<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476956" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Women I Have Loved</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">The women I have loved, <br> the taste of old fires in my mouth, <br> wild orchids <br>that summoned me <br> with their fragrance in the night<br> to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony, <br>betrayal and loss, <br> intensities hotter than stars <br> that could thaw space like glass<br>in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Seizures of flesh, potions of pain, <br> delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks, <br>the sweet doom of paradise <br> in the effulgent bells of their hips <br> and their skin always <br>a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille <br> only the eyes in my fingertips could read.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Each was a way of breathing<br>in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon, <br> an atmosphere that clung to me <br> like the smell of an autumn night in their hair, <br>an era of seeing <br> that rooted like lightning <br> in the starmud of my poems.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Some were the windows of a palatial awareness<br> that astonished my heart like a peasant<br> and others, the rocks that crashed through it.<br>I tuned all my mirrors <br> to the high notes <br> of the most beautiful stars <br>in each of their constellations; <br> and the ones I loved best <br> were the windows <br>that could see both sides of God <br> and you could taste it in their eyes. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> No doubt I was ruinous <br>in ways that it's taken years<br> of deep solitude and suffering <br> to clarify, the ore <br>wasn't always worth the metal within, <br> the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations, <br> the urge to express, release, affirm, excel, <br>the way I parted women I loved like seas <br> in my quest for the promised land <br> and the way they closed up on me like pharoah, <br>like a flower that doesn't want to look at the night <br> and lowers its lonely eye, <br> like coffin lids <br>that were once the petals of a mystic rose. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Who knows who was buried <br> on those sexual slopes <br>that overlooked the motif of the river <br> wandering easily <br> through the vistas of the valley, <br>or how the story truly ended<br> that went on writing itself <br> as it does today <br>long after we were villages, <br> tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved, <br> and wholly usurped <br>like utensils by the afterlife <br> of the erupting mountain <br> that put an end <br>to the interminable funeral orations <br> that unrolled us like thunder in hell.<br> <br> We slashed heaven <br>with the bloody razor of the moon<br> like the vicious legates of a papal threat <br> to spiritually salt the holy ground <br>we were rooted in<br> like lava, blood, and lightning.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> I am still a confusion <br>of wounded dreams, <br> and when I look at the moon, <br> the bruises, the dead seas, <br>I am devastated again and again <br> by a ghostly sorrow<br> that returns to my heart <br>like a dove to a dark bell<br> that once knew the morning with another.<br> <br> The truth is slurred by time, <br>and the confessions we made to the sky, <br> gusts of shame and contrition, <br> tiny burnt-out match-heads<br>that once flared into big fires, <br> slagging their depletion <br> like ore in the rain, <br>were abysmally true to the moment, <br> as we felt the ground beneath our feet <br> sinking like a continent. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">We may have drowned like Atlantis <br> but how many decades since <br> have we lain here <br>like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks <br> offering the hilts of our masts <br> sheathed in coral<br>and the bunting of weeds <br> to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender? </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> All the beauty of that seeing, <br>the laughter in bed, <br> the aloof eternity in the form of the woman <br> at the end of the garden, <br>seen through the kitchen window forever <br> as if I had never made love to her, <br> pulling weeds from among the asters, <br>forever true, forever <br> preternaturally true, <br> the mystery that transfixes <br>and devours me yet.<br> <br> I have not laid my dream down <br> like the head of a child <br>on the pillow of a stony heart.<br> I have not looked upon the stars <br> that shone over us those long walks into each other <br>as if we were two banks of the same river <br> and we were still a wonder <br> and a temptation to each other, <br>two wings of the same gate <br> hopelessly opening.<br> <br> I am still summoned against my will <br>to those dread nights we went out in each other <br> like down-turned torches, <br> and the bouquets of the daylilies, <br>those truces of fire and water <br> we burned beside, <br> turned into congested refugee camps<br>that plunged into civil war with their own reflections. </div><div style="margin:10px 0"> All along this road <br> where I carry my life <br>like the shoes in my hand <br> there is broken glass, <br> shattered goblets of the moon <br>we once drank from together, <br> shards of the suicidal chandeliers <br> we once danced under <br>like the tails of the unnamed comets <br> that followed us like paparazzi <br> as if we were the prophecy. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Vampires once cloaked like assassins <br> in the darkness of the light, <br> they still come for blood, <br>pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms, <br> and I am often aghast at my own compassion, <br> feeling the quick tendrils <br>of their tongues flickering in my heart<br> that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.<br> <br> Perhaps there is more spontaneity <br>in the darkness <br> than there is in the light, <br> but I have not let my mouth <br>turn into an open wound, <br> or wielded the cold flame of my tongue <br> like a dagger of fire that could only be put out<br>in the blood of another.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> Leeches and lilies <br> are born in the same pond <br>and I have not denounced one <br> at the expense of the other, <br> but have stood before both in silent awe, <br>trying to overhear any whisper <br> of what these things might mean<br> that they should still sweeten and startle <br>my deepening ignorance<br> like the shadows and stars<br> that leap out of their own darkness and light <br>to ambush and detain us with love and life<br> all along these lonely, vivid roads <br> that walk us like the wind <br>that moves me now to remember<br> the generosity of loss that is love, <br> and the flaring of the dust that we once were, <br>this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust<br> that will forever be<br> like the wind, like love, <br>like fire and life, like the nights <br> that bent down over me while I slept <br> and kissed me good-bye, <br>the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.</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=476956" data-title="The Women I Have Loved de Patrick White" data-description="The women I have loved, the taste of old fires in my mouth, wild orchids that summoned me with their fragrance in the night to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony, betrayal and loss, intensities hotter than stars that could thaw spa..."></div> </div> </div>

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