Saturday, June 30, 2012

FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN


FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN

Full moon and the mournful thunder of a train
passing through town. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury
long gone down for the rest of the night.
Orion a pale imitation of itself in the west.
Mars near Regulus, the little king with the heart of the lion,
and Saturn off to the east. Like water returned
to the river it came from, everything immersed
in the fluidity of silence
swimming through the trees
as if virgins were older than fish at the spring equinox.

A habit of wandering when no one else is around
walks me out of town like some unknown journey
stringing my feet along with a line
and two minutes with a lunar hook dangling
in the effluvial plains of the moon’s volcanic seas
as if I needed to be played into it by the sacred syllables
of ancient starmaps talking in tongues like oceans of awareness
into the ears of the seashells who can repeat
every word they say to themselves in secret.

All I’ve done most of my life is write and paint
spring, summer, winter, fall, four seasons,
and a writer not only adds another dimension
to the state of affairs, but constitutes
a fifth season of his own as well, a sphere
of thin-skinned spirit that covers the earth
like an invisible aurora of imagination,
the third eye of a wobbling satellite
lost in space with spiritual vertigo
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon. Five
seasons in all, but the fifth includes the other four
like a mood ring on a chameleon in front of a mirror.

And the rest of my life in between
exotic flame-outs and catastrophic inspirations
has been about running back home to my life
like an ambulance, a squad car, or a fire truck,
and, yes, even the occasional water bomber
to put a root fire out before it broke into blossom
and spread like daylilies to the rest of the neighbourhood.

Just as I can’t help looking extemporally at
the extraordinarily ordinary dandelions sometimes
and thinking they must have been born middle-aged
because they all look like yellow G-7 type bachelor suns
that have rubber-stamped themselves all over the place.
Dandelion wine, but I wonder if anyone of them
ever longed to be born a red head, looked
at the gypsy poppies like blood at the side of the road,
wearing too much black mascara , and wished somehow
they could be just as uniquely scarlet and carefree.

And in the night, out in the woods on my own
without a light or a fire for a companion
you’re never alone with, I think, o yes,
a poppy or a dandelion would be good right about now
and I make them a mental substitute through
intense creative visualization and though
I’ll sit out here spiritually naked all night
somehow by the morning I’ve melted a block of ice
like a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas
who was trying to focus on stars.
So when I take these long starwalks
through the desolation of stark and delicate things,
and their ferociously bold slow-hand insistence
on returning the way they came like fruits
ye shall know them by, back to the wild apple trees,
I’m not just walking among solid things
that overemphasize their reality at the expense
of realizing their full potential as an event of metaphors
that can shapeshift musically into anything they want to be
from dandelions with short haircuts
to poppies with the manes of solar flares.

My life is being conducted by a symphony of fiddleheads
at a seance of violins. I look at the desiccated milkweed pods
and I don’t see a coffin or a brittle fortune-cookie of a womb
that’s gone to seed, but the eyelids of visionaries
who gave up everything to the seeing they had to give
like millions of little ghostly white parachutes of moonlight
landing like prophetic time-capsules from the flowers
who refused to go blind, even after jumping from paradise,
and emptier than a widow’s mailbox
still stare blankly up at the stars
with their mouths open in utter amazement
trying to remember all their children’s names and myths of origins
shawled over their shoulders like the Milky Way
as if that were some kind of cold comfort
for a lifetime of absurdly trying to rinse
the shadows out of the light with their tears.

PATRICK WHITE

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