THERE MUST BE SOME STAR SOMEWHERE

There must be some star somewhere

that can give me an insight

into what I’m doing here

on a habitable planet

it’s getting harder and harder

to live on anymore.

God is dead.

Long live the landlord.

Just finished the underpainting in burnt sienna

of an autumn scene I’ll work on in the morning.

My ornamental goldfish Toke

swims above the blue stones

at the bottom of his aquarium

in underwater moonlight

sometimes like a comet

sometimes like an orchid.

sometimes like the Bolshoi Ballet.

Pain.

But I don’t know why.

Fear.

But I don’t know of what.

My palms are covered in paint

and I feel as if I’ve got

the blood of Swan Lake on my hands.

I study my star globe

and wonder how many eyes it took

to work its iconic constellations out of chaos.

The ecliptic will intersect

the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure

in a little less than three weeks.

And I’ll be sixty-three in less than two.

I imagine the stars hooked up

like neurons in my brain.

Networking.

Dream catchers

and medicine wheels

talking to spider webs

in a vast nervous system of light

that keeps breaking into intelligence.

And I imagine more than a few of the arteries

that supply my mind with oxygen

have had their apertures narrowed enough

there must be black dwarfs

and the gravitational eyes of black holes

all through my brain by now

bending light and space

like apparitions of what they used to be.

Time turns the telescope around

and looks at the astronomer

as if he were further away than ever.

And if you were to examine

most of my wavelengths

through a spectrograph

they’d still be an emission spectrum

but shifted toward the red.

The T Tauri stars in the Hesperides

are aging like a windfall of overripe apples.

I’m in the autumn of my life.

The sumac is burning like a phoenix.

If I didn’t need to make a living

trying to catch the light

of a moment in passing

I’d finish my painting in the morning

and true to life

throw it on the fire

like an immolation

that might lead to an Arab spring.

As it is I have to sell

the way I feel about what I see

just to pay the rent.

But if I were rich enough to have my way

I’d let the wind take them like apple bloom

or Japanese plum blossoms

or the leaves of the maple tree

with a palette of strychnine and arsenic

to complement the photosynthetic greens

or if they were moon scenes

the petals of white peonies

and scatter them across the lawns

upon the stairs

and along the gutters of the streets

just to say I grasped what beauty is

and let it go.

PATRICK WHITE