SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate to an open field where the white horse that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude like a phase of the moon come to earth is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much distance and disappearance in it wings and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by I can barely hear you singing from here over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night when the ghosts are rioting in their graves like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree as do I these strange epiphanies of you that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom. And the depth of the emptiness that informs the substance of my imaginings, devastates me like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart like a black cataract of snake skin I keep trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck. As if I were bleeding out like a rose after the green thorns have hardened into fangs that are killing and curing me at the same time. Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours and be done with it, no more of this, no more. No more of watching the beauty of the world burn out into a dark radiance that makes me want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing. Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning, thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can’t go without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain. And it isn’t anything either of us can do anything about. It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining, small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light. As I am now that you’ve become that rip in my heart all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light carved out of one of these black walnut trees. Endure. Participate. See. Wonder. Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing. And when you’re hurting your worst, sing. And even when I’m soldiering my way through stone like a flying fish in the wrong medium, or walking alone with the Alone through the woods, just to meet you where you ask me to when you call and I come like a burning bridge down to the river, wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime, I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck. Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case I forget how to dance on my own grave with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile that really means it if it really means anything at all. Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell my tongue is stuck to like a child’s to a wire fence, or this black diamond nightbird that cuts my darkness to the quick because it’s got nothing to sing about that can answer the call of the living for someone on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver, except the dead air of this strange place where space is indelibly bruised by the passing of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar. Like a candle in the lantern of a skull I’ve carried before me like a nightwatchman on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears until I lost my footing and fell in one night, as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark I was growing wings where I had none before and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well noticed the dead still blooming like stars in the white shadows of the sun at midnight. And out of the corners of my eyes when what I can’t see what need to know about being alive comes looking for me like the sacred syllable on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird to the dead branch in my heart that’s having trouble remembering how to blossom after a long winter, as if you’d summoned me to the trees like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead, to teach me how to take the pain and through the alchemy of the grief that flows through my heartwood like light and rain turn it into life again, as if every leaf were a new loveletter from the dead I’ve been saving for years like expurgated starmaps illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips where they know who you are, and they’ve seen you like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows down by the river that weeps like a black mirror for the stars and waterbirds in passing that appear and disappear each in its time and you wait for me like the longing of the dead to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere, the withered star of a wild rose without a flower, that let’s me know you’re near, you’re here rooted in me on earth where we’ve both come to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 17:08:16 +0000
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