SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

Squalls of rusty leaves clinging to a tree in winter

like the pages of a perfectly bound book,

the memoirs of a fire that refused to go out

like the gypsy scarves of the poppies,

dry, rattling, skulls encrusted by the firepits

of their own laurels. So many of my generation,

the sixties, the fabled seed beds of a dead revolution,

the distant thunder of a creative firestorm

that flowed back into its watershed like a black snake

after the lightning struck the sacred tree.

Cratered, pitted mantles with thinning atmospheres

on the surface of rogue planets still looking

for that one mystic star they’ll orbit

like comets with their greying ponytails forever

if they ever find it. But don’t be too quick to judge

the heart of the original nightbird on the basis

of a fading echo with a long way to go yet.

Just below the surface of the reflexive symbols

that have worn out the knees of the shrines

and devotees who made peace signs

instead of the sign of the cross, just below

the volcanic islands of the scars they’re marooned on,

the effusive swords of their edgy insights

cooling out in a tempering sea of awareness,

there’s still a hot, magmatic core of dragon sages

dancing in the ashes of a dead furnace

that approached them like a matchbook

that thought it was the peer and master

of their ageing green cremations at a rain dance.

Don’t throw cold water on a dreaming wolf until

you’ve checked its teeth to see if it snarls

with the broken crescents of a waning moon

or the turning world has kept its pencils sharp

as the point it’s about to make for enlightenment’s sake.

Even in my own heart, I can hear the pathos

in the voice of the wolf shaman calling

the few who remained faithful to their prayers,

like a savage muezzin in the mountains

of a brutal solitude that knows what hour it is.

If it grows dark around me even as I write

that doesn’t mean I’m editing myself out of the light.

That’s just a sixties way of conjuring the stars to come out.

Who hasn’t stood in the starmud up to their necks

in the infinities of the chronic rapture

of a sixties think tank of one very spaced-out brain

cauterized by bliss burn? The generations lie down

one upon the other like layers of sediment settling

out of the turmoil of their sky bound puddles like new skin

on cosmic river bottoms, today’s cambium,

tomorrow’s heartwood. Dark absorption lines

around the eyes of an emission spectrum. Black

calendars scarred on the vulture femurs

of the bird bone flutes of Archaic Indians lying

in their graves by the Straits of Belle Isle.

Takes a while, but it perpetually happens.

It’s going to happen to you, just like that

medieval clique of skeletons said. As we are now

so will you be one of these mystic bagladies

or homeless revolutionaries out trying to trade

the whole wardrobe of the emperor’s new clothes

for a few rags of retroactive fashion. The duff

of the autumn leaves collaged into wet albums

on the forest floor of radicals returning to their roots

one last time before the snow falls. The setting star

doesn’t shine any less brighter than

the new debutantes of lucidity rising in the east.

We ran before the storm awhile like birds

that delighted in the riot and the madness

of its creatively destructive, dark energies.

We burned cities, trying to make love not war.

We gnawed through the chains of the anchors

of moonboats in the ports of lunar drydocks

even as we jumped ship like rats on friendly terms

with the dragons of the Chinese zodiac.

Civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism efoliate,

this time with thorns, ecological paracletes

intervening on behalf of the pimped-out earth,

water, air, earth, fire, four poor girls

whored in the stables of the corporate flesh market,

and a sexual revolution that broke the locks

on the stocks of the witch-hunting Puritans

who burned the bodies of women like candles

fearful of the lunar power of their own housewells,

fierce hypocrites who thinned the blood in their veins

into the formic acids of nettles and ants,

into the vicious beginning of their one letter alphabet

of red ink that kept sinking deeper in arrears to God

because they lived their lies like pincers on a lightning rod.

Major regret. No work revolution to undo

the immorality of enjoying what you do for a living

instead of accepting it as a purifying karmic scourge

for the evil and the guilt of having been born

to hard labour on a chain gang without parole.

It’s sixties just to point out that the Upanishads say

work should be a form of worship, or in Zen,

a do, an enlightenment path, or closer to home,

a begging bowl. In the aftermath of the cosmic cocktails

of chemicals for herbivores with poetic sounding names,

the apocalyptic spirit went supernova and the remnants

of the excruciating ecstasy came up like a moonrise

of manic mushrooms that shaved their heads

like magic monks in a cult of future afterlives.

I saw the maharanis kiss the serpent on the head

and get away with it. I’ve lapped the marrow of music

out of the fossilized bird bone flutes

that tried to charm the snakepit and got bit because

music hasn’t got charms to soothe all savage breasts.

Over now. With this proviso. No star ever

says farewell to its light however far

it travels from its original fountainmouth,

wavelengths away from the first flash of insight

like the continuum of the wind, or space and time.

Things may be diverted by gravitational third eyes,

and, yes, so many have imploded on themselves

like black dwarfs that yesterday were fireflies of the spirit,

and others brood like dark ore deep within themselves

over secret motherlodes of white gold

that glows like wheat in the moonlight

in the wake of a silver plough sowing stars

in the furrows of their terraced brows

that are timed to germinate long after they’re gone,

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond.

Lucidity surprised by the lengthening shadows it cast

like a rookery of crows in a psychedelic sunset.

Chimney sparks by the moody cresosote of old fires

that aspired to the stars like nightbirds

caught in their own throats when the darkness

overwhelmed them with the unattainability

of the best things in life to reach for

like brilliant failures with an artist’s nostalgia

for a lost cause that went into exile voluntarily,

some like asteroids of the Orphic dismemberment

of a whole generation, some like hyperbolic comets

fallen from their dark haloes turning once around the sun

like tracers following the flightpath of their own ricochets,

and some, you’ve seen them, emanating

from the invisible radiants of well-thumbed zodiacs,

like the lion and bull gates of meteor showers

that can still thrill the marvellous children

with the fireworks of their creative immolations

as another generation shrieks in glee realizing

their own freedom in the high jinx

of the sacred clowns and amazing lunatics

blooming in orbit like wildflowers protesting

the way the earth passed every day into night

without opening its eyes to the wonders of itself

strewn in its path like the tarnished haloes

of moondogs we once reached for like brass rings

that gored us like matadors on our own horns

as we bled to death in an eclipse of roses

in the magic ashpits of their oracular thorns.

PATRICK WHITE