The Greater Love Unanswered
The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,
a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude
that receives everything without distinction or caste
like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising
or the luminous myriads of the night
into the visionary cauldron of the dawn
that drowns them in their own beginnings, an excess of light
that drew too near to read the fading scrawl
of disenfranchised love letters
from a god fashionably unfaced. And I have seen birds
disappearing into the quiescent dusk like prayers
that fold their wings in an unknown grove
to wait for a morning that rarely comes, a song
that would hurl them back into the light, redeemed,
because the greater love unanswered,
it could only end this way. This world, a scintillance of dust
in the gaping darkness of implacable aeons
whose indifference to mind and matter alike
is worse than any judgment, grows lonelier with the truth.
A smile and a wound, one heart nudged toward another
in the frenzy of mad water
drawn out by the poultice of the moon, life is a cannibal
that wolfs its own, eats the candle and the flame
to pursue a scheme of persistence
shuffling the portfolios of proven minerals
to maximize the largesse of its living issue
with intensified affinities of blood and vision.
Bless the modern man who has sloughed his life
like a skin of chrome for an aimless longevity
that cannot grow older than the eternity he is.
The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way.
He passes away like a pore on the cheek
of someone he never met.
Without going anywhere everything passes,
spring buds on the branches and Jupiter
flashing its tiny plinths of lightning
at the cradles of the elm in the upper boughs
sweeping the sky of stars,
and love, and friendship, and family,
and arrayed in the veils of its own enigma, beauty,
the only acceptable apology
for the serial distortions of time.
Transformations of the orthodoxy I call myself
keep turning the mirror inside out
so that one word of enlightenment
might be poised on my tongue when I die, but
until then, I am bound by a serpent of doubt
to drink from its fountains of fire
a martyr to my own desire. The greater love unanswered;
it could only end this way, a creature
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poem by Patrick White
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