OCCASIONALLY A VAPOUR OF SADNESS

OCCASIONALLY A VAPOUR OF SADNESS

Occasionally a vapour of sadness

condenses into the eye of a tear with a star in it

and the great consolation of the compassionate

is that they see more beauty in a wounded world

than they do the savagery of the suffering that caused it.

They don’t so much exorcise the thick fog

of the ghosts they wander in like empty lifeboats

so much as alloy it to themselves like a star

in search of its own shining. They make deeper ripples

in the darkness of the night than the shallower wavelengths

of apprentice insight, and worlds within worlds

are enlightened by the ingathering of lost harvests

so every ray of the light is someone’s direction of prayer.

The older I get, the more experience ripens into an apple.

A planet in a sunset red shifting toward the sweet end

of the spectrum. There’s still a green star at my core

with half a dozen magic seed moons like eyes of dice

hoping they might root in some kind of continuance

of my starmud and wake up shining in a dark place,

and even oblivion seems a lot kinder than it used to,

and more beautiful those cold, cold nights the moonlight

flashed like a blade of frost across my jugular

in a sword dance of love with my clumsy heart.

But even when I consider the windfall ahead

when the dead go overboard like a burial

at sea in the unsounded depths of their own awareness,

I’m beginning to understand the compassionate nature of space

as more of a receptive embrace of everything I became

trying not to be, and everything I am of what I can

and cannot be, than an impersonal reservoir of my ruin.

Or as someone who understands what I mean might say,

pouring Aquarian tea out into a cracked cup

mended with the gold scar of the last crescent moon,

as above so below, starmaps in the firmament,

water-lilies in the wetlands. At least, I hope so.

Autumn burns like a solar flare in the rain

and occasionally a vapour of sadness

is summoned like a ghost to the medium

of a pilot light of the imagination and even after death

something retains a more flammable impression of life

than the mere forms of the smouldering of smoke

or why post angels with flaming swords

at the gates of Eden if the snake is already out of the bag

like a skin it shed a sky too small to swallow the moon?

Moths and candles, even in hell, birds of a feather

flock together, and neither a true phoenix, nor

a real dragon are born every spring from a shell.

And I’ve heard of flowers that bloom

longer than light years in fire that only

the wisest of children among us know how to exhume.

What’s time to a waterclock if not the mother

of an infinite womb making sure

from one generation flowing into

the empty bucket of the next like

the bloodstream of a body through

the ventricles of a heart, it’s never too late for life

to amaze you with how inseparable you and life are

from the start, not like the reflection of the moon

on dark water, but deeper than that,

like secret jewels dissolved in a solution of light

that taste like star sapphires crystalizing out of the night,

so you can’t help but go where life goes

as it must follow you like the Pleiades from tree to tree

like the water sylphs of the mindstream

they animate into the lyrical dream grammar

of a poet who doesn’t care who’s leading who where

on a long firewalk alone in autumn among the stars.

PATRICK WHITE