I Move Through The Shadows That Have Their Flowering Too Poem by Patrick White

946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada

I Move Through The Shadows That Have Their Flowering Too



I move through the shadows that have their flowering too.
I see you blooming through the pale
of the trunks of the black walnuts
like a fire you've been sitting around a long time,
wondering if you're a habitable planet
or a belt of asteroids that hang like skulls from your waist,
orbiting around a middle-aged avuncular sun
as affable as a porch light welcoming you to the abyss.

You don't always need a beginning to get something done
or a sunset to remind you it's getting late.
I can hear your sorrows like waterbirds
down by the lake where the raccoons drowned the coydog
by luring it out of its depths. Dead Dog's Dream Self.
The titles of old poems invariably return
like roads that have picked up their own scent
and follow it like fog and smoke and a seance of stars
high in a darkened lighthouse full of lament.

I want to see you jump your own fire like a witch
dressed in nothing but your best tattoos.
I want to see the savage in you come out
like a rare lynx at noon when your shadows
are withdrawn like claws that could make the light bleed.
I don't want to be sacrificed to anything anymore.
I don't want to relate to someone's heart through an embassy.
I just want to lie down with you in the eerie blue grass
like an astronomer with the universe in his arms
and be totally ignored by cosmic events
as I take your earlobes in my teeth like oysters and pearls.
Black. Because you're a new moon. Hard
because so many dawns have been darker than the night.

Or we could get hilariously drunk on black pearl wine
pressed from the finest wild grape vines
without throwing them before the swine to trample them.
And you could ask me in the homeless silence
we both belong to like sketchy tenants, how
it came about I creatively visualized you
in the caldron of my heart over a fire that never goes out.
And all I'd be able to say you'd already know for yourself.

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946 / 834
Patrick White

Patrick White

Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
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