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 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 tormentive 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
like 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,
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 like
the night sky
through the astounded
vowel of an open window.
PATRICK WHITE
