BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.

BACKGROUND SADNESS. COSMIC HISS.

Background sadness. Cosmic hiss. Cool blitz of the rain.

Too late to do the fossils of the flowers any good. Grim air.

Morose silver-grey homogenous sky. Curds of colour.

Though the trees that have hung on to their leaves

like poets afraid to publish their works on the wind,

hoarding them like flakes of dried blood from previous passions,

remind me of the Library of Alexandria going up in rusty flames.

The drainage ditches are full, and the chandeliers

of the New England star clusters aren’t shining anymore.

This morning I’m the fragrance of smoke

in a bombed out city that’s eaten all its horses.

A drenched scarecrow without a function

wandering through a field of shattered cattle corn.

More smouldering than combustible. The earth

lays a poultice on my heart like green moss

on the skulls of the rocks. And the agony of healing

sometimes hurts worse than the original wound.

Dark starmud clings to my lily-white winged heels.

And though the arrows of my words have been

fledged by the sky like ospreys among songbirds,

I’m still flaking spear heads off the obsidian

of prolific new moons. And it’s hard to know

if I’m weeping like a candle that’s still burning in the rain

or crying long, slow, pungently languorous tears of resin

down the trunks of the dolorous pines.

Wet raw umber leaves stick to my boots

like decals on a guitar case of one night stands

like the lament of a bird moving from tree to tree

without understanding what it’s longing for.

Too many sundials past the equinox

in the season of the dead, I’m hauling

the blue stones of my emotions from distant quarries

as I walk these fallow fields like a crop circle

with notions of refounding Stonehenge here in Lanark County,

stacking pagan trilithons out of heritage Christian cemeteries

as I close the endless gates behind me, chain by chain,

so nothing gets out that isn’t meant to, except me

and the fox that’s stopped to eye me

from the far side of my field of view

that’s been abandoned to its own recourses

for the rest of the year in and year out.

I came for a casual walk, but I find myself

wary and prowling through a carnivorous solitude

like a drenched bush wolf in the middle of too much agriculture

and I’m many long wavelengths away from home.

There’s a brutal exactitude about a life that doesn’t love you

because you were born with fangs, even when

you lie down with the lamb to share vulnerabilities.

Some like it high above the timberline

where everything is as sublime as nightfall

on a good seeing night and the stars are so ferociously hot

they cauterize your eyes like focused fireflies of blue acetylene

so you never have to cry again quite the way you used to,

or if you do, your tears shatter like chandeliers of dry ice

and weeping glass. And then a black walnut tree

that’s been unfeathered by the wind like a snapping turtle says

the trouble with wild predators is they never

get down to the roots of things. Come the autumn

they’re still wandering homelessly in the shallows of life alone.

Too sad to argue, I nod my assent, and think to myself

so do your leaves, your blossoms, your seeds, your windfalls,

the burnt planets of your scattered solar systems

strewn at my feet like black cue balls that break for us all.

I allegorize the woods to humanize my lupine mythologems.

And then there are some. Siloes of dark abundance

standing in the starfields of an emotional famine

that have been living on nothing but the crumbs

of the forgivable shining of their former dreams.

Sometimes think I’m one of them as well, among

so many fortune-tellers reading the lifelines

of the open palms of the trees. But I don’t get fixed upon it

for fear the fireflies of insight I revelled in this summer

stop burning holes in my starmap that lets me see

clear through these obvious paradigms of the light

to the shapeshifting constellations of chaos on the other side

that unravel these monstrous myths of human origin

as quickly as they weave them out of nothing

so that in the end we’re always the beginning of something else.

And there’s a hidden compassion in all of that. Mercy

in the mobile protocols of passage that initiate us

into a deeper awareness of the pathos of our passions

emptying the urns of our hearts like the ashes

of the Canada geese flying high overhead above the clouds

that our pristine emptiness might be renewed again

by the yellow leaves we’re kicking through in the rain

like sodden flames strewn across the trail

beside the mindstream I’ve been following like the Tay

where the fleets of sulphur butterflies

timed to the weather reports of the dying flowers

have taken down their sails like the wings of old loveletters

to walk alone with the Alone without saying

anything short-sighted or humanly intrusive along the way.

PATRICK WHITE