Sonnets to Eurydice

Excerpts From

Making the great refusal

Michèle White

That was the seventies...

First stirrings

Someone is swinging on my childhood

Swing I can feel the ropes

As it pushes forwards and glides back

I remember

Re-member

Remember sitting on the swing

With the offender

Remember the first blow

Of awakening

Feeling the rising and ebbing

The scar of this blow a star

On the brow of childhood

Innocence

To Nicholas, Fairmount

To Winter

Barren trees                          solemnity

            with black                  solitude

                        branches        saddened

                                    like      sleepiness

                                                falcons

                                                talons

                                                clutch

                                                at the be

                                                wildering

                                                night

                                                as it

                                                descends

                                                over

                                                the twi

                                                light

                                                dulled

                                                snow

1971

Left

Yesterday       I lost

Love

It’s such a

Big

Thing

It should be

Difficult

To mis

Place

They give it

A name

But you can’t

Hold it

Wind like

But not

Even

As constant

1971

Gone

Shall we ever speak
Of what came
Before
Of what came
After?

Should we pass
Words if we
Meet
When we are future
Strangers?

Long after
Your alien
Figure
Has flown

1972

My heart cried out for you
A hundred thousand lonely moments
Slowly    passing    by
I                wonder   why

We linger through December
Hope for strength to make it through
For a new year is coming
When our love could be renewed

Our love didn’t have the flame of passion
Nor the depth of some blue seas
It had all that could have
It was you and it was me

And I loved you in the springtime
You were my summer bed
I was lonely in the autumn
But your face was in my head

Now the winter is upon us
We are on different shores
With a sea of past experience
Which we shall cross no more

1972

Shards after Sappho Fragments

Whose love never smoldered never will  

Who never loved love never loved

If there is no wonder the living is a death

Give me a face that I can wear when
This one’s scratched away by
The hair of the man
Who comes
To me at
Night

Let me see it, be it
Tie it up and down and
All around
Like Botticelli’s Venus
Waiting to be born 

Got you down
Into my finger
Tips
Aching
To let you
Out

There’s a hole in
A heart waiting
To be
Filled
In

Heaving
Heart unable
To remove the hardening
Anchor
No one two
Hoist the sail

Fingers can’t
Reach it
Stretch all
You want
It won’t be there when
You are
Won’t be the same
As when first
Found
Gone when
Needed most 

Jumped out of
Your own skin
Bleeding from little
Cuts
No apparent wounds
Can we sleep
Without clutching
At the tears?
The night is a
Stream of spirits

These three were all loving these three were all loving in different ways and they were all arriving at the same end and that was that loving was not what had been expected that loving was not what had been learned that love was not but that love was to be desired

Black stranger
The witch with a face
Like a dog riding the night
Burning the candles
Incensed
Incanting 

You tell me where
I ought to be
And just tell me
Where you are
But I am nowhere
Near you
Forever or for now

1972

She is my sky

I went down to the sea

The stars came out to look at me

I felt light in the heart

Waves of illumination disseminating

From the body centre

Joining the waves of the night

Light and dark, met and hooked

Flooded with this electric

I melted into the sea

Drowning in that instant

I saw a pale face

Filling the misting voids

Of watery space

I knew immortality

And she clothed herself

In your white robes

Your light shining brilliantly

In her streams of floeing hair

The joy that my heart wore

1972

After the exhibition

Suspended in a scream I lie

Supreme artificer

Heaving back a sob for every

Thing created out of me

What they take when they leave

And what they leave behind

Memory of the memory

Of artification

Eyes wet now with regret now

Lying alone

All creation

Taken

Each

One

A monument

Made for you

1974

Flood, a colleen

Bittersweet toady princess girl

Sand rippling from skull to shoulders

Thin whiteness running through your veins

Blanched almond

Shivery and shimmery

Sparkles balanced between eyelids

And puffy pouches, pulled taut

In expressions of amazement

Carefully concerned and wrinkled brows

Contemplating complexities

Imagining fears and paranoias

In which to horde the love

1974

When and Where

Where to?

When reaching no belief

And nature is a burning

Rock and tears

Bare no relief

When memory?

Beats a stiff retreat

And the store of fascinations

Recitations

Is deplete

Where to?

When hungry

And no one home

To eat

And so tired

Of devouring

The street

1975

Finding Frida

In the late

Of the night

Like a long black shell

Razor-sharp

Stretched out across

Metal not gleaming

But dark

Against dark

There was

Motion in the grass

In the leaving

Hunched and crossed

Among the grasses

Poised and waiting

Dark cat Kahlo

Revealed

Real for the first time

1975

Song of self

I am all motion in stillness

Order and calm containing

Mutability

Decomposing with the leaving

Ripping

Layers of tissue

Bones revealed

Vein universes

I am day-fingered

Sun touched

As a spring thing

Half-furled, curled again

At the dying light

Warmed cold

In ice water embrace

Rocks under

Slippery feet and wet

I am the reflection

Of light from water

Onto firry insides

Of sun-stretched

Evergreen

I am in the parallel

Lines

Running to the shore

In the roots twining

From head down

In the cold

To grow up from

1975

Hard and

Soft wetness
Undried, unbaked
Pliable and fresh

Your finger
Prints all over
And then
Your foot
Print all over
Me

The concrete of my face
Now
Immovable

1975

Fair Flower

Fair flower Firenze

Deep into my heart I reach to touch

The chord that sends melodic memory

Back to a thirsting hand

Sun ticklin from undercover

Waiting to rise

To cover me again

Sun-drenched: blanketed

In one long even kiss

Eyes out through centuries arches

Florentines pressed together

Gazing upon blossom clusterfaces

Of fresco painted sky

Iris sword, lily flower

I chain my cup to

The sweets of the morning

From your lips

The splendor:

To be lost

Here

Forever

Full-faced

Botticelli wonder

1975

dovesky

Bright
Round
Luminous
White light disc
Filtering out into a pearl grey dovesky
Nurture the dead hand
To fill
The empty
Pages
To curl around
That pulsating power