Sunday, December 30, 2012

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND


SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

Sometimes I listen to the wind
as if it were trying to call me home again
though I don’t really know where that is anymore.
Sometimes I hear the chatter of water
exhilarated by moonlight dabbling its feet
in the birch groves and I’m possessed
by the uncanny notion I’m listening
to my own mindstream as if
I were privy to some ancient secret
about myself I were the last to be let in on.

More than likely I don’t exist except
as this protean emptiness that insists
I look upon my own formlessness
as that which was naked now clothed by the world.

Good to go skinny-dipping in your awareness
once and awhile, resilver the mirrors of your skin
in water and moonlight, swing from your spinal cord
like an old rope over a childhood swimming hole
when rapturous simians were still as innocent
as their laughter at getting away with risking it all.

I recall the night I stopped thinking in the past tense
about memory, and she proved how creative she was
by introducing me to her daughters as if
I were a member of the band on stage at the moment.
I love wandering in a labyrinth of insights
the only way out of is to devote yourself
to being as lost as a gust of back alley stars
in the space-time discontinuum of your imagination.

I trust the dream grammar of my mother tongue
to find its own equilibrium like water
left to its own resources. There’s a logic
of associative metaphor that doesn’t dispel reason
from the genetic code of the irrationally inspired.
I look out on a cold night at the stars
and I’m wholly intrigued by the messages
I’ve been asked to deliver like future memories
to the ghost of what I’m becoming. There’s
a second innocence about the world that makes
the return journey even more beautiful than the first.

So when you show up out of the void
like the fragrance of a burning rose
shedding its petals like inflammable deathmasks
on a pyre of bird bones at a sky burial
I never conceive of you as separated,
gone, dead, unfeathered, or alone, anymore
than my heart says farewell to the passage of my bloodstream.

You’re not unravelling in my mind
like a stray thread of smoke from a wick
that put out the fires of life to follow a more spiritual path.
You’re as intangibly here in every breath I take
as a poem without line breaks is to me
when I’m listening to a visionary wind
like the sound of my eyes jamming with the stars.

And there’s nothing about your true features
that are any less real than I am even after
all these lightyears of trying to repatriate
this avalanche of asteroidal Orphic skulls
to a home planet that wouldn’t tear us apart again.

O what a joy it is to still love you as if
I’d never stopped sword dancing
with the thorns of the heart life strews on the paths
we do and don’t take sowing the past
with the first and last crescent moons
of the long nights we spent together
like lovers opening and closing their eyelids
at dawn and dusk to reassure themselves
the mystery of the other was still there,
Venus lingering in the darkness long after sunset
or getting up in the early morning
to turn the curtains back like the pages
on a calendar of last year’s constellations
as you are now, your eyes rising to the astonishment
of an old nightwatchman of the zodiac
spotting you looking out of a window to the east.

PATRICK WHITE  

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