THE LEAVES SLUICING THE RAIN DOWN THE BACK OF MY NECK

THE LEAVES SLUICING THE RAIN DOWN THE BACK OF MY NECK

The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck

to put out my candle of serpent-fire

like an orchid in an abandoned house well,

lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow

of its telescope when the white runaway horse

pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning,

the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh,

the stars running to peer through their windows

to see what’s making that sound.

The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff,

an Orphic descent whose picture-music

owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls

of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step,

the assessment of an omnipresent danger

that could kick the stool from out under your noose,

though you were foolishly hoping it might be

an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life

in an underworld where anything that’s violet

is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief

that laments that it had ever met the sun eye to eye,

and try how it might, can’t make a way of life

out of suicide. But I didn’t come here to grease

the hinges on hell like the wings of rusty birds

or desecrate the place with my omnipresence.

Once I realized the realm of the dead

is no realm at all that can be distinguished from the living,

I’ve returned to this underground river from time to time

where the roots try to take hold of my skull like the moon

as if it were their last chance at blossoming,

and my bones are scattered along the banks

like socket wrenches from a dead mechanic’s tool box

or a coffin that’s finally run out of things to fix.

This is where I come to return my harp of water

to a watershed of indistinguishable wavelengths

in homage to the source that handed it on to me,

a voice of my own, and there’s a bridge I stand on

no one’s burnt down yet, just a fallen log really,

but to me an overarching oxymoron that lets me stand

on both sides of the mindstream at once

to pay homage to a death I long to be worthy of

like a teacher my life is obligated to surpass

to fully honour her undisciplined transcendence.

Like water. A carrying away into a carrying away.

We couldn’t tell time if we weren’t all dying.

Eternity just a sundial that never closed its eyelids.

The wounded serpent of the waterclock bleeding out

like a human heart to remind us what hour it is,

what windfalls and harvests of the season of our soul

to leave in the begging bowls we place

at the eastern doors of our autumnal burial huts,

hoping we’ll see each other again, once are bones are dust,

like Canada geese returning in the early spring.

Some bring silver swords minted of moonlight

thrusting through the parting clouds

and lay them down on the water gently

like children they once cherished abandoned for life

as the greatest gift their hands had ever grasped.

I lay down this gift of a clear voice

that no fear or desire’s ever broken in like a wishbone

pimped out like tinfoil to the glamour of temptation.

Whatever storms raged in the crowns of its oracular branches,

this tree never injured any bird that ever sang in it.

I never hung my lyre like a dreamcatcher over the bed,

or used it to seduce butterflies into a spider-web,

dolphins into a bay of fishing-nets, nor yet

let its strings go slack like the pentatonic spinal cords

of a guitar that’s lost its nerve in the dark corners of life.

Nor did I ever refuse to sing what the dead asked me to

anymore than I did the living. Nor let the medium

intrude upon the message in such a way

the import of the song couldn’t exceed

the wingspan of the bird that released it

into the vastness of its interstellar longing.

Here the dead whisper their secrets to the waters

like coy sylphs of the wind flirting with waves,

and here where dissolution walks in the same shoes

as regeneration, and one step east is one step west

and though there’s a coming and though there’s a going

birth and death don’t know anything about this,

and Prussian blue the wet wind that’s been crying

about the sturm and drang of things to the broken pines

whose excruciations have become part of their character,

as if the haloes of the rain rippled through their heartwood

like the echoes of old engagement rings

from wide-eyed springs that have lasted for light years.

Death isn’t the derelict of life’s glory.

Just as peace isn’t the end of passage.

Mid-summer squanders as many flowers

on the capricious rivers of life as it does

the funeral bells of the fallen water birds.

And maybe that’s all these words are,

wild iris and daylilies lifting their skirts

above the flowing like troupes of gypsy fires

that like dancing to the flutes of their own desires

as they burn on the pyres of their floral reflections.

Who knows this late in the day, but maybe

I’m just trying to approach my own death

like an unopened gate to a garden

the way I did as a novice to love

when I couldn’t tell a larkspur from a hollyhock

nor what sign the star sapphire of the borage

wanted to be planted under like the Pleiades?

Anyway it pans out is ok with me, though.

I like it here where the waterlilies reset their sails

like redemption out of their own salvage

and after a long, grey day of funereal rain,

the clouds begin to clear around nightfall

and my eyes are seeded with the stars

of unnamed constellations of New England asters

that don’t conform to any known starmaps

I can follow genetically back like a fuse of dna

to the Big Bang of my first flowering into life.

And maybe I’m a mutant in the ancestry of death

that has always been the subliminal motif

of a symphonic life that wasn’t immune

to the picture-music of the celestial spheres

but I can’t help noticing how the bones of the muskrat

and the skeletal remains of the heron’s stilts

toppled by the stealthy fluke of a fox

all resonate like musical instruments

laid down in tribute on the roots of the trees

and on the sides of the paths that broke like melodies

on the ears of the dead who could taste them

like the tears of the moon on their silver tongues.

In this realm of radiant starmud in a state

of reanimating life out of its own detritus and decay,

I can hear their ghosts returning to life

like native atmospheres

returning to the songs of the lunar night birds

that don’t abuse their solitude with a sense of loss

without sweetening the music

with the ripeness of their silence

just before the grande finale

of their next windfall of transcendent whole notes.

PATRICK WHITE