MY GHOST IS DANCING ON THE ASHES OF MY BONES

MY GHOST IS DANCING ON THE ASHES OF MY BONES.

My ghost is dancing on the ashes of my bones.

My blood was always a rose in this house of thorns

and it blooms and it blooms in a fountain of fire

and each of its petals, a farewell in the eye of a flame.

Ghost dancer, what do you pray for, who do you dance for,

what do you celebrate? Are your tears drying like paint

on the lifemask you left out in the rain? Are we

ageing into the scared silence of doomed children

listening in the other room to a stranger raging in pain?

Should I bleed with the warrior or heal the medicine man?

Whose life was this that kicks its heels up in a gust of stars?

I remember when I used to smile at my scars

like arrows that hadn’t been fledged yet in their own feathers

as they hastened to taste the blood of the mark they left on life.

Do we fly like hawks for awhile, coming down

like a decisive answer of the gods to what the dove

was wondering, and then as we age and mellow

like the gourd of the moon in late October

and the harvest’s in, and the stars have been beaten

like wild rice into the wounded canoes idling

like fish in the shallows, does the lunacy of our wisdom

teach us to evaporate like a quiet suggestion

of the grey wraith in the moonlit mist

that unravels from the lake like another way of life

we’re going to follow like the path of smoke

from our own fires and the calyx of shadows they cast?

Did we heed the protocols of the magic and the mystery

well enough to have been worthy of the wonder?

Did we part with gifts or did we die with our hands closed?

Does our disembodied heart resound like the whisper

of a black snake sliding through the grass down to the river

to drink like the ripple of a long wavelength

from its own watershed, or does it still boom out

like summer thunder and grasp at what’s unattainable about life

like bolt lightning with open talons? Does our voice

still grow silent in the aftermath of the most beautiful absurdities

after the nightbirds have finished singing in the black walnut trees

that taught us to forego the star tracks we were following

like blood through the woods, for the more powerful hunting magic

of the understanding that exceeds the signs we go by

like a dream we had when our ancient totems slept at the side

of this Road of Ghosts wandering like wild geese across the sky?

I remember lifting the veils of my tears

like curtains of rain over the distant blue hills

and the sound it made like the plectra of a harpsichord

playing adagios of music in accompaniment to itself

as it fingered each clean note on the keyboard of the leaves

with the agility of a spider seeking shelter from a downpour

as the fireflies appeared in its wake like the chandeliers of the Pleiades

shining in the valley fog like constellations that weren’t yet

quite sure of themselves but had a nebular insight

into what they wanted to be as I watched like a shapeshifter

enthroned like a rock intrigued on a neighbouring hill.

I can still feel the spell they cast upon me

like the bliss of enlightenment when I realized

how extraordinarily unnecessary it was to be anyone

I would recognize tomorrow wearing my own skin

coming the other way on the same path I followed

like a mindstream on the moon that shed me

like one of the last phases of a lost atmosphere

it breathed out on a deathbed unmindful of the weather.

Do you remember the name the wind addressed

the willows in that night or have all the words

we used to speak to one another about the secrets of life

been taken out of our mouths and replaced

with a whole new vocabulary of light we have yet to master?

Or are we deaf-mutes now and the dream grammars

we once chanted around our fire pits like wild irises

irrevocably indecipherable to the unborn and unperishing

who always had less to talk about than we did

who lived among the dying like a compassionate stranger

as one of them moored on the moon to the same fates they were?

Old ghost, no regrets? Is that why you’re dancing

on the ashes of my bones? Because we didn’t sign

a truce with the starmaps that put a lie to our shining

like a limit on the sacred mindscapes we wandered freely in

without taking possession of even the little we needed

without seeing it as the gift of a magnanimous spirit

that expressed the measure of its own creative power

by how much it could give away like the sun or the full moon

or a light nocturnal rain on the dusty wild flowers that needed it

to keep on blooming back at the stars that shone down upon them

for never having put gates on their gardens

or guarded their exits and entrances with warning signs

that the birds and the worms and the deer and the dragonflies

that came in the name of life to gather the fruits of the earth

had no right trespassing here as if they weren’t walking

on their own land beside a deed of free waters given

with the open-handed blessings of a habitable planet

amazed by the starclusters of New England asters

and stamina of pale blue chicory along the side of the road

this late into the fall like the parting gesture of farewell

to everything that passed before them like the moonrise

of a dream just waking up on the far shore of a deep sleep

sweeter than any that even the love of peace had ever known before?

PATRICK WHITE