THE LAMENT OF THE LAST TRAIN WHISTLE
The lament of the last train whistle
has disappeared into the distance
mournfully looking for its lost child.
October night in the woods
around an old fire pit of prophetic
skulls
blowing ghosts of smoke in my face
that bring me to tears, a neolithic
calendar
of all the old and new moons that have
passed.
So many, so much, that used to matter
doesn’t anymore. Dream figures
that shed their skins like the longer
wavelengths
of watersnakes in an infra-red
mindscape
of serpent fire dying like the sun
that can tell the hour by the taste of
its ashes.
I throw more well-dried thresholds on
the fire
like branches that used to be green
with the tears
of sweeter departures and arrivals over
the years.
All the light’s jumped from orbitals
of the tree rings that sag like bags
under the eyes knotted like islands
in the heartwood of their xylem and
phloem.
Here where the river parts like long
hair
on the skull of a stone, I sit like a
demon
in a sacred place, clarified, alert,
and alone
as any nocturnal animal in the woods.
The chalkdust of my bones trying
to connect the stars to their
constellations
snagged in the trees like the rags of
spiderwebs
on the blackboard of a starmap as wide
as the sky
and deep as the subconscious of the
Burgess Shale.
It’s not a betrayal to let go of your
faith
when you had none in the first place
and you don’t need a parachute on the
edge of space
to plunge from paradise, or a weather
balloon
of a bad Christian poet to shepherd
Dante
like a moon out of hell. Be yourself,
especially when nobody’s watching
except that same drone in the sky
that occasionally flashes a flake of
silver off
its stone cold third eye to flint your
awareness
that it’s still there in the cosmic
background
like a witness to your dreams and
schemes
for a luxuriously appointed life of
enlightenment.
Be yourself. The direct copulative
imperative
that has supplanted the light as the
first word
out of the mouth of creation. Be
yourself.
And then let there be light by the side
of a good fire
to let you see who that is as acutely
as you can see in the dark who that is
not.
The migration of the Canada geese might
seem
a broken rosary of new moons calling
out
the names of God to you, and one
unknown,
or silhouetted against the moon they
might
suggest the afterbirth attached to a
cut umbilical cord
and your heart might feel reborn
somewhere
in the autumn of your life, a child of
the fire,
a flower in the full bloom of its
solitude
dancing with its own mercurial
apparition
on the waters of life in the mindstream
always out of season enough to lag
behind
so it can tell the time by the widening
gaps in its passage
as it’s waiting for the night to
catch up to its own shining
like a thief of fire unchained from the
rock
that broke the glass window of its
transfixed seeing
with a meteor in the hands of an
enlightened delinquent.
Or you might read the falling leaves as
occult lifelines
on a Tarot deck of overlapping
lifespans
like the scales of a dragon playing
solitaire
beside the small inferno of a signal
fire to the stars,
to let them know you’re coming faster
than the time it takes for a thought to
make it
all the way to death and back to birth
again
as if you were pinging your emotions
like stray wavelengths from the oceans
of your awareness
off the horns of the moon the way
you used to skip rocks out over the sea
as a boy
to see how long they would keep on
going
like a waterclock of stone before they
sank
like the flying fish of the hard, cold
facts of life back into
the numinous depths of your collective
unknowing
where the stars aren’t fixed to
anything that isn’t
flowing along with them like the wind
on the mindstream
or a small fire catching its breath in
the silence and the solitude
of so much radiance, before it’s on
its way again for good.
PATRICK WHITE
