THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

THE MOON A BLADE OF STILLNESS

The moon a blade of stillness honed on the heart

of a cold, dark night

without lunacy, love, or forgiveness.

Indian tobacco and milkweed pods

like the fossils of shucked clam shells

in the middens of the Neanderthals

or the twisted wombs of fortune cookies

that were long ago cracked open

to spill their good fortune on the wind.

The morning dove of the loveletter flown

they’re left with nothing but the envelope.

The wind gathers and swirls gusts of snow

across the ice-glazed fields

as if someone were about to rail coke on a mirror

like the Milky Way

and blew it big time into a gust of stars.

Venus and the moon,

perfume on a wrist

with a wound and a scar.

The cold air slashes my nostrils.

Only mad dogs and Englishmen

go out in the midday sun.

This is the light-deprived Canadian version

of the same thing

at midnight when everything

is frozen in space and time

like the numb desolation

on the face of a lost Arctic exploration

as if we were all wearing the same death mask

because whether you’re a nationalist,

a naturalist, or just winging it on your own,

when it’s this cold and birds

are dropping from the sky

like words and notes from the lyrics

somebody forgot to mime,

one size fits all.

Lethal the burning clarity of the cold

when it rimes your mouth

with your own breath

with the salt of the earth

and the lime of the moon

as if it were just one big celestial grave pit,

the cold stone of the crone

that buries people in her heart

like a locket she can’t open from the inside.

Life in these brutal windswept fields

desolate as a used calender

or a losing ticket in the lottery

of predictable apocalypses

that didn’t even remotely come true

like Mayans in igloos at the top of the temple stairs

one for each day of the year

that went on living without them.

Or the astronomical catastrophe

of nuclear winter in Puerta Vallarta,

according to a pyramidal sun dial

that got it wrong

from the late Triassic and beyond.

Fire and ice pulled like a blade

that wouldn’t be bound to a heart of stone.

Light pours out like gold and honey

from the dark ore of a new moon

opening its eyelids for the first time

since it went into a coma

like a temporary eclipse of its sanity.

Everybody obsessed with death in the end-times,

forgetting from the universe’s point of view,

there’s thirteen ways of looking a blackbird

and fourteen in reverse

and they’re all as true

as whole numbers on a clock

doing a sword dance with time.

Life lines unravel like the frayed ends

at the delta of a river about to enter the sea.

But what could be so terminal

about returning to the source

of where everything begins

like the universe with a Big Bang

that has continued

like an executioner’s drum roll

ever since the moon rose up

like a two-bladed ax in the east

and learned to cut both ways

by the time it fell in the west

on the white napes of the birch-groves

swanning with their arms outstretched

like a constellation who’s time has come

to kiss the crucifix like a vow of silence

and have done with trying to maintain the peace

like a truce with the truth of severance

as if it were their last best hope for deliverance.

And if not deliverance, then at the very least,

to let their branches pile up at their feet

and let the infallible stars set fire to them

like self-immolating heretics

or Joan of Arc in the inferno

of her martyrdom

among treacherous friends

and Burgundian enemies alike

as history neglects to write

into the hagiography of trees

the black stake she was burnt at

and suffered as much as she

for things it never meant to stand for

like the backbone of a saint

when her heart and her legs

gave out under her

like the rungs of a burning ladder

propped against the windowsills of heaven,

her feet grounded in the snake pit

that bound her to the earth.

But enough said, or too much,

or too little, or nothing at all.

Jupiter returns retrograde to Pisces

at its stationary point in the west

for thirty-five nights

and then returns to the Ram

to disappear behind the sun in Taurus.

Castor and Pollux in the Twins

and Capella and Nath and the kids

in Auriga the Charioteer.

Orion holding its club up like the glyph

of the mythically inflated victory truce

of Ramses the II’s battle with the Hittites

at Kardesh, his figure

ten times more imposing than the rest

as he puts his foot on the chest of his enemies

and hopes like stars, snow,

blood and flesh, fire and ice,

his few sparks of life will last.

I’ve always seen it that way somehow.

What hunter would go out with a club

to beat a wild animal to death

unless his prey were human

with a skull that was easy to hit?

Ergo. Kardesh. Forensic mythology

on the few bones

of the original fireflies that are left to us

like the prehistoric vertebrae

of great whales that died in a bay of the desert,

or the skeletons of humming birds

as delicate as the stalks of wild oats

encrypted into the snow

like a hieroglyph for help

frozen into a bottle of ice

that took thousands of light years to get here

only to discover

that we’re as helpless as they are.

That imagination and wonder

are the mind’s way of making sure

in the desolate immensities

of these starfields overhead

and this glacial acre

of hard ground beneath our feet

impervious to the coffins

and roots of our solitude,

we’re not estranged

by what we’re looking at.

That the emptiness of the mystery

is the source of all our metaphors.

The dark mother. The muse.

Our last recourse.

Our only hope of rescue from ourselves.

Interactive similitudes in a void with no likeness.

PATRICK WHITE