Sweeter Than The Beginning Of A Delusion Poem by Patrick White

it wouldn't be wisdom to resist, I see
waterlilies burning votive candles on the Fall River.
Even in winter, chandeliers of blood red chokecherries
feting the pheasant, the quail, the hermit thrush.
Mutable mind, mutable heart, out of this bleak night
of frozen waterclocks, I summon irrevocable time
to break the ice on my eyes and let me drink the stars again
from the unattainable grails of a prophetic skull
tormented by impossible longings the way I once was
when I walked with you beside the whisper of this river
after a summer rain, knowing it wasn't me
you were crying for. You befriended the cure,
but you were in love with a wound, and I,
unwise in the way a lover's blood
could taste of thorns forever as if each
were the gravestone of a rose you tried
to bury deep inside yourself like a moonrise
that came up every night to shed its petals on you
like the phases of the dead opening the fresh scars
of their eyelids over and over again to shock you
with the hydra-headed budding of your pain- -I
who was an exorcism, could never hurt you like that,
even as you were a seance summoned by a ghost
I never tried to dispossess you of. Love, but not with me
as my voice disappeared into the silence
like a waterbird through a curtain of broken prayer beads
falling away like tears from my wings, like a carillon
of tiny bells that knew they'd never have anything
sweeter to sing about than that moment
they held their tongues and listened to the way
you talked about the moonlight gracing the waterlilies
as if you were addressing a loveletter to someone
so deeply embedded in your heart it made
the distance to the stars almost seem intimate
though it was your eyes I listened to in silence
as the river passed for the next thirty years not certain
if I bloomed like a man or died beside it like a child that night.