THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

THE SILENCE HAS GROWN SO MAGNANIMOUS IN THE NIGHT

The silence has grown so magnanimous in the night

it encompasses all of space and time

in a palace of dark matter

with light beaming through

the cracks of the planets

that have been stacked into walls

like the skulls the Mongols heaped up

like the foundation stones of Samarkand,

Olmecs in Teotihuacan,

or on a gentler note, Golgotha.

Upon one skull you can build a church.

And an Orphic skull might look like

a dead moon to ordinary eyes

but when your inner vision waxes to full

you realize when it drops its jaw

as if it were gaping at something transfixing

to prophesy what comes next

as you asked it to

life is swarming all over it

like black ants over the globular clusters

of the white peonies abandoned by a farmhouse garden.

Two twenty a.m. and I’m sitting

on the tie of a high train trestle

trying not to get slivers in my ass

and black creosote all over

my last clean pair of jeans.

I’m dangling my feet in the abyss below me

like a kid gone fishing in a Norman Rockwell painting

and positioning my arms like the legs of a French easle

so I can tilt my head back like a telescope

on an alta-azimuth mount

and look at the explosive array of stars before me

without falling off my vertiginous perch

because my gerry-mandered tripod

couldn’t keep its bearings straight.

It’s a mistake to count on a crutch for a rung

on this endless extension ladder

on the back of a fire-engine

because it couldn’t reach

the windowsills of the stars

missing a dimension or two

to reach the woman in the moon

with her hands up against the glass

screaming for someone to come to her rescue

as the windows melt faster than they can weep.

Stars are to me

what cocaine is to a mirror

in a reflecting telescope with clock-drive.

I get a rush every time I rail them through my eyes,

shoot them under my tongue

or o.d. on them sitting on a train track

thinking how weird and surrealistic

my addiction to them has made me over the years

that I only stopped to piss by the side of the road

and risking bears

made my way through the leafless trees

to end up out here in the clear where I could see better

how much higher yet there was to aspire to

and how much further to fall.

Bellatrix, Rigel, Saiph, Betelgeuse,

Alnilam, Alnitak and Mintaka.

Orion at the end of deer-hunting season

extending its license to kill by a week

north of highway 7

as it crosses zenith.

I’m not playing Russian roulette with a train trestle

but I doubt I could dodge the bullet

were one to come my way

even though it wouldn’t make any sense

given that we still need each other for support

each in our own special way.

As it is I’m sitting in the middle of the Road of Ghosts

as the natives called the Milky Way

mesmerized by the doe-glare of the oncoming stars

that pass right through me

as if a head-on collision were a redundancy

their deer-whistles couldn’t avoid.

Three thousand five hundred western miles that way home.

Twenty-five miles outside of Perth near Bolingbroke

I wonder what my mother’s doing now

three hours behind me

in a time-zone with more of a future than mine

and if she ever

when she thinks of me

conceives of a bird on a wire

perilously suspended in space

like the last whole note

to drop out of a song

that’s getting ready to leave for the winter.

I raise myself up on my hands

and my legs straight out into space

on a balance beam at the Olympics

I swing like a loveseat on a country porch

to see if the daredevil boy in me

is still fit to wear my balls like the man

it’s sometimes laughable to think that I am.

I used to do the same for her

when I climbed to the topmost branches

of the abandoned orchards of the Saanich Peninsula

to throw the choicest apples down

she used to catch in her kerchief one by one.

Looking down as I waited

for her to catch the next one

I’d watch her gently arrange them like skulls

at the foot of a siege ladder

with her son on the highest rung of all

not listening to her warnings,

disappearing over the holy walls of Jerusalem

like a crusader that had taken it a step too far

and realized there was as far to fall

on the other side of the infidels

as there was on the side that God was on.

Now I keep my heroism to myself

like something I’m slightly ashamed of

like a movie star with a stand-in stunt man.

I take chances.

Great subjective risks

with dire physical consequences

to keep spiritual things material

by refusing to abstract my senses.

This isn’t a train trestle in Bolingbroke.

It’s the bridge of Chinvat

that Zoroaster said everyone

among the holy and the damned

would have to cross

raised up from the dead on the Day of Judgement

to see hell before it was decided

whether you were a son of the lie

or the son of a truth that got double-crossed.

But given my indifference to both

as if they were just spontaneous happenings

in a charged particle field reversing spin

as high as wide as far as deep as I can see

in all directions at once

out here alone by myself,

the exception that got left behind,

all I’m aware of are the stars

and the tops of the cedar trees

tiered like rustic pagodas

trying to fly when the wind

gets under their wings

like shaggy boughs

that never make it off the ground.

Nothing but stars.

Nothing but open sky and moonset.

Nothing but space and time and Jupiter

and the Hesperides in their apple orchards

wondering what Alcyone in the Pleiades

thinks she’s got over them

that’s worth so much more of my attention

I can almost forget where I am and let go

if I weren’t as unattainable to her

as she is to me.

Look at me Mum

no hands

at the top of a tree forty feet below me

like a pine cone

with all its eyelids open

that doesn’t care where it lands

among all these meteors

shaken out of the radiant of the Leonids

like the Cannonball Express

given how many light years it’s been

since you were last there to catch it

like a falling star

and put it in your pocket

and never let it fade away

though we both know

it’s a little too late

a train too far

and a night too deep for that.

PATRICK WHITE