SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,

Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,

cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is

but my heart seems to be in the right place,

smokes, coffee, heat, a loaf of whole wheat bread,

not quite Omar Khayyam, a jug of wine, and Thou,

but the bough is on the fire and I’ve got the Pleiades

to make me feel like a sexy astronomer

if the life mask I’m wearing isn’t convincing enough.

The moon’s off aloofly waning below the horizon.

There’s a commotion of ghosts below my apartment window

and the furnace is cracking its knuckles as if

it were getting ready for a fight. And I want to write

from the least expected quarter when you least expect it

in a space where my heart isn’t just another synonym for solitude.

Explore my mind in its omniabsence by handing out

free telescopes to the fireflies and asking them if they can see

two stars over at eleven o clock from the dim one,

the same thing I’m looking at. I want to

investigate the morphology of knowledge forms

among the mad, wholly absorbed, nothing left out, by my work.

That’s what I call it for the want of a better word

but most of the time it’s a kind of dangerous fun

that keeps me warily engaged on full alert

listening to a voice singing in a lighthouse

on the coast of the moon that laughs

nervously like a lifeboat at the weather.

Or Shelley in the Gulf of Leghorn. If I didn’t say anything

how could the silence know how beautiful it is

to experience the world as an aimless, drifting intelligence

at ease with itself as it toys lightly with elegant distinctions

that burn like paper boats origamied out of Zen poems

that come and go as they please like the moon in the window?

True excellence doesn’t rule like an aristocracy.

There are too many wonders in the world to be distracted by.

And there’s an hour. It doesn’t come often. But it never

fails to return. One disquietingly beautiful daughter of time,

lying down in the cool summer grass looking up at the stars

as if her whole body were vivid with light

as she savoured the ages that went into every single flash

of the beauty of her brevity. Firefly eyes in a lightning storm.

You can lie down nameless with her like a secret syllable

and speak in a voice older than words about things

you both know there are no answers to, and why

the shared sadness grows more beautiful the less it clings

to the lucid delusions we precariously cherish the most.

You can rendezvous with her at zenith on the hyperbolic arc

of a burning bridge or a comet that’s only going to come once

and your detachment’s a deeper intimacy

than anything you’re ever going to experience

with anyone in life ever again however hard you try

to rinse the ashes of the falling stars out of your hair for good.

On a cold night like this, even an eclipse gets creative

and she’s the crow silhouetted by a moon blossom

rising in the west of a dead branch still lamenting

the loss of its songbird as she leans down

low on the green bough of the east and suggests

maybe it’s time to get over your grief by learning

to sing for yourself. It might feel like confusion at first.

But at heart it’s an infusion of growth and compassion.

All relationships with a muse are illicit. Like blue moons

it’s not good to conduct business under. So you don’t.

And mundanity’s at a premium only a mystic could ill-afford.

It’s like taking the future for a test-drive before

the vehicle’s on the market. And at daybreak,

whether you look upon it as an entrance or an exit,

by example, living it, it’s much like mentoring a star

that always woke up too late to greet its own light

how to say farewell in the dawn and really mean it.

PATRICK WHITE