THE LEAVES TREMBLE

The leaves tremble at the tips

of their half-denuded branches

against a flat gray sky,

the ruination of yellow and green

and the maples afire.

The house to myself;

four hours to myself. My head

jammed with the business

of swarming blackflies,

the crucial trivia of the morning,

crankshafts and cabs,

fitting the lid

over the spoon in the coffee can,

drinking brewer’s yeast

to coat my neuronic synapses

with vitamin B

to counteract the stress

that just handed me the single rose

of an unrequited cold sore.

And I’m chain-smoking

contraband cigarettes,

and I’ve got enough money,

I’ve got enough smokes,

I’ve got enough food to last until tomorrow

and the coffee’s not bad

and I don’t even mind

this ashen hour of October

as I wait for the mud in the puddle to settle,

the turmoil of the soiled cloud,

the ecliptic commotion of the meteor shower

to stop smearing and smashing

the silence of the eyeless mirror,

and my feelings are waiting for mouths

like the interlaced fingers

of a Druid who doesn’t know

what he wants to say

but knows how to say it

a hundred and fifty ways.

I look for the column shift

and put the world in park.

I look for my heart

and it’s a small, scuffed planet

trying to throw a curve at me

as if I were nothing but space.

I’m the key to a forgotten lock

in the spirit’s lost and found,

and part of me likes it this way

because for several eras now

the sleeves have been too long

on the winter straitjacket

time sized and knitted from my solitude,

and I hate the stingy herb of the colour.

I have lived like wings without a sky,

fire in the heartwood of a weeping willow,

and the birds piled up on my windowsill

like the craven junkmail

of an insincere migration that kept turning back

and my tears were always pall-bearers

at the death of water,

and I couldn’t understand,

couldn’t fathom the shallowness

of the infinite interpretations

that sprawled like lavish waves

across the sandy inclinations of my mind

with shells and starfish and seaweed for proof.

How could everyone not be right,

each according to the ruler of their spine,

a full measure of the truth?

The universe five ten and a half feet tall,

and flowers that taste like stars to the blind,

and wounds that heal like scalpels

in the hands of the surgical moon,

and emergency rooms full of clowns,

and shovels like iron valentines

indifferent to gardens and corpses;

and the beautiful arches of the women

who collapsed like aqueducts and bridges,

the stones of their plundered geometry

collaged into the gaps of makeshift hovels

to keep the cold night drafts out?

And I put it all down as a poet.

I was faithful to the vagrancy of my voice.

I offered the first born of my blood

to the law of my heart

and my soul was an ardent shapeshifter

with the wardrobe of a theatrical poppy

forgetting the lines of a dream.

I was an arsonist waiting in the dark

for the bell of a woman in the doorway,

and my cells were haunted

by the ghosts of the vacant thrones

of dark intensities

that swept me like rain over the masks and hills

of faceless domains.

I squandered myself

like confetti, fire and cherry blossoms

at the weddings of water and gasoline.

Everywhere was threshold and door,

and the world a ghetto of exiles,

a refugee camp for stars and humans alike,

an oildrum under an urban overpass

where I spray-bombed the hunting magic

of the beast masters

who danced to keep warm

under the horns and hides of their sacred shadows.

I have never been anyone

I ever thought I was.

Alone and alone and alone,

the hidden eye under a robe of light,

gazing out at the world from the inside,

I could never claim my thoughts and emotions as my own,

and without realization

I could be the vision

but I could never say that it was mine;

and slowly I was poured out on the ground

like blood and blue wine

and what was left was space, was

the whole palace in a single cornerstone,

a way of keeping everything in mind

and mind in everything,

of holding the world with an open hand,

letting the rivers

slip through the delta of my fingers

back to the sea they issued from

and I was always the last drop of water

to leave the moon. Empty and dry,

I lived on ashes and salt, a gnawing thing,

breaking its teeth on minerals,

trying to build a house of transformation

with glass nails, speaking

in the liberated tongues of broken mirrors.

How many days, deserts, dragons,

surviving on the marrow

of thorns, fangs, claws,

on the exhausted fruits of the fire,

on the flakes of blood

I shed like brittle roses,

like the paint of a condemned post office.

There was no more meat on the bones of the gate

and my heart turned into a loaf of coal.

My annihilation was perfected

in the crucible of my skull

by an excruciating isolation

that wept like the swords of diamond clarities

and the women and the children and the books,

and the abandoned shrine

in the tiny grove of my name,

fell away behind me

like wharves in my wake,

points of departure,

everything I’d ever cherished

lost in the undertow of the abyss.

Days of defamation and reptilian discretion.

I lived on nothing, a habit of breathing,

my heart a looping reflex,

terrified by the carnivorous gray of everything,

the short somewhere in the house

that would burn everything down,

the unforeseen event

that would snatch me

from the auroral approach of joy

by making me stand at the window

behind the stone curtains

of a harsher delusion,

always returning me to the same moment

as if a lesson I hadn’t quite mastered yet,

convinced again and again I was a chronic clown

proofreading the encyclopedic obituary

of someone who didn’t know when to quit.

PATRICK WHITE