ONE LAST PILOT LIGHT OF A BLOSSOM

ONE LAST PILOT LIGHT OF A BLOSSOM

One last pilot light of a blossom

on the ghostly candelabra of the blueweed

and the New England asters huddled

like starclusters among dishevelled stalks

of blonde hay dry and brittle as hair

that’s bleached its supple green

into a lustreless sunshine of flat bread.

Stripped of their leaves, the Southern belles

of the willows, now sadistic molls

whipping their own eyes like rain in the river

for things they wish they hadn’t seen.

Planets scorched into extinction,

black walnuts crushed underfoot,

the air, thick with the ether of decay

and the water’s turned mean in the cold.

Pelt of a muskrat in the cattails,

the leatherwork of bush wolves,

and at the foot of the oracular rock

with the birthmark of a glacier

that once passed this way like time

the shepherd moon of its gaping skull.

All the seeds have gone to ground by now,

ammunition stored for a spring revolution,

flower power redivivus, a vegetable vendor

in a Tunisian souk, a sacrificial arsonist,

a burning apple in the eye of a fire storm.

Blue jay in the yellow birch leaves.

One lone turkey vulture buffeted by the wind,

adjusting its magnificent splayed wings

to every gesture of the air as it wheels

over the dried blood flaking off

the maples like leaves of crackling paint,

and at my feet, like vulnerable sexual organs

shaped from the flesh of the moon,

labial mushrooms with the gills of albino fish.

Things of the mind, not solid, but real,

I witness myself in the decline of the woods

and every leaf, and maple key, and fuselage

of a dragonfly in a torn bird net of a spider-web,

every withered grape on the wild grape vine

I want to take with me as my grave goods

when I go, every mystic detail of the fall

down to the last God particle, an encylopedia

of what it means to have lived like an empty silo

of expanding space so I could hold all this

in the abysmal solitude of the human mind

when it discovers the image of God

in the affinitive creative potential of its own unknowability

as the many return to the one, and the one

returns to transcendence all on its own

as if everything in existence from star to stone

were merely a suggestive guess at the hidden secret

that lies on its deathbed longing like autumn

to confess itself to the expressive silence

of the mystery in the heart of the unknown.

PATRICK WHITE