You Can't Embrace Me With Your Moderate Love
You can't embrace me with your moderate love
as if two arms were one too many to give someone a hug,
or one eye were enough to look at the stars in your lover's eyes,
and make up constellations you've never seen before.
I've never fallen in love with anyone who ever
made my whole body feel like it was a ghost amputee
who had never gotten over the memory of having one.
You can't read Braille without fingertips.
And it's either brave and suicidally noble, or something
drastically real about me but I've always preferred
the dark, dangerous muse, to the sunny cheerleader
who cut the bananas into my cereal just for the potassium.
No moon. No music. No slumming in heaven
when we take every other nightshift off from hell
and then walk out on the job permanently like a Tarot deck
to see how it feels to be a shipwreck on the bottom of a prophecy
that foretold, one day, swimmers and drowners alike
would be in it way up over their heads. And that's
when I learned to count on my heart
like an overturned lifeboat to keep things afloat
for me and anyone I love who went into exile beside me.
Got to be ancient starmaps in her eyes
like the return address of extraterrestials
who promised to come back one day
and make crop circles in the hay together.
And fireflies for back up in the long dark halls
of what we were reading when the stars went out
and we opened up to each other about our secret research
into the comparative mythology of each other's psyche.
Even at high noon I want to look out of the corner of my eye
and see in the depths of her silence, stars
hiding out in the shadows on the bottom of her wishing wells
and know that she's ok at either end of the telescope.
And I'll show her the sun shining at midnight
and the moon among the corals, and come up like a pearl diver
with new metaphors to show her how I can still see her radiance
like a lunar eclipse in a mystic moon rise just behind
the guile of her veils and the eyelashes of her tree line.
And there shall be no shadow upon the earth
that she casts behind her that shall remain starless.
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poem by Patrick White
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