IS SILENCE THE NEGATIVE SPACE OF WORDS

IS SILENCE THE NEGATIVE SPACE OF WORDS

Is silence the negative space of words,

darkness, the stars? A fact is just a fact,

static and inanimate, until it moves and breathes,

a dynamic of the mind, sinks into the heart

and mingles in a confluence of the nuances

of chaos that characterize each one of us

in solitude, is it alive, one eye plucked out

of a voodoo doll, a sunflower at a black mass,

a fable of truth in time that time, too, will pass.

Venus and Jupiter near Spica in Virgo

and Arcturus in Bootes, still stand offish

as it was through the canopy of branches

of the black walnut trees this summer.

The worst place to discover your loneliness

is when you’re dancing like the new moon

in the old moon’s arms, and it’s the old moon

that’s having all the fun. Everyone wants to

fly with the waterbirds. The third eye of the river

turns itself into a simulacrum of the sky, but still,

it only runs. As the star that would efoliate

like the starclusters of the New England asters,

merely burns like a chip off the focus

of a magnifying glass in the hands

of inquisitorial children cooking butterflies.

Here is a bend in the Tay River about ten miles

outside the town of Perth. When is another

cold night on earth I had to get out of the house

to bathe my nuclear cabin fever in the heavy water

of the moon washing over me as if a lunatic

were immune to the craziness of going sane.

Why is the content of life that counter balances

death’s bad sense of timing. How is a matter

of doubting the cure and trusting the pain

to turn you into someone you could never imagine.

The fish don’t jump. It’s Lent for the blackflies.

The leaves have torn up their book. The retina

of the river is partially detached. There’s

more resentment in the woods than there was

even a month ago. As if the only way

you could live here were by trespassing.

As I do, furtive as a fox, wary as a wolf

listening to the distant barking of farmyard dogs.

The air’s taken a vow of chastity that burns my face

in the warped clarity of the hottest part of the flame.

The atmosphere’s renewed its virginity

like a windowpane in an infertile November rain.

The grass brittle and the starmud hardened

into shards of pottery in a midden of ostrakons.

I’m exhilarated by the way I’m threatened

by my own vulnerability at the possibility

of being eaten alive by the elements, rather

than expiring slowly en masse like the hungry ghosts

of the homogeneous consumers back in town.

No place for an old man, maybe, but the young

don’t fare much better here either. Birth

is on the clock. No one’s born on the nightshift.

Only the salt lick left out for the deer

isn’t frosted like a cake in a famine

of mean-hearted snowflakes that don’t adhere

like toupees and wigs to the judicious skulls of the rocks

but blow off in any slight gust of the wind

like tears of dry ice that don’t know what there is

to cry about, and keep holding themselves back

like the locks out at Murphy’s Point or the boats,

their sails furled like daylilies and withered poems

at Rideau Ferry. Even the dragons that used to

feather the staghorn sumac in their flames

are barely a skeletal candelabra of wicks

that have gone out. Just the dendritic deltas

and bloodlines of dynastic lightning whose roots

go all the way back to the sky, but don’t

flash their sabres as much in the legendary storms

that once made them famous among

the usurped crowns of the sacred oak trees.

Laureled in poison ivy, their blood slows down

like the xylem and phloem of imperial Rome

wintering north of the Danube or Ovid in exile

on the Sarmatian shores of the Black Sea,

waiting for the Ister to freeze like a meat locker

while a tryst of sorrows pleads to be forgiven

for the joys they once took in living life erotically

as if frost-bitten toes were as close as he

were going to get to Augustan purple in his afterlife.

I wonder what my eyes have contributed to the stars,

what might have been added to their shining over the years

I’ve looked up at them, if anything at all,

in this inter-reflecting hall of incommensurable mirrors

warped by the mirages of my frozen tears

in this desert of snow grinding them into lenses.

Clear. Cold. Far things brought near out of the darkness

like moths and stars into the more intimate fires

of my heart. Per ardua ad astra, I reach for the stars,

the lamps and the urns, the eagles and swans,

and they scatter my ashes like a snow squall

along the Milky Way disappearing into a black hole

in a mindstream of its own like images of this occult art

of reviving my life by returning it to deeper, darker waters.

PATRICK WHITE