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
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:48:11 +0000
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