DOWN BY THE RIVER AGAIN

DOWN BY THE RIVER AGAIN

Down by the river again

listening for stars to interrupt my solitude

like the first little nicks of rain to strike a windowpane,

I realize how much I prefer a magnanimous liar

to the tale of a man with a stingy truth

so much so I’m generous in my sorrow

with all things that suffer as I do

however dangerous and estranged

tomorrow might causally seem.

The latest casualty of a dream I had,

I sit down on a prophetic skull of an Olmec rock

surrounded by broken beer bottles,

that remind me of withered waterlilies in the fall

and the cracked shells of cosmic eggs

that took the plunge into the abyss

to test fly the flightfeathers of a new universe

like a baby sparrow on the edge of a nest in the abyss.

My mindstream mingles with the night creek

and we both flow by like avatars of time

wondering what oceanic theme

we might be the tributaries of

as we watch the willows wash their roots

with their hair, and the stars

dip their lures in the water

to catch the silver fish that school on the moon

like a poet and a modest river

that can’t find any room for their emotions

stranded on the earth like wingless waterbirds.

Down by the river again, it’s easier

to share my pain with a restless companion

in constant change like the moodring of the moon

than it is the meteoritic flash and bling

of the ceremonious cornerstones of life

who might give good advice to a building

like the Kaaba or the black Taj Mahal,

but know nothing about walking

on quicksand and water or stars

without sinking like most of the living

through the fathomless depths of their seeing.

Or the aboriculture of the orchards of rootless trees

tasting the fruits of their wanderlust

like the sad sweetness of farewell on their tongues

as they pass through the gates of becoming

the same way they came yesterday

like sad poems falling from the wings of waterbirds.

Sacred syllables pearling off their feathers

like a windfall of pear-shaped tears in the moonlight.

Down by the river again I can dazzle my sorrow

with the beauty of a fleeting insight

into the nature of enlightened fireflies

that can light up the whole universe

in a single flash of compassion

for everything in passage that can’t last

if it doesn’t fall out of formation with the past

like Canada geese on a return journey

to the lakes and rivers that don’t hang on

to their reflections in the well-thumbed holy books

of family albums any longer than it takes

for them to be on their way again

and gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

the dark hills that keep their secrets to themselves.

Down by the river again, I can commune

with all the burnt bridges of my long firewalks

through my nebulous heart trying to break into stars

so I can find my way home again

without consulting a starchart of fireflies

where X marks the spot of my biggest mistakes

when I knocked on a plague door from the inside

and the angel of death answered like a distant memory:

Get out. No one lives here anymore.

And the pain was almost more than I could bear.

Down by the river again, I can let my dreams

and my nightmares alike flow downstream

like the blossoms of the moon or the feathers

of a my imaginative flight path into an oceanic awareness

there are no trees, there are no branches

there are no seas on the moon or in the abyss

and the waterbirds have nowhere to land,

nowhere to nest, not even the sprigs of peace

they carry in their beaks like divining rods

to anywhere within their starless wingspan.

Down by the river again, it’s enough

that what I am answers to itself even

when the nightbird of my longing

comes looking for me like a rootless tree

it used to roost in like a voice from the past

that keeps mistaking me for someone

it’s the foolishness of a sacred clown to still hope I am.

And what can I know about what I’m becoming

except it’s the sum of all I’ve forgot

to keep pace with the flowing

where the shapeshifters wait at the river’s turning

for a thought to tilt its wings up

in a good-bye remember me if you can

sloppy kind of salute or awkward bow

from all of us whose names

have been written on the wind and water in blood

to all those lightwaves and flash floods of the heart

standing at attention like a parade square

where war’s never been declared

and head toward home like an arrow

that’s lost its sense of direction

and falls like an illegal immigrant toward earth.

Down by the river again, where change

comes as effortlessly as the fallen leaf

of an apostate hymnal of protest songs, caught up in

the currents, the undertow, the vertigo, the delirium,

the rapids and vapid swamplands of time,

no one claims me, and nothing is mine

and there’s a silence that screams

the birthright of my freedom at the stars

and holds up my severed umbilical cord

as proof I’ve escaped my immortal chains

and chosen this transient path, brief as it is,

of light and wind, root and rain,

the circuitous blossoming of the wild grapevines

wandering like dancing drunks all over the place

underneath the fruits by which we shall know them

like chandeliers of global streetlamps

shining like clusters of pearls in the Pleiades.

Down by the river again, contemplating the world

like an earthbound frog sitting on a cosmic lily pad,

feeling the ghost pains of old wounds

summoned to a seance of scars

like a retrograde excorcism of all life on Mars,

wondering if the surest proof

that life on earth first came here

from that angry libidinous planet

like a seed in the fist of a meteor,

is that life on earth has been at war ever since.

Or if it’s too much bliss, or a surfeit of sorrows

that keeps the bubbles of the multiverse

in the rivers I’ve followed into hyperspace like

the inconceivable tomorrows

of the lonely predecessor of my own dragon line

that’s an affable familar with the same starmap on

the palm of my hand, as it holds

like the triune stigmata of serpent fire and snake-eyes

of two black pearls of wisdom and one mystic eclipse

of a new moonrise in the crescents of its triadic claws.

Down by the river again, where my wounds

attend night school in the lecture halls of my heart

and vast significance is explained away

with the whisper of a cool breeze, a gust of stars,

the flaring of a matchbook of daylilies,

goose-bumps on the bare arms of the river,

and the wild white iris doesn’t disguise itself as a truce

when it’s really a surrender, the sacred silence of the dusk

is animated by a cloud of unknowing gnats

that makes me wonder what they’re the aura of

if not the rapture of love that surrounds

the same galaxy of cosmic insights and earthly emotions

my heart has been haunting for lightyears

like the distant lustre of Venus shining like nacreous dawn

under the heavy eyelids of the dusty sunset

nodding off like a spectrograph under the weight

of the longer wavelengths of the red poppies

it’s been consulting all day like the green skulls

of gypsy fortune-tellers prophesying the death of stars

that go supernova like nocturnal nightlilies

along the riverways and dirt backroads of the Milky Way

like sleepwalkers in a dream lingering

over the darkening hills of the Lanark Highlands

like an extended metaphor for life, love, and death

that’s been trying to keep pace with a sunflower

that blooms at midnight, without running out of breath.

Down by the river again, where I can drown

in the endless baptismal fount of my own myth of origin,

without entering a womb like an unclean thing

asked to wash off the starmud of my afterbirth

like something dirty on the threshold of a shrine of life

I’m asked to leave outside and turn my back

on all the roads and dead end pilgrimages it took to get here,

I refuse to start any new incarnation with an act of betrayal,

and I won’t sanctify a saint without lifting the curse

off an heretical dragon’s back at the same time,

knowing that for every angel that falls from heaven

like rain to put this hell on earth out,

a demon rises from pandemonium up the burning ladders

of their skeletal remains like watersnakes

on the fire-escapes of emergency moonlight,

to get a rise out of heaven, and warm things up a bit

just to show it that wildflowers can bloom in fire as well

and it doesn’t hold a monopoly on bells

that have been beaten out of the afterlives

of experienced swords that have been through the forge

like hot blood through the heart of a warrior poet

who’s gone absent without permission

like the rogue star of a conscientious objector for good

from nightwatch in the guardhouse at the gates of Eden.

PATRICK WHITE