UP ON HEARTBREAK HILL AT NIGHT

UP ON HEARTBREAK HILL AT NIGHT

Up on Heartbreak Hill at night

with a 2.4 inch, 60 mm, refracting telescope,

a cat, and a journal of poems,

deciphering those immensities of sky

as if every star were the sacred syllable

of an inconceivable intelligence that explained

everything in light, and the light were singing.

Earth noises in the broom bushes and Douglas firs.

The air rife with the spirits of those

who had their necks broken here by a prison noose,

and had more of a right to be here than I did

who felt like an intrusive guest in their house

even though the darkness was common ground.

Eventually they learned to ignore me

as just another adolescent longing for eternal responses

to the expiry date on life and love,

and not one of them without a silent understanding

of what a star could mean through the bars

on the windows of their prison cells.

Up here on the hill I was a temple above

the imperial rhetoric of toppled garbage cans

expurgating on the fate of fallen empires

that took themselves way too personally in restrospect

than they did at the time, as if the wound,

even the children had to amend like a religion,

grew deeper and more volatile with age.

Up here, just the executed ghosts of perversity and rage.

The whisper of something beautiful

no one could smear, soil, smudge,

out of touch, though I caressed

the skin of the stars as if it were as smooth

as the lenses and mirrors I used

to watch the fragile radiance of how they danced

so intimately across the apertures

of my field of vision trembling before

their scintillation the way I used to make

some spiders vibrate in the morning

like sewing machines or the clappers on fire alarms

by simply touching their webs

as if all the strings on a Spanish guitar

were trip wires in a terrorist museum.

Light as the only liquid in a desert

for many dangerous miles around,

the stars were cool jewels of water to me.

I could almost taste them like the tartness

of wild blackberries on my lips, lemons,

the deadly nightshades of experimental girlfriends

testing out cartridges of new lipstick

the first time we kissed in the shadows

of the new moon behind the abandoned warehouse.

It’s impossible to see a star as it is

until it’s become part of your love life

or, at least, until you can learn to flirt with the light

like a firefly at the window

of this thirteenth house of solitude

where the homeless gather like an avalanche

of the misplaced cornerstones of condemned temples

that like the stars, are always updating their past

about things that shine, but don’t last.

If the medium is the message, and it is and it isn’t,

then seeing must be a kind of love as well.

I saw the stars through the eyes of the stars.

I felt the weight of the billions of years

there wasn’t even a one-eyed sea to look back at them

for intimate insights into its own impersonality.

Hard stars in the winter, soft stars in the summer.

Stars can see further into the darkness of the human heart
when it’s cold out for everyone and clarity

stops breathing on the mirror like evanescent nebulae

sensitizing the light to the chromatic aberrations

of the disappearing veils and crushed rainbows

synchronously aligned with my poetry at the time.

I could feel the passage of the stars

like migrating Canada geese in the autumn

the shamans read like rosaries in retrograde orbits,

an abacus of wandering planets, and one,

whose name was unknown

rooted in the ground of itself like a strange silence

that had whispered the world into its own ear

like the dark secret of light upon light

as everyone looked up like mirrors

with tears in their eyes as big as lenses

trying to overhear what was clearly not hidden

through the keyhole of a telescope up on Heartbreak Hill

when seeking wasn’t a way of avoiding what was revealed.

PATRICK WHITE