

than the nose-bleeding heights of renown.

And yet the leaves are not wasted.

The word was spoken.

The fortune foretold

of better things to come

like pears and apples and plums.

The slow autumn dawns of poems

ripened by rising stars and falling flowers.

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.

PATRICK WHITE