<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476932" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Object Of Our Devotion</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The object of our devotion <br> finally asks from us <br> the very eyes that dazzled us into obedience, <br>and leads us like a wind, <br> the last breath we'll ever take, <br>in the guise of a woman<br>who beckons at the top of the stairwells and thermals <br> where the hawk wheels, <br> a spark of the sun, <br>to follow her down deeper into a darkness <br> that even the dead shun<br> like the deleted shadows of noon, <br>if I would be her perfect lover.<br> If I would be her perfect lover, <br> and the fever of my demon <br>not go mad looking for her<br> like water on the moon <br> to ease the fire, ease the fire <br>that blazes in my bones, <br> I must abdicate my consummation <br> in the intimate otherness of me <br>and forfeit my eyes <br> to the deathly absence of the sea <br> that has unmoored me like a wave. <br>If I would be her perfect lover <br> and lift the veil<br> to see the face she only shows the stars, <br>I must take myself down<br> like a torn sail in a storm <br> and let the current heave me where it will, <br>the lonely word whose endless sentence is a soul. <br> I must say her beauty, <br> I must root her flower in the starfields <br>and vanquish time from the garden; <br> if I would be her perfect lover, <br> I must enlarge my emptiness like space <br>to linger with the subtle fragrances <br> of the silks and auroras of her mind <br> that blow the stars around like dust <br>and pick the galaxies like dandelions <br> and raise them like suns above the streaming skylines of her hair<br> flowing out behind her, the wake of a waterbird<br>landing like a blossom, the moon, a wing-weary emotion<br> on the night sky <br> she keeps to herself<br>when she bathes alone in the milk of the undulant light<br>on the other side of her eyes.<br> If I would be her perfect lover, <br>and my heart, and my blood, <br> my mind and my spirit, my art, <br> this poem says I must <br>give up this busy corner in the passing world<br> where my voice <br> rows and rows <br>in the leaking lifeboat of an empty coffin <br> and the guitar in my arms <br> I've tuned to the furthest stars<br>who have looked the longest <br> and were the first to believe <br> their fire could live, <br>is a rudder on the wind; <br> if I would be her perfect lover I must leave <br> my constellation and my bleeding throne, <br>this courtyard of pleading gravestones <br> modelling for the dead they've made a trend of, <br> and taking off the polluted water-robe <br>I wore to my last coronation like an atmosphere, <br> breathe myself out, <br> the vapour of a dying candle, <br>and enter the darkness and the solitude and the silence, <br> slipping like the pollen of a many-petalled theme <br> into the alloy of a sweeter dream <br>than ever slept like honey <br> in the labyrinths of her hive.<br> If I would be her perfect lover, <br>I must not amass her private thresholds with my need <br> like autumns and autumns of junkmail <br> banked against her door, <br>nor implore her to patch like an oracular island <br> the wounded sails of my ongoing shipwreck<br> by threading my blood <br>through the needle in the eye of the siren <br> I came in on like an abandoned message in a bottle <br>allured by the tides of her song; <br>I must not wire myself like spam <br> and blow up like a holy war<br> vying for grace<br>and weighing her place like a feather <br> in the scales of an insurgent creed, <br> a star gone nova among the stars, <br>bury her alive and shining <br> in the black hole<br> of the afterlife I am.<br>If I would be her perfect lover, <br> if I would be her perfect lover, <br> if I would be her perfect lover <br>and old bones screech like owls of chalk across the night, <br> their talons sheathed <br> like the thorns and swords of the sun <br>behind the capes of her roses, <br> and the matador ungored <br> by the horns of her crescents <br>on the bull of the moon; if <br> old bones would blossom <br> and the dead branch leaf, <br>the crutch and the baton and the scuttled coffin <br> would marrow the dry wood <br> with the urgencies of the orchards again, <br>then I must heed the wine <br> and not the snake in the goblet <br> she pours out of me like music.<br>I must not labour in the occult mines <br> of her diamond infallibilities <br> like a floodlight <br>that makes everything blindingly clear, <br> if I would be her perfect lover <br> and see how she glows by her own light <br>in the darkness of her own depths <br> like a fish or a firefly or a vine <br> or the flame of a star <br>tending the brittle wicks of the blind<br> as if they were the tendrils of a supple candle <br> and not the black monks of a lifeless paradigm<br>that flares without light <br> like the hood of a cobra <br> that's sloughed its last eclipse.<br>Remember, my heart, how thin the moon is <br> and not rub it away like white-gold <br> at the snap of a thumb and finger <br>but lay it down gently like a kiss on dark water <br> like the skin of an eye, <br> the flake of the water gilder, <br>the first precious breath of your longing <br> to shake the abyss of the darkness inside <br> like a white dove at a black window, <br>if you would be her perfect lover. <br> And you, my voice, you must become a journey <br> to what is far and out of reach, <br>and make boats and birds <br> of the worn-out shoes of your words<br> and learn to fly like the barefoot wind<br>with stars and wings at your heels, <br> and take down those old bells <br> that have withered on the bough like apples <br>and set the seed free from the corpse <br> and sing like the first of the dead <br> to sire the living. Not enough <br>to say your love; you must listen, deeply listen <br> to the silence within you <br> that burns like a flame<br>in the night crown of the lily <br>and draws you to it <br> like a gypsy out of the shadows<br>and know the thread of the candle is the length of a life <br> that binds the flesh to its own consumption <br> and you must enter wholly <br>into your own immolation like a star in the sun <br> or beg forever at the gates of the fire<br> like a snake for a mother tongue<br>that isn't the rearing hiss <br> of a forsaken bliss, <br> if you would be her perfect lover.<br>And you, my body, are you not a flower <br> rooted in the greater wisdom of the devil <br> but decked out in the feathers <br>of an earthbound angel; sometimes <br> a great volcanic rose <br> that sheds its igneous petals like islands<br>and covers the villages on its slopes <br> under eyelids of ash like a dream<br> that won't awake for eras <br>to the curiosity of the shovels that exhume the agony<br> of being buried alive in yourself like an underground fire<br> moving from root to root like frustrated desire? <br>What prophet could stand <br> at the door of your furnace <br> like a school janitor on a winter morning<br>and do anything more than add fire to fire <br> by admonishing your rage<br> with the strap of his tongue? <br>O you who have sustained me like a road, like blood, <br> and never asked where we were going, <br> who have endured me like a wound<br>beyond your healing for years, <br> and never left my bedside, <br> what an unacknowledged sage you have been <br>to temper the hot iron of all these celestial blades <br> that rise like the grass of heaven<br> out of these deserts and deserts of stars <br>at the mere whisper <br> of the shadow of the mahdi at noon <br> drawing the first crescent of the new moon from his scabbard; <br>what wisdom to temper the spirit<br> like a horse of blood <br> in the cool troughs <br>of hunger, desire, and sleep. You have been <br> water and air and bread on the moon for me, <br> and led me to the tree <br>I could sit under in the shade <br> of a woman in blossom<br> who smiled like the wile of the wine <br>in the hand of the stranger <br> who has worn my features <br> as I have his <br>like the inside of a face <br> turned toward its own light, <br> that's never known a mirror. <br>What could I possibly say to you<br> who are the branch <br> of my eloquent leafing except <br>remember, remember, <br> when you ache with empires, <br> that all these worlds within worlds as all worlds must <br>will end like squalls of dust <br> at her threshold, <br> and when we're colder than a windowpane <br>it will be her breath that moves us like a glacier to tears, <br> and on her windowsill <br> where we linger with the dead leaves of an unwatered art, <br> a patina of dark matter among the new lucidities, <br> new myths fleshing the bones of the constellations <br> they throw across the sky to prophecy<br>the things that shall be and the things that shall not, <br> it will be her finger that traces the words <br> that will scatter us again<br>like birds of the morning in a gust of light, <br> and it will be the sky that clings to her eye <br> that we will walk under like a figure in a dream<br>disembodied by the night<br> looking for any sign of ourselves <br> like faces we once lost to the stream<br>when we danced with her <br>under the chandeliers of the cherries <br> and she were the whole of our theme, <br>if you would be her perfect lover<br> and not just another king of quicksand <br> sinking on the throne of his own domain.<br>And as to the spirit, as to that ambidextrous sleight of the light <br> that gnashes its teeth <br> like lightning in a cloud<br>until it flame out like revelation <br> from the eye of God<br> and glimpse the ocean of its own vast features <br>in the merest scintillance of the furthest star<br> arcing like the tongue of a serpent of light <br> in the darkest depths of its own unscrutability; <br>who could say anything about its origins<br> that doesn't drown the listener <br> in the widening wake of the wind? <br>Most of the world goes on like a secret; <br> and what do we ever know <br> but the little bit of ourselves <br>we overhear amid the clamour, <br> shadows through a keyhole, <br> people breaking like twigs on the pathway behind us? <br>But the secret of one is the spirit of all, <br> the same finger of silence held up to myriad lips, <br> so there's no need to lament <br>we're not in on it<br> when it's the secret itself that leads us to see, <br> a firefly in a valley of mist, <br>that the best place to hide is out in the open<br> with everyone else. How many times, my spirit, <br> washed away in a dark tide <br>that's never known an island, <br> have you come looking for me like a dolphin, <br> and found me<br>and nudged me back into the vine-covered lifeboat of the world? <br> Life is the mother of death <br> who gave up her own<br>in giving birth to it, <br> but you are unborn and unperishing <br> and your deepest joy is playing <br>freely alone in the world you array <br> like the nations of rocks and stars and willows<br> spread across the hills <br>where you bed for the night to dream <br> of the mornings that have yet to come upon you <br> like clarity to an uncertain lover. <br>What shadow of a star, <br> what radiance on the mindstream, <br>could spar with your flamboyance, <br>when you are the fire, you are the breath <br>that crazes my delusions like a poet<br> into this body of burnished gold<br>you have raised like lead <br> from the coffin of a seed long buried <br> in the fertile valleys of the book of the dead? <br>And yet and yet and yet <br> if I were to be her perfect lover, <br> I must not imperil the night <br>with deeper dangers and ordeals <br> than I have the courage to requite<br> when the daylily fails <br>and the light is breached in the wombs of my sails<br> and I wait for you like the premium <br> on all these returnable grails <br>to fill me again with the quest <br> for the coast of a spiritual rumour <br> that thrives and confides in itself like a woman<br>far to the west of the world's disclaimer<br> there are no more continents to risk. <br> You, more than all, my fleetness, my caul, <br>the kite and comet of my fall to paradise<br> when you're the voice in the fire <br> that speaks to me in tongues, <br>or scarfing the air with phantoms<br> from the eye of the sacred lake <br> whose holiest dream is the loneliest bird <br>of a free imagination, you must <br> seep like water at night through her roots <br> as she's closed up in her flower<br>and summon the radiance of your lightning <br> to flash from her tears <br> when she mourns for herself in the night<br>like a lost earring, <br> if I would be her perfect lover. <br> If I would be her perfect lover, <br>you must not rise and abase yourself<br> like the suppliant sun and the sky<br> that touch their foreheads, <br>facing west, <br> to the earth she walks upon, <br> huddled like wildflowers in the dying light; <br>you must do this for me, my spirit, my starfeather, <br> you must weave the subtlest silk of your radiance <br> on the looms of the space that surrounds her<br>like the master spider behind a Persian rug <br> into a vision of life<br> where the beauty of things that must fly <br>doesn't evaporate like a mirage of water <br> in a desert eye, <br> and the lie between the parentheses of the moon <br>has no fangs, <br> and the stars don't burn underfoot, <br> and the all night windows aren't widows of glass, <br>and love isn't the maiden voyage of a flagship<br> that lowers its pennant of blood on the bottom, <br> when the sea smashes its bottle against the scuttled prow. <br>You must befriend her solitude without intrusion, <br> you must be everywhere an open gate, <br> the wings of the crow and the dove <br>that are hinged to the days and nights of her passing, <br> and in everything, in the rock, in the rain, <br> in the small nugget of the bird <br>that beats like a heart in the dark, <br>there must be a whisper of stars, <br> the suggestion of another world <br>breathing in the shadows of the lanterns of this <br> like a door left ajar for the night, <br> where the dark lucidities<br>that hang their weary bells in the lost groves <br> of the shrines she's fled <br> like divinity from its likeness, <br>by morning, <br> are the first words of the light <br> to begin these worlds within worlds anew, <br>if I would be her perfect lover, <br> and drawing myself out like a sword of water <br> from the wound of my oceanic view, <br>succumb like a wave on the shore of the island I belong to, <br> you must be, as you have been to me, <br> the earthly excellence that abides <br>in every starbound breath of what the world can mean<br> when the sails that enter the bay of the rose<br> like the leaves of a distant lover<br> are truer than green.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q> <img src="https://www.citatepedia.ro/g/32share.png" style="float:left" alt="Share"> <script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476932" data-title="The Object Of Our Devotion de Patrick White" data-description="The object of our devotion finally asks from us the very eyes that dazzled us into obedience, and leads us like a wind, the last breath we'll ever take, in the guise of a woman who beckons at the top of the stairwells and thermals where..."></div> </div> </div>

solid border dashed border dotted border double border groove border ridge border inset border outset border no border blue green red purple cyan gold silver black