Wednesday, January 18, 2012

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND


SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

Suddenly the nightwind comes
and scatters me like dust, leaves, stars, birds,
flakes of blood and paint from a dried rose
and I am nowhere again among the extracted windows
compiled like used theories in the mind-dump,
cataracts, fog, ice between their thermal panes
an obsolete encyclopedia of seeing, image, view,
skating rinks and skies that shattered like eggs
from which nothing ever flew.
Believe me when I tell you
there is not a flame or a shadow
as lost as I am when I fall like moonlit rain
from this endless pilgrimage of clouds
into the wells and watersheds, the dark godheads
and cracked mud of ancient creekbeds
once urgent with my flowing. And I am a fanatic
of unknowing when the darkness
overtakes me on the wing, an apostle
of undelivered monologues
humming like a powerline
in the ears of inattentive telephones,
the dirty needle of a compass
that has shared one too many directions
with the addicts of the north. In the freefall
of this vast space that confounds my eyes
with numberless illuminations, gravity
is just another superstition, light
a bride that leaves me standing at the altar,
baffled by absence, time, and futile distances.
Even the atoms of my body
are the liberated doves of a scuttled ark
that waits in vain for signs of land
when the waters roll me like a drunken sailor
far from any port of call
that ever pressed me into service.
I grieve like a passport
for vanished borders, circumferences
subsumed in parsimonious points
once radiant with lighthouses,
and all the clandestine crossings of my youth,
the zeniths, nadirs, transits,
all the date lines and ecliptics,
the equinoctial colures
that adorned my green meridians,
my perilous explorations,
with nautical clocks
and astrolabes that shone like jewellery.
Now I drift, an empty lifeboat
through unknown waters, the toy
of any wind and current
that wants to play me like a map
or a spiritual castaway
that grew old on the way to the rescue.
Even the language that I use, the tongues
I once mastered to implore the world to stay,
the tines of disaffected lightning
that taught me how to pray,
are the fossils of white serpents, harps
and combs of bone between the shale
of books that sank like continents,
the cacophonous keyboards of burnt pianos,
the scales and frets
of Pre-Cambrian guitars
that never learned to lie
by listening to themselves
like birds in rootless trees.
And if now I write with the unmanned rocket
of a pen that’s left the solar system,
sending back these junkmail messages
these chainletters without return addresses
in my search for intelligent life
to thresholds that don’t exist
except as the lost and founds
of imaginary households,
it’s only my way of whistling in the dark,
of trying to make contact with myself,
of riding to shore like a boy on a dolphin
or the crest of a homing wavelength
from the ghost of a failing beacon.
And though the solitude is overwhelming,
the oceanic closure of the dark
a rock on the tomb of embryonic ages
that will rise to their feet again
and learn to walk from heart to heart,
star to star
in a revery of origins
that seeds the journey back,
certain of their courage in the open,
do not mistake the obvious fools
for the hidden harmony
that guides them with an empty hand; there is
no plea or warning in my voice,
no call for help or a place to stand
that isn’t already the ruined capital of the going,
and it’s been that way for years.

PATRICK WHITE

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