Monday, July 20, 2009

I HAVE BECOME MY OWN SEASON

I HAVE BECOME MY OWN SEASON

 

I have become my own season

living through these renewable eras of you

that come and go

like the fragrances of passing stars

that sometimes stop by the gate

to talk about the garden blooming late.

Some flowers wait for the moon to open,

to throw their arms around space

as if they could encompass everything

in the brief embrace of their petals,

and their seeing is one eye under multiple eyelids

as they burn like jewels in the night

to keep it all shining and bright.

But I’ve worn out the elbows

of my insatiable longing

on the windowsills of a different insight.

Saddened by the distance, the time, the circumstances,

delinquent desires still hanging out their shingles

like green apples on a dead branch in winter,

withering like the inconsolable eyes of old men

who have died like sons

and now must die like fathers,

mine is the darker radiance

of the faint halo of light

around a black hole

that summons everything

down into it like the sea

sitting below its own salt

at a stranger’s table.

You can’t look into

the black mirrors in my house

with your eyes open

because they only reflect

what’s on the back of your eyelids

where the only light is your own

and you are the road

and the lantern you go by

and everything you feel and think and imagine

is your own true face without skin

not the gate between outside and in.

How could I ever recognize you

in these dark spaces

if it weren’t for the trees

and the stars and the moon

and the nightstream that runs through me

like a lifeline on the palm of my hand

down from the mountains

in a rush of diamonds and gold

that pour out like the pent-up emotions

of a sword that’s just been pulled from a stone?

And how hugely alone the night is

when you love someone as they are

and you realize without effort

that if you hold them a moment in their transience

you hold them like a star in a locket of water

that tastes like the past.

There are people

like treebound barrels of rain

and then there are people like me

who leak out of their lives

like radioactive water

that couldn’t pool the pain

long enough to stop the meltdown

long enough to cool the brain,

long enough to let it kill me.

Now in the darkness

seeded with the dust of black dwarfs

trying to clench a fist of coal into diamonds

my auroras are weeping neon dew

like a cheap enlightenment

all over the watercolours of dawn.

And I’m wondering

what kind of an afterlife is this

that I might have foregone

if I were indifferent

to how my solitude deranges me

like a lost continent

wandering through its own mindscapes

like an extinguished star

that wants to make up

just for one luminous moment

a constellation of its own

that doesn’t wait upon anyone’s eyes

for the themes of its seeing.

And though the skies have changed

like the slides of childhood dreams 

with every blink of an eyelid

whenever night approaches me

and asks to sit by my fire

and let the flames and the smoke

of our past lives 

speak for the both of us

I look up to give my eyes

like two drops of water

back to their oceanic immensities

and it’s always unattainably you

that is shining

like a woman in the window

of a secret house of the zodiac

far off the beaten path

that leads everywhere like a firefly.

And your stars speak to me

as if my flesh were light again

and my heart

that bumps its way through the dark

already a lamp beyond

the Lazarus of wax

that’s buried in his own lucidities

like a candle I left for dead.

 

PATRICK WHITE