IF YOU CAN APPRECIATE THE GIFT

If you can appreciate the gift,

solitude is a way

of giving yourself

back to yourself, the gift

returning to the giver

like salmon

swimming upstream

against the flow of the current

of the rivers

that have written your life freely

on the palm of your hands

until even the map, the destiny,

the finest thread of a lifeline,

all the provisions

hope has ever air-lifted

and dropped like dandelion seeds over the lost,

are merely the atlas

to a grain of dust

compared to the open road

of your solitude

that widens like a wake behind you.

Eternity at peace with time for awhile

like a sea with its wave,

and the gathering intimacy

of the voices and whispers and shadows

long nights at the window suggest,

trying to rewrite the constellations

on a glass star chart

that refuses to hold fast

to the shrinking nebula of your breath.

Pain unbinds

the knotted ribbon in her hair

as if it were your bloodstream,

and if your heart is caught between

the pincers of the moon

turned spider, lobster, assassin,

if her first and last crescents

have pierced your heart

like the fangs

of a flaring, albino cobra,

and the space

that cradles you

like a rejected gift

is growing stiff and sharp and cold,

there are wells full of antidote

in your solitude,

sirens and grails and serums

waiting for you to drink

the healing darkness down

so that you can know for certain

this wolf moon, famine moon in February

is also the light that fills the goblet

when she holds you up to her lips.

Solitude is a bridge

that you’re alone on either side of,

like your eyes

when they see clearly

what it is you’re writing

in the journal of your breath on the windowpane.

The universe once exploded into being

like a terrorist

and in every moment there are bombs

that are waiting to go off

like the detonating frequency

of another cosmos,

but no one knows what the cause is

as the atoms and the gods contend for the credit

and no one should be surprised

if all the windows are broken

and space unfolds us,

the black rose of our hearts,

emergency after emergency

like a stretcher at a catastrophe,

if our hearts break

like the sacrificial glass

of a voiceless fire-alarm,

no one should be surprised,

no one should wonder

that they amble from window to window,

attending to little things,

broken and alone,

trying to spoon-feed

the dead that lie under their scars.

In my solitude

my heart is in my mind

like a love-letter

in a cynical envelope

and I am neither mystically elated

nor bitter

that life doesn’t have

a return address,

nor time make anything better.

In this solitude

I neither am

nor am not,

and I sit or walk with myself

until both of us disappear

like the shadows of birds over the water

into an abyss of pure awareness

where the whole of the universe

and everything it encompasses

is simply the flaring

of the merest flame

before my next breath

blows it out

to see better in the dark.

PATRICK WHITE