IF ALMOST ANY LEAF WILL DO

If almost any leaf will do to prove

the autumn is a flying carpet, then why should you doubt

my heart is a chainsaw buried on the moon with honours

after the last tree was felled, or the sun is the ultimate dumpster

for raving comets in decaying orbits

that want to thaw and cry and unspool the radical rivers

locked in straitjackets and handcuffs of ice, at least once

before they’re extinquished on the windowsills

of voyeuristic telescopes, wear

gardenias in the cold fire of the long hair they rinse in the light

after dyeing their carbon tresses blue? You ask

what ails me, why I won’t publish the silence

I keep revising like the first draft of a broken windowpane,

why I keep trying to root the lightning

in the cloud bed of a quick northern garden

like orchids in a storm, and I have nothing to say but skulls

that fall like apricots and exemplary moons

whose eyes were excavated by the crows

as a warning to anyone who wants to approach your throne like rain.

And it’s not the falling, it’s not the ashes and the mangled weathervanes,

the impact craters, and the trembling omens,

the salted soil and the astringencies of bitter wells

that taste of ancient snakes

that have installed me like a wary camera

in the bedlam of this mood, it’s not the people who arrive,

wave after wave like oilspills and messages in a bottle

written in blood that shrieks when you let them out

like birds from a furnace, it’s not

the endless misspelt preludes to suicide

that keep coming up like dawn

over the sleepless cities in the all-night restaurants

or the blank cheques of the children cancelled

by the dirty needles of the toe-tagged bloodbank,

those are shales of sorrow that have long lain heavy

on the fossil of my heart like crushed bells, those

are the startled eyes of roadkill

along the highways of the spring

when the perennial ambulance blooms like a white lily,

the suffering almost seasonal; but it’s not that,

I can handle that, they’re old sirens fused to harbour rocks

like foghorns that lost their voices years ago

and though I concede I’ll never be enough of a lifeboat

to rescue all the sharks from the people in the water,

and do what I can with what’s left of my buoyancy,

my devastation rarely turns dysfunctional,

and I can handle that for the sake of those who might need me;

but when you ask a poet what’s wrong like a yellow journalist

or the Red Cross in Auschwitz,

or the bleached nurse that books the car accidents into emergency,

the blossom disables the fruit, and what can anyone say

as the gray ashes of the crematoria fumaroles

appall the human orchards with baby-faced insecticides?

PATRICK WHITE