I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

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

THE WESTERN LIGHT

THE WESTERN LIGHT

The western light

comes right in through my windows

and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.

It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes

like some mad abstractionist

who took them way too personally.

And all they said

was moon tree star light stone flower river sun

as if that were enough of a vocabulary

to say the whole of creation

quietly under your breath

like a secret that’s shared by everyone.

Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue

to comb the swamp for my own skeleton

like the ancestor of modern art.

I’ve gazed too long and hard

at the waterlilies in the Fall River

as if I were meditating on koans

that effortlessly open by themselves

not to waste my mind on anything

that didn’t include my heart

like a work in progress

like a river on its way to the ocean.

Dark soon.

The night sheds petals of insight

like moonlight making waves

on the shoreless seas of enhanced awareness

where I stand like a human candle

with my little standard of flame

trying to light up the universe

so I can see what I am in the depths

of my own eyes.

If I’m the tragicomic clown of my own catastrophe

or if there’s something more profound

going on around me

than time and light

glancing off the mindstream

like birds against the delusive skies

that lie like the windows of insight

until you break through them

like the sun at midnight

shining its light

on a conspiracy of mirrors

against the moon.

I must have been mad before I was born

to see things the way I do now.

Everything is inconceivably probable somehow

like a fortune-cookie

that’s had its tongue cut out

for telling lies to the emperor

or the lack of a sign

for the thirteenth house of the misbegotten

in the neighbourhood watch of the zodiac.

Even when you lose your purpose in life

like a passport in a borderless country

you can still hang on to your identity

like a willess work engendered out of nothing.

You can still firewalk the ghost road of smoke

like stars under the feet of the dead

or follow your own breath

like a dancer that no one is leading.

It’s a surprise when you first come to see

that the greatest liberty of all isn’t death

but to cry as if you were bleeding

from a wound

so much sharper and deeper

than the poignancy of the knife that opened it

like a posthumous loveletter from the gods

you feel

reading your own fate

in the silence between their voices

as if forever hereafter

you could only be killed into life

and that every rafter of delusion

you ever sought shelter under

were the overturned hull of an empty lifeboat.

Sometimes I look at my life

like one of the splendid ambiguities

of a subtly nuanced godsend.

I try to befriend the way I feel

like the generous host

of a dangerous stranger

too cold and aloof

to introduce himself

as my shadow

my eclipse

my potential assassin.

I have tried to stay true to the lies

that led to the myth of my lucidity

like a mirage in a desperate desert of stars

I could drown in like an island

up to to the neck of an hourglass

in tidal waves of quicksand

laying my life down

like the foundation stone

of an inverted pyramid

that yearns for the state of mind

he enjoyed before life

more than that that won’t come after.

I have refused to put the torch out in its own reflection.

I have not tried to uproot

the beauty of the waterlilies

opening their eyes like stars

from the decay and the lies

and the scars that sustain them.

I have put to good use

the dysfunction of delusion

to make a credible raft

to get me to the other side

of this river of shadows

swollen like a flashflood

in a lunar seabed.

I have danced with ghosts

like a lonely shaman

around the unappeasable fires

of desire and death

entreating the nightsky

to rain on my flowerless roots

and sweeten the severity

of the dragon’s eyes

with tears.

I have lived in such a way

to actualize the nameless reality

of a few common words

like love and understanding

I’ve kept alight like fireflies on the wind

and cherished them

as if the seeds of insight

were the perennial beginning

of enlightened orchards

that taste like the fruit of compassion.

I have lived in such a way

like a thief of keys

to relieve the locks

on the nightwatch

of their tunnel vision

that it’s not safe

to give my new address

to my old mailbox.

But even in a black out

I have not kept the light out

by plastering my windows with starmaps

or gone underground

like a blind star-nosed mole

that put its eyes out

to share something

in common with the dead

who would never have dreamed

they would all end up sleeping with their mothers.

I open them to receive the sun.

I close them to remember the stars

I’ve been dancing under

for lightyears

against the gathering storm

like a poor man’s chandeliers.

I have celebrated my defiance

of hitching a winged horse

to a hearse

by expressing the joy I take

in the revolutionary spontaneity

of my unself-reliance.

But of all the things

I’ve ever outgrown

or overthrown

like a sword from a bridge

I gave back to the sacred waters of life

the last to fall

was the ghostship in the mirage

of the image I had of me.

I poured myself out

like imaginary water

from a fountainmouth

in a real drought

to green the secret Edens

at the sacred crossroads

of the four rivers

that might come of it

as if X marked the spot

where I was standing

as the best place to start a garden

on the waterwheel of the mindstreams

that radiated out of its stillness like spokes.

Sometimes you end up stealing fire

when all along

you thought you were meant

to invent the wheel

or make up a new language

out of the echoes of dolphins

breaking into birdsong

as if they had turned in their feet

to go back to the sea

but had not forgotten

that their fins

could fly as easily

as the wings they once wore on their heels.

Many rivers flow into the one sea

and the sea returns to transcendence

back the way it came

without stepping into the same mindstream twice.

And I prefer to think

that the same thing is true of the multiverse.

Everything that shines in the night

or in the mind

down to the smallest spark of insight

locked like a firefly

in a lighthouse of ice

on the same omnidirectional course.

And true north

just the magnetic attraction

of a voodoo doll

in a haystack of needles

trying to get a bearing on things

like the right ascension

and correct declination

of a lost soul

summoned like a deranged galaxy

to the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

to exchange the light it goes by

by upgrading its eyesight

to search for itself in the night

on the higher frequencies

of X-ray vision

on board an experimental satellite.

And yet for all the myriad universes

that bubble up in hyperspace

like the last breath of the drowning

I have refused to live

like a diving bell in a wishing well

trying to understand

why nothing came true but the coins.

If you’ve never resolved anything in your whole life

maybe you were meant

to keep the mystery alive.

The medium is not the message

when the message is the mystery.

A meaningful medium

is nothing but meaningless words.

The sky doesn’t intend to say birds.

The water doesn’t mean fish

anymore than an infinite number of other things.

Nothing lives like a machine

for something as small as a purpose.

You don’t have to live like a lens

to keep the sun in focus.

And maybe one of the greatest blessings

of being on the nightshift

is that when the universe is out of work

it has no use for us.

We’re free to be when and whatever we want.

Or thoroughly protean.

Or nothing at all.

A full eclipse of the clock on the wall

or a chromatically aberrant nightlight

like a colour crazy star

low on the horizon of the hall.

As for me and my house

I’ve lost track of the number of times

I’ve brought my starmud to enlightenment

like a horse you can lead to water

but you can’t make drink.

The words crawl.

The words swim.

The words take to their wings

like eagles and dragonflies

and startled waterbirds.

Half a sliced pear

looks like a short-necked Spanish guitar.

But looking for the meaning of this

isn’t the same

as listening to the music.

PATRICK WHITE  

IN THE MOMENT BEFORE SILENCE BREAKS WATER

IN THE MOMENT BEFORE SILENCE BREAKS WATER

In the moment before silence breaks water

like a thimble of oceanic consciousness

and the fish are jumping through the underside

of the moon looking for the dark side of their reflections

in the genetic waterclocks of time endlessly editing

the first draft of three quarks in a membranous monad

as the inflationary tendencies of the initial inspiration

cool down into molecules and space gives lead to the light,

I cast one long last farewell of a look

like a waterbird disappearing into the eyes of the void

that have never turned back like nirvana

to ever say good-bye to anyone, indifferent as smoke

to the path anyone takes away or toward it

as you realize you are the journey you’re on,

you’re the vehicle and the starmap, you’re

the dream of getting somewhere that’s making you up on the go.

Marvels and madness. The business of wonder.

Asylums crammed with star-shocked astonishment.

The exponential rush of knowledge, and, as always

the mysteries last to the dance, an innocent lover’s slow advance

to embrace the novelties of this Cambrian explosion

of fractals and facts like the wavelengths of a suspension bridge

swaying between two crows’ nests of straw. Memes

on the memomes, evolution, brutal genius, shaping space with thought

until matter itself is seen to be a translucent mode of sentience.

A dream of stars adrift like an empty lifeboat

in the wake of the path it takes without knowing

where it came from or where it’s supposed to be going

over the edge of a black hole into the tunnels of love and death

with a whole new universe at the other end of a telescopic hourglass

where bliss makes its own molecules, and compassion

the heavier elements of our starmud deep in our sorrows.

Things of the world like a language without a voice

until you say them like a secret you’ve kept from yourself

in your heart of hearts, the ear of your ear, the eye

of your eye, so deeply intensified by your understanding

they begin to shine by a light of their own to say they’re

as alive as you are to live as freely as they seek

the key to why they exist at all, as you do, to know this.

It’s the longing of hunger that inspires you

to use what you have to seek what you’re missing.

Content with what you have, ripeness is all,

you fall from the bough like a windfall of shepherd moons

to erect a provisional scaffolding to climb up again

and paint the creation myths of the constellations anew

in the crowns of the treetops washing in the underpainting.

No sailors in sight, life sings to itself like a mermaid on the rocks.

Out of the mouth of the mountain that wanted to speak

in a grammar of eagles and stars to the next peak over,

in a lyrical outburst of echoes, a valley was born to listen.

One star west, is one star east, one foot after another.

The humanizing of our solitude is deranging strangers at the gate

as the signs of life have become a matter of course,

and the miraculous doesn’t know what to do for an encore.

Even if you don’t, the mystery of your own life

takes you more seriously than your enquiries can imagine.

When a hidden secret wants to know itself

it looks at you in the mirror of your own awareness

and as much as you’ve been given a light to see by

is the colour of its eyes, the shape of its face, the curl of its mouth.

Looking into the mind like a telescope looks at the stars

and the stars look back like fireflies in the well of the telescope,

admit you’re invisible, formless, and start from there.

Or you’ll languish in the timeless eras before the Big Bang

without eternity to back you up. Ripples in the microwaves

of your cosmic background emanation, can you feel the pulse

of an ancient rain in your own veins, or did the golden fish

that eludes you jump into your lifeboat of its own accord

the moment you stopped tying lures to hook it on your questions?

Trickle or sunami alike, everybody makes it back like

a wave of the mindstream to the great night sea of their source.

Like an apple makes it back to the tree that abandoned it

like a god, or an atom, or mitochondrial Eve looking

for a purpose in life that wasn’t too deep to conceive of

given that she couldn’t know what she had to work with at the time.

When you listen to yourself clearly to hear the universe

talking through you, if it doesn’t sound unapologetically absurd

you’re either lying or mindless of the madness in the mirror.

This is what comes of updating your questions

but listening in the same old language. The universe is polyglot.

It speaks in tongues of undifferentiated chaos, and the ear

you give to it is the grammar, the magic of what it has to say

so the message is always collaboratively creative

like the quantum entanglements of binary star systems

dancing around each other like lovers whose bonds

are not proportional to the elastic distances between them.

Just like the impersonal intimacies between crystals

on the same frequency. Go out and look at the stars

on a winter night and say anything you want in their presence

and it’s heard in reverse on the other side of the galaxy.

You can tell who’s been looking at Orion

by the labyrinthine eyeprints of earth bound fireflies all over it

whose light you didn’t think could reach out as far as a star

to leave an indelible impression on the third eye of a sunspot.

Pure motivation doesn’t set the agenda of what you’re fated to live.

Ambition even less. Yet they’re both open doorways to enlightenment

as expedient and delusory as those spiritual keyholes you peek through.

Life accommodates itself to the morphology of your knowledge forms.

Inconceivably, it exists because you imagine it, not because you know it.

Astronomy for poets. Picture-music for cosmologists with stone ears.

The shape-shifting pillars of the moon in a palace of water,

the way all poems move like serpents of light

dancing to their own flutes like the wind on the waves.

Many waterclocks and broken hearts that do,

but the lyric of the mindstream doesn’t taste of time.

There are no ashes of the stars on its tongue,

no new moon like a pupil in the iris of a moondog.

It doesn’t enter the future trying to improve upon its infancy.

It doesn’t hire a tutor to help perfect its spontaneity.

It’s not the idolatrous familiar of its companionable mystery.

It’s not the nightwatchmen of everything it reflects.

It’s not the eyewitness watching you being you in your dreams.

The circuitous blossoming is your own emergent life. Your seeing

flowers into music like stars on the tendrils of the wild grapevines

feeling their way through the darkness like the cursive script

of a serpent of light writing glyphs in the wake of its going

as if any wavelength of water were a sign of intelligence

in a desert of stars where sand may be the measure of time

but the hourglass of the sky never runs out of insights

like fireflies writing back in ungrammatical constellations

of pictographs in the luminous hand of their vagrant imaginations.

PATRICK WHITE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

Acutely aware of the onceness of life, one

of the many shadows that followed me for lightyears

was the terror of wasting it on myself and not

the mystery of what it is to be here knee deep in starmud,

up over my head in a fathomless atmosphere of awareness,

knowing I was going to leave my body behind

one day like gumboots. Any moment now.

The green light of the firefly about to change to red.

In the last flash of insight to cross my mind,

which could well be, as it has been here,

the foundation stone of a whole new universe,

I didn’t want to get caught, one foot in and one foot out,

trying to weather the storm like a lifeboat

still moored to the dock like an apple in winter

on the tree of life, not risking what I had to let go of

like seeds that abandon the rafters of the tree to be true to it.

Some people trip, some fall, some plunge,

some swan-dive into the abyss. I made

a big black hole in my heart and let all the stars

leak into it like the creative side of the light when it

turns around to look at itself without being rebuffed

by its own reflectivity. I’ve danced under the chandeliers

in the blue-white palaces of the Pleiades

when the air was full of mirrors, and that was

as elegant as a graceful woman on the verge of tears,

and often, I’ve worn my eyelids like hoods and eclipses

over the falcons of my eyes to keep the lunettes of my talons

from seizing the heart of the dove like a bouquet of blood.

Like the gutter receives the spent flames of the leaves

and the Japanese plum blossoms, like the baleen

of a blue whale harvests the krill and knows

by the taste in its mouth whether it’s autumn or spring,

when they were tired of shining, I let the stars

go slumming in my humanity as if I were a spiritual nightclub

where they could let their hair down like black dwarfs

sick of photo-ops and burn out alone at the bar

like bruised black and blue flash bulbs any way they wanted to.

I brought the stars back down to earth as often

as they raised my skull up like a grail

they poured themselves into until my eyes

were brimming over with their radiance and never once

did I ever hear them say when. Or enough is enough.

My capacity for emptiness was and still is limitless.

How else could you hold all that shining within yourself

and not go blind? How could you ever hope to know

what hour it was like the zeitgeist of the times at home

in a material eternity if you didn’t live space

like an intimate experience there were only the stars

and a few nightbirds you could tell it to who could understand?

Though the signs were everywhere like a secret

that wanted to be known. All you had to do

was open your heart and take a look through the third eye

of a black hole dilating in the middle of your iris like a new moon

climbing the rungs on a ladder of event horizons

as if it were crossing the thresholds of each house of the zodiac

back into the burning arms of the black sun no one could see

that wasn’t intrigued by the mystery of the dark eyes

behind the veils and lifemasks of the light

that paled them like nightwatchmen making

their final rounds on the grave yard shift

turn their lanterns down like stars in the dawn.

Acutely aware of the onceness of life,

I cherished my fingertips, not what they touched.

I exalted my seeing, not what it saw. I honoured my voice

for the nobility of its calling, not what was said in my sleep.

I gathered up all the myriad thoughts and facets of mind

like wavelengths of the omnipresence of the universe

like fireflies and lightning, and delighted and horrified

as I was by what they revealed, looked deeply into the eye

of the one jewel of the world concealed behind all the shining.

I’ve firewalked the Milky Way on a pilgrimage

of ghosts and smoke and taken the hands of many lovers

as if they were my own like an Orphic leper

come back from the dead like a moonrise silhouetting

the green boughs of a tree that had suffered many dismemberments,

to revel in the return of life to my limbs like an orchard in spring,

not the windfall of the fruits of the earth that fell out of their sleeves

like cornucopias, wishing-wells, and the caressable magic of lamps.

Though I praised the fountains and goblets, the flowering

of the starfields after the ice-storms of Orion thawed

like a chandelier over the candelabra of the trees

I drowned in the godhead of the dark watershed like the source

of the great rivers of my life returning to the sea

like the stray threads and frayed deltas of my blood

reworked into new flying carpets on the loom

of the lunar ebb and neap of my tidal heart

seminal with life along the island coasts of consciousness

when the moon is in the corals like a sower in the fields.

But more than desire itself, I celebrated my heart,

not for what it longed for, but the art of love that mastered me

like a down and out stranger I once met in West Van

when he saw I was out of cigarettes, and opening his hand

like an ashtray of butts he’d been picking up off the streets,

and saving for himself, picked the longest one out

and gave it to me as freely without forethought

as any highroller ever shot the stars as if he had no limits.

PATRICK WHITE

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

Stars tonight and the train whistles just passing through,

not dying like some wounded animal, a mammoth in a tarpit

beset by dire wolves just as the ice-age is taking its hand

off the throats of the rivers and returning the world to trees,

no drunks or teenagers lying across the tracks, no accidents

or suicides with loved ones leaving flowers and photographs

on the spot where it happened too late, too late, and no one

in a small town really able to relate to such a universal absence

like the death of the larger mammals when spring is at the gate.

I listen for the music of fate, and I’m almost always ready to dance,

but sometimes when I consider the erosively random indifference of chance

I speak as if I had to keep a tight grip on my molecules

or dissipate into space myself with no nebular aspirations

of ever becoming a star to shine a little light

on what I’m doing here as if I just bought drinks for the house,

though I’m never quite sure what I’m trying to celebrate,

but it’s enough to start a riot of sacred clowns

laughing on a winter night as they put each other down

as if the only way they could bluff themselves into having a little fun

were to put callouses on their smiles, and talk tougher than they are.

And over the course of time, the scars prove as hurtful as the wounds.

Atrocities turn into local stories and the asylums are abandoned

to the ghosts of the mad who murdered the nurse

in the moonlit flash of an axe you can still see ninety years later

if you’re driving by alone on a starless night in late February.

It’s the commonality of it all that makes it chronically appalling.

It’s the sententious acceptance of death as if it had already

been achieved sooner than later, and sooner waste your last breath

on the ashes of a dying fire than wonder why

intimately specific human beings turbulent with life

are forgotten as carbon copies of us as they’re fossilized

and remembered, if at all, as the narrative themes of morbid legends,

or nacreously glazed in mother of pearl as if the dawn were never false.

I can’t see the bright side of a black hole through the temple

of a universe that’s playing Russian roulette with itself,

but I can hear the tumblers of a solar system falling into place

on a safe full of secrets for my eyes only as if some things

came to light like undertakers chalking the faces of the cosmetically dead.

Lifemasks and strawdogs and scarecrows thrown

on the ritual fires of the crematorium after the sacrifice is said

to make the living feel better about having their hearts cut out.

Whatever gets you through the night. Aquatic Byron

reaching into the pyre to pull Shelley’s drowned heart out of the flames.

The way I seek a deeper solitude than death out in the nearby woods

where I always feel like an exile with a homeless heart

looking up at the stars like a handful of sacred dirt in a medicine bag

I’ve been saving for years to throw on my own grave

I’m holding up to the abysmal impersonality of the nightsky,

not to have it blessed by a consolation prize, but to give

the unresponsive silence of the alphas and omegas of the mystery

a taste of my humanity even if they spit me out as a bitter kind of light.

I will shine. Without a lantern. Without a firefly. Without

a guiding star. Without a radiant familiar in a desolate place.

If nothing else, I’ll keep adding my paint rag to the big picture

of the dark until I grow eyes to look beyond the obvious mirrors,

part the curtains, lift the veils, kiss the eyelids of the new moon

until the dead wake up like an eclipse of black roses

blooming in their blood, turn the trilithons of Stonehenge

until it’s aligned with the vernal equinox and the dead return

like migrating birds to the innocence of their childhoods

and the coffins they were buried are disinterred like toyboxes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLUE DAWN COMES

THE BLUE DAWN COMES

The blue dawn comes, the night has walked

its bridge of stars and there shall be other days

we will dance in one another’s eyes,

circles of rain in the shadows of the willows,

the fragrance of your hair, your skin,

words I will say into the abyss like a nightbird

longing for your green bough, and the silence

shall know the taste of our human joys and sorrows

in the perishing of the flowers, in the moonrise

of your sad, sad smile rising from your depths

like the flame of a goldfish in a waterlily pond,

the candle of your body still burning

among the earthbound stars you rise and set among.

I shall name comets after you with occult names

that bend their path toward the sun once

and then are seen no more like the passions

of fireflies enamoured with the stars.

And I shall sing of you like a poet

worthy of a lover’s farewells

on this road of smoke unravelling

like the plans of a man when the lanterns

of the starmaps go out like the star sapphires

of your eyes in the paling dawn as you walk away.

Millennia shall pass, eras fade, futures deteriorate,

and time silt the world with the ashes and dust

of stars that never shone down upon us,

most evanescent of all the waterbirds

that rose from the lake to disappear like our tears

among these sleepwalking ghosts of the mist

returning to their graves and the waves

will not forget what it was like to be graced

by the compound bows of the black swans

that fletched the spirit’s arrows with the feathers

of an eclipse that revealed us to each other

like the stigmata of a wounded bliss in the dark.

And wherever your hands found me

I shall wander in the labyrinths of your fingertips forever,

preferring the way I was lost and homeless in you,

to the thresholds and doorways of lovers to come

who will know me by name, but never understand my eyes

nor the bracelets of rain that have aged

like the orbits of binary stars dancing in tree rings

around my heartwood, nor why the nightbird sings alone

to the moonsets that have fallen like blossoms from my boughs,

still true to the vows we never made to one another.

PATRICK WHITE