If You Were To Give Me Your Hands
If you were to give me your hands, break your prayer
and offer each wing up to me, broken halves of the heart,
I would make one burning dove out of them
that would carry a ribbon of flame in its beak,
a comet in the night, a vision of life and love,
a message to God she couldn't ignore, a wild flower
that emerged out of the ashes of her abyss
like a star waking up from a bad dream
in the skies over the darkening hills of Perth.
If you were to give me your eyes for a moment
like the lily pads of two eclipses, I'd put my lips
to each of your eyelids like the kissing stone of the Kaaba,
and erase all memory of its igneous fall to earth,
and when you opened them at moonrise,
where I touched you, there'd be two waterstars
shining as if they'd just fallen from the Pleiades
among the waterlilies and crazy raptures of the nightbirds.
Spare me a tear, and I'll return it to you like an elixir
that will dye your grief like the palette of an autumn tree
that's been painting for years, a sidereal Prussian blue,
with a touch of alizarin crimson, to burn
like the subliminal passion of a dragon in the background.
And when the fish return to their sacred pools on pilgrimage
like water sylphs, even when your mindstream
breaks like a rosary into billions of separate beads
flowing over the precipice of your eyelashes into the void,
you'll be the bird that amazes the sun and moon
reflected in each of them as they are in your eyes
as you wheel like the phoenix of a double helix
with the Swan and the Eagle across a summer
of clear night skies casting the nets of their constellations
far and wide, like a spell that gathers them up like shepherd moons.
If you were to give me your breasts, your lips,
your arms, your legs, I'd come like spring to a landscape,
clouds and rain to the moon, a hummingbird
to the goblet of your body, water to a wishing well
full of stars and fireflies, even at noon,
that's just realized all she ever had to do was ask.
I'd make your flesh feel like the shores
of some vast sea of unexplored sensual awareness
and walk them like a beachcomber in a red tide
of radiant starfish pumping light into your blood.
I would not ask for your soul or your spirit,
knowing the eternal sky does not inhibit the flight
of the wild waterbirds startled off the lake,
and even the wind can't hold them for long
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poem by Patrick White
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