NO MUSE AROUND, I SIT DOWN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

NO MUSE AROUND, I SIT DOWN BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

No muse around, I sit down by the side of the road

and let my solitude inspire me, insights

flashing like unnameable night birds

across the occult intuition of the moon.

The dark matter of nocturnal words

like the nerves of the light, the hidden scaffolding

before the light begins to shine like neurons

or the superclustering of galaxies strung out

along my axons rooted in 120 billion cells of starmud.

The silence revels in its unpredictability.

Moonrise over the birches, great blue herons

reflected in the waters of the swamp,

and a parity among wild things that makes us all

equally susceptible to each other

as we charge the air and ionize the shadows

with our sentience, everybody with blood in the game.

No rules. Just instincts. Life neither fair, nor sly

when the snow owl snatches the purse of the mouse

that was trembling under the juniper

its cheeks full of seeds like the eyes

of another roll of the dice. Peaceful here,

remotely freaked with danger though I’ve outwalked

the ghosts and robots who were harrying me

like an uncooperative medium swarmed by voices

pleading with me for time shares in my life awhile.

The far town, diffuse, an apparition,

a haze of infra red above the tree-line,

as the road I’m on narrows deeper into the woods,

though I don’t know what it is

I’m walking away from or toward

or if one mile west is one mile east

or the earth is moving under me

and I’m just trying to keep my balance

by staying in the same place. Until

I get to the farmhouse where the road

loops back on itself like a needle or a noose

and I can feel it following me with its eyes

like shattered moonlight beaming

from the windows that still keep more inside

than they let on, something sacral about the place

with its sway-back roof and overgrown porch

playing solitaire with the floorboards

laid out like a well used deck of cards

curled at the corners as if someone

had cheated themselves, no one else around.

The gate’s a drunk swinging by one arm

as it falls and the vetch catches it in a safety net

it remains entangled in. The sutures

of a cedar rail fence trying to stitch up space

with staves of femurs stacked like skeletons

in the skin and flesh of lunar lichens and moss

fallen into disrepair long after the music has flown.

And there’s a presence, remote and almost menacing,

stronger than the spirit of any church,

as if something had gone on living here

well past its time, that wasn’t a ghost

though it had undoubtedly died by now

to judge from the year it stopped

nailing license plates like a rusting calendar

to the woodshed door. Alive, but so estranged

even the leaves shuddered like no trespassing signs

as I stood warily in my culpability as a human

who could feel the taboos in his blood

even if he didn’t always heed them, beware, beware

whose ground you tread, whose threshold you cross

in your rootless wandering back into the past

that isn’t going anywhere without you.

PATRICK WHITE