THE PALE MONTHS

THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green

in the gripe of small, bitter apples

and the white blossoms

have got their laundry done like nursing caps

and the bonds of friendship with the young

have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,

as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens

with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays

and the busy wavelengths

of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons

that might lark their threnodies with real wings

and flammable paper if the little mummies

ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep

their tears fall like the cold lenses

of leftover concentration camps

they may or may not have read about,

and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,

the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers

run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar

thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,

and the silence that lies in state

like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime

is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine

how many stars and planets and lives it takes

to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,

how much light must give itself up to the night

to get one drop of translucent honey

flowing through the narrow veins

of their slim contingencies

and into the green flutes of their bones

like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not

the red wizards of autumn yet

forging swords out of the ores and eras

of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.

They’re too busy looking for their place

and white surplice

in a travelling choir with portable pews

and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young

and imagine because they say the word good a lot,

they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems

as they will, it’s natural, it’s right

and there’s even a beauty

in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms

of ancient hydrogen

that looks like the birth of stars,

the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,

or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,

white dwarfs and cepheid variables,

young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light

to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets

are correctly interfaced

to download easy solar systems from the night.

They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,

flamingo fan tails and neon tetras

in a cannibal aquarium

of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,

they’re an army of baby turtles

holding on to their helmets

as they run for the beaches of Normandy,

strafed by the Stuka seagulls,

black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,

black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.

It’s a hell of a way to begin

the rites of spring,

but the best steel goes through the fire

and there’s a chastening beyond virginity

that’s got nothing to do with victory

or the peevish tempers of first violins.

And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,

and the roadkill along the highways of life

unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars

and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park

staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,

all the lamentable carbons of human existence

down to the last embers of their spent hearts,

the spare change of cogs and bobbins

taken apart like watches, and I see

another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence

of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke

in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,

sybarites of wood aged and polished

by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands

that steadied their ascents and fallings

through years of snakes and ladders

on the chromosomes and rungs

of these who’ve bleached their peptides

in the caustic salts of the sea. Born

a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,

the second-hand bins of the stranded performers

and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,

a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,

I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within

the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,

tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,

and a I see a darker kind of flowering

and the mysterious purple fruits

of a second innocence sweeter than the first

long after the apples are out of their diapers

and their blossoms are fouled by rust,

swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae

like bells, and moons, and chandeliers

clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,

and windfalls of seasoned planets

waiting to be pushed through the doors

of the hungry dead

in a jubilee year of pious offerings.

See yourself reflected in the face of an old man

if you truly want to understand what grace is,

or the well-used wood of a faithful chair

with a view of forever

beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice

to make something of yourself in the light and the rain

that can embrace the whole of the night,

can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,

a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what

courage is, not the charades of the young

besieging the sweetmeats

of moonlight in a nut,

raising their arrogant hammers

like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,

mistaking their juvenile bias

for the robes of an older law

that presides without judgment

over everything that lives, not the breezy sail

of a quick voyage into the depths,

a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,

but staring into the eyes of the Medusa

in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,

and greeting every grinning serpent

with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE