Tuesday, July 10, 2012

CONSTELLATION


CONSTELLATION

Even in spring, the night is old, and the rising moon, fool’s gold.
Maybe I’ll go on believing this darkness is the harbinger of light,
and even if life be proven random and absurd
there is still beauty and significance in the word that says so. These days, aging,
love is elusive
as the abandoned heart grows crude and abusive
and mistakes that were made and never mastered
return like the last word of a parting sleight that chilled the stars.

Within me the wines of being still dream of becoming blood,
and there are still angels in the mud trying to fashion a man
whose life is more than a passion of decay. Forsaken as folly
the dark clarity of the holy, I am yet a candle and a planet
that runs before the sun. More time behind me than ahead,
and the silence sadder for all the things that were said,
tonight I remember friends and lovers who once burned
with all the insatiable fury of life to be wonderful, wild, and free,
extraordinary in the turmoil of eternity,
and I bless the light by which they lived
through blossom, leaf, and fruit back to the deep root
that makes apples of the rain. Human, they were worth their fate in pain
now that none of us can live those days again. And though
it’s hard to dispute that life is a house on fire where you can’t stay long,
there are harps of night and voices and soft winds
that even the stars have not fingered to commemorate
the faces and places where we lingered awhile
to explore the immensity of a vagrant smile
that opened like a gate and a garden
or fell through the bars of our mortality like a file. From those
who were wounded by the furious rose of my youth, who were lashed
by the sudden squalls of an afflicted heart, I ask pardon
for the nights their eyelids closed like scars and offer
this silver herb of the moon they watered with their tears
until something grew in the salted soil of those punishing years.
Though late, I lay it gently on the stairs I’ve descended ever since
like a star reflected on water or a face in the black mirror
that never lost its innocence. It was the light that fell,
not the darkness that everyone is convinced is hell, the dove, not the crow
that plummeted below. But that’s a sail for another horizon
to keep its eyes on. The moon takes refuge in the window,
a stone swan rippling the dirty winter glass, the eyes of an old man,
the ruses of time, thawing to let it pass. More mercy
in the righteous fire of the forgiving liar
that tells himself that he is still young
than in all the grime of proven facts
vented from the chimney-mouth into the night
like refugees or fingers of smoke reaching for something they’ll never grasp.

And are my enemies satisfied, and the women who came and went,
ingots of hot honey poured into the mould of my bones
that formed them into roses and knives and keys to mysterious doors,
thresholds of pain and joy, dark and light, mountains and valleys
that led me like a stream down from my idealistic heights
to the great seas of being that encompass
the enchanted dream of this island seeing? I was a poor student
of the solitude they tried to teach me, but at this remove,
knowing what I know of love and agony,
I offer them my gratitude, and making a sword of the hour-hand
that once slashed at my heart
lay it gently in the wound that never healed, believing at last,
slow but thorough, I understand. They were the dark masters
of a lost art that bronzed the plaster cast of my spine
and long since all the blood and tears that were spilled have turned into wine
and all that was killed has risen again like a forest, like a green phoenix
out of this igneous delirium of time.
I was the first draft of a shadow I read to the blind.

Too early to make my peace, too late not to desire ease
and freedom from the long calling of my intensities,
the hollow of this blue guitar, this abundant emptiness
is crossed by power lines
attuned to the hidden harmony of heretical black stars
that have formed a constellation of their own on the back of my eyes,
and there is a name for it, not said by anyone,
not even the wise. And only the dead and children can see it rise.

PATRICK WHITE

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