I MEET AN OLD LOVER
I meet an old lover
and it’s like returning to a poem
I haven’t finished.
Any muse can inspire beginnings
but where’s the dark muse
that knows how to fire up
these prosey endings
that never seem to ring true?
All the swords over our heads
are beginning to rust
like windchimes in the rain
even as the bamboo skeletons
of the cats and dogs
we left hanging on the back porch
go on talking to the wind
as if we’d never left.
Your absence has grown
so expansively beyond me
it doesn’t fit me like skin anymore
and sloughs me
like the boney constellation of a snake.
And though it’s good to know
I am no longer the admiral on deck
in the mizzenmast
of your assassin’s eye,
I vaguely resent the bronze way
you have of dealing with me
like the ghost of an injured albatross
badly in need of your prosthetic advice.
I’d rather have you look into my face
now as you do across the table
like the photo of an author
on the backcover of a book
you’ve already read
and didn’t really like
because it truly wasn’t about you.
But still I must love you
as you say you always will me
as we lie away the yokes of the past
as if they were foreign bridges
we had to cross
in a language neither of us understood.
And it’s all for the good, all for the good,
isn’t it
that peace has replaced
the unstable intermittency
of our savage joy
in feasting on each other like life?
And good too that the years and the miles
have finally given us each
the aerial perspective
to blue one another into oblivion
like two birds disappearing
without misgiving
into the crowded afterlife
of what dies in the distance.
Perhaps there’s no more agony
in the seed that separates to grow
than their is in the full blown haemorrage of the rose
and it’s all just a matter of shedding
your way back into bloom
like the second full moon
in late October
that comes alone to the high fields
after the harvest is in
and we’ve reaped what we’ve sowed.
But you don’t need to know
what gravity is
to know that it keeps you down
and these days a fish
is as good a definition of water
as any I’ve ever found,
and when I look out into space
for the habitable planet
that was our bond to one another,
our soil, our atmosphere,
when I look for that star
among so many again
that illuminate loftier myths
than the tiny fury
of who we were once to each other
as if each morning laid flowers
at the door of the dark side,
I realize deeper than space
that there’s no point
looking for the universe
in a grain of sand
when I’m already thought-years
beyond the wavelengths of the black pearl
that came of never finding it
and there’s nothing
that could ever call the light back.
Love’s greatest flaw
is trying to turn its thresholds
into cornerstones
that can’t bear the load of the law
or the massive rebuttals of the heart
that shakes them into quicksand
when the mountains come down
like stone tablets
as if jury had just written
their own commandments
and the first was to bury belief in love
as if it were a faith in the light
you could only keep
with your eyes closed.
That’s why when I shine
as I still occasionally do
remembering some elation of you
like a momentary flaring in space,
I pour everything I am and am not
flowing through this boundless abyss of insight
into a single star with nothing to say
about why we are the way we are
when we finger the braille of our scars
like blind men reviewing the history
of constellations that have gone out in the night
to enlighten their study of darkness.
I shine down upon everything
under my eyelids and yours
like the last grace of our leaving
no trace of our grieving
upon these old waters
we rise from
like the ghosts of birds
or words we said to ourselves
alone in a mirror
that never answered back
and went our separate ways
like two smiles that go on for miles
without a face between them.
PATRICK WHITE
