Homogenous Grey With Violet Towers Of Delphiniums Poem by Patrick White

Homogenous grey with violet towers of delphiniums
so intensely purple, they’re an imperium unto themselves
in a twilight zone between night and the dawn,
a mystic state of blood when the eyes in your heart
climb down from their firetowers like stars, vacate
their watch without leave weary of being on the lookout
for two bullets to the back of your head as if
it were better all were lost than to proceed by rote
at someone else’s peril. If only we could bleed
like the masterpiece of these waiting for our eyes
to catch up to the sleeping visionary within us all.

Would we see our dreams dying in the vastness
like the fragrance of flowers that exhaled themselves
like forbidden passions in a garden of moonlight and lemons
as if every moment of life were an encounter
with what’s most strange and mystifying about us
as the cowled shadow of the figure by the blind sundial
turns as if to ask at last, can you see me now? Am I not
more beautiful than anything your imagination
was afraid to meet for fear of falling in love irreparably?

Would the seed build the rafters of a new treehouse for us all
by impregnating the earth with more intimate metaphors
that embrace their own perishing like an enduring love affair
with what remains most daringly inconceivable about us?

Easy enough to explain, but whoever understands it,
inherits a dynastic empire of afterlives in a silence
so profound no one without the bloodseal of the delphiniums
in their heart has attempted it yet as a way
of inhabiting the unattainable by reaching out
like the stars in a spearhead of flowers
to the aimless distances in a passing stranger’s eyes.

The mercy’s in the blooming and the planets
gather around like the fruits of why it should be so.
The mindstream divines the way of water as it flows.

And what could the light that unites what’s most remote
from us to the aniconic images of love that bind us
to one another like delphiniums and gardeners
to the hidden suns of the seeds in the starmud
of our shining but inspiration, that wounded joy
made manifest in the eyes of the way we express ourselves
when we encounter love as if it were never meant to happen
like the royal house of the delphiniums in inexplicable rapture
they can trace their bloodlines back to the stars
as each of us, enthroned like the king and queen,
the prince and the pauper, the singer and the thief,
the sage and the fool, for a day and a night of love, ours?