These Words Turn Homeward Poem by Patrick White

These words turn homeward
toward you, my dark wood,
because of all assignations of the night
you are West, you are dream and secret
you, deeper than jewels, sweeter
than the taste of stars
in the eyes of wounded black berries.
You, longing and lucidity,
singing in the last of the shadows
of the sacred trees for the unattainable
that summons me to you.
Endless, the farewell, endless
the dusk the nightbirds follow
after the swallows
have danced for the stars
in an aerial display of their own.
You, my star field, my wildflower,
whose skin is the skin of lunar waterlilies
and the tide at the tips of my fingers.
My new moon, my despair,
my solitude, my silence, my absence
which among these thousand lonely lakes
has looked upon you and seen
as I have seen in your incomprehensible eyes
how unfathomable they are to themselves
in your depths, your death,
the fullness of your abiding evanescence.
the quiet intimacies
that have just crept up on me
over these intervening years
that have done nothing
but linger in the moment
as if you would always be there
and could be found nowhere else
but now forever in this doorway
this broken window into my heart
to let go of
over and over and over again
like the rain, this stone, that leaf,
the wraith of your breath
hovering like a thin autumn mist
always at a distance over the harvested fields.
O diminished one, subtle one, free,
how is it you can inspire me still
though your ashes were given back to the stars
like a message for their eyes only
so many years ago that time itself
has upgraded all my starmaps
and made you alone, far one, bright one,
this lonely holy road that’s walking me home
as if my final destination, like yours, like you
were everywhere in whatever direction I turn
to ask the next star, where you’ve gone,
has it seen you, has it heard
was it too soon, was it too early
is it too late, too perilous, too absurd
for the morning to return you
like a singing bird to a green bough
to the dead branch that lost the moon
like its only blossom
on the rootless tree
that it took you from
when it took you from me?