AVIOMANCY

AVIOMANCY

And the grace of the returning Canada geese in the night,

the sentinel response of their approach

in the high volumes of the moon-soaked night,

the plaintive creaking of an ancient hinge

at the slow turning of the urgent planet in my hand

undoing the door and the threshold

of another spring night on earth, the ghost of the willow,

a resurgent fountain among the black geometry

of the tumultuous roofs of Perth,

and the luminous fleets and crucifixion kites

of the emergency eyes of the window-glow in the darkness,

almost museums from the outside, an archives

of compendious fates from which the curtains seldom part or rise.

And the glorious, more concentrated stars of winter

now the ragged standards of a remnant army

in organized retreat, as the rustic proclivities

of the shepherd moons of Jupiter approach zenith, my blood

scored by the silver ploughs of sudden valleys

monitored by the demonic laughter of barbaric echoes,

I cherish the exotic pathos of my urbane exclusions of joy,

neither young in the shining prospect of the greening mirror,

nor old in the bellweather of the ascendant. No longer summoned

to the seditious beauty of conspiratorial orchards

that whispered to me like women complicit with the wind,

no longer driven to madness by the veils of promissory assassins,

my heart is yet a habit of freedom, the unmantled ashes

of a vagrant phoenix in the urns of inflammable sanities.

And though the dead pass me around

like the souvenir and rumour of a single heartbeat,

the curiosity and relic of a maverick wave of life

that once broke like the shadow of a man

on the immaculate shores and igneous chastity

of the imperturbable moon, I am not haunted

by the lascivious curiosity of their cold fingers

nor swayed from my abject apostasy by the suave prophets

of a spurious exhumation. What is dead within me,

the burnt offerings of pagan autumns deposed by a change of stars

does not entreat an untimely season to rise

but confides in me the courage

to risk it all again, all the faces and the hearts

and the exquisite transformations that sometimes

saw me born without eyes, and the dangerous sorrows

that turned into the sullen dragons of a slow agony

sowing terrible visions in the wake of their pain,

and the pornographic solitude of godless atoms,

and the chronic doubt that could only be countered

by doubting the doubt that obsessed me:

I was irrelevant, purposeless, vain, alone;

do what I will to divert the course of the river, achieve, attain

anything, long eloquently for the best, drunk

on the moon’s reflection, or curse the stone that bore me,

I lived to be worthy of a salvation that didn’t exist.

I founded a religion on the utterance of a clown,

and of all that followed me I alone was damned,

the ferocious heretic of my fanatic interdictions, confounded by the grave

without a firefly, while everything else

rose from the toils of death like a heathen rose.

And nothing has changed but the acceptance of myself

as the nothing by acclamation

on the other side of assent and denial. I sat

like an amputee on a throne in the middle of a crossroads

that led nowhere, that offered no departures or escapes,

tighter than a straitjacket, an armless compass and clock

alarmed by the approach of forever and the improbability

of waking up from the dream with anywhere to go.

In my own eyes, I was the sad visitation

of a black comet in shallow summer skies

that portended no good, without a will for malice,

to anyone befuddled by shadows down below.

My radiance, uranium, I burned to be someone else

on more intimate terms with oblivion, someone

on a lower rung of the ladder of emanations, below the salt

at the elemental table, less catastrophically alive.

In my search to turn gold back into lead,

I had gone too far and the oceans that confronted me

were shoreless virgins that had never known the wind,

waveless expanses of immaculate silence

that sang deeper than sirens on the only bloodrock

in an infinite sea colder than any conceivable tomorrow

that might be born of the view. Unbelievable

even to me, the eras of alienation that fixed me there,

the depths of my immersion in the void, the terrible harmony

of my lifeless actions as I planted a standard

in the name of nothing known to me

but the fame of a useless conceit. My utter defeat.

And now this afterlife of returning geese in another spring

that divine their way from star to star

only to disappear like a passing enthusiasm

into the unanswerable recesses of a damaged heart

that doesn’t run to the window to look up. And it’s late,

already a delinquent solitude beyond hope, and there’s release and fear

in the serenity of waiting among the unborn dawns of a world

that never happened to anyone but me

as forbidden mystics look for their eyes in the ashes. There’s peace

and an astounding abundance in the empty hand

that grasps at nothing, and a wisdom that can’t be learned

in the vision of a madman who knows he can’t return

to any aspiration of the prodigal year

that absurdly flags him down to ask for directions.

PATRICK WHITE