A SEANCE OF SPRITES AND GHOULS IN THE
CABALS OF EMPTINESS
A seance of sprites and ghouls in the
cabals of emptiness
as the train whistle mourns across town
out of the darkness
looking for its lost child somewhere
along the tracks
where last night’s waning moon put
its head
down on the rails as if it were
swanning on the block
like an uninhabitable planet jumping
orbits
to coyote into the Goldilocks zone like
an illegal alien.
O let the midnight special shine its
everlovin? light on me.
Not the first time I’ve been up with
these novice ghosts
in the darkest hours of the early
morning and felt
this relentless sense of incompletion
aching in the air
like dry ice in the tears of frozen
mirrors locked in grief.
I’m a halfway house for successful
suicides and my abyss
is their abyss and that’s about as
close as they’re ever
going to get to the flavourless taste
of death again,
clinging like old gum to the underside
of their vacant desks.
I let them terraform moonscapes out of
my starmud
on the dark side of things as if they
were sculpting
life-size glaciers of themselves hoping
they might
thaw out like crocuses and early
waterlilies in the spring,
but they’re only irrigating their
birth canals with glass
like Schiaparelli’s Martian
aberrations on the lens
of an extinct intelligence that left
signs of itself
in the wastes of an occult catastrophe
that has yet
to be determined like the history of a
future
that happened only yesterday in an
ice-age of desolation.
Even in the dead of winter, I keep a
green bough
in the leafless tree of my voice should
anyone remember
the lyrics of the nightbirds they were
once a moment ago
when they longed for things they didn’t
know
how to ask for, or were refused, from
the people who
were suppose to love them and did, or
didn’t
and still don’t though it came as a
shock to their indifference
how feeble and transitory the webs and
mandalas that bind us
to one another are and how little it
takes
for a squall of stars to sever them
like
the Medusan wavelengths of Al Gol in
Perseus,
or spinal cords and the coinage of new
moons
and total eclipses holding their breath
as death comes on
like a punchline to the perils of
Pauline in parallel universes.
How much respect we accord the dead
than the little they received in their
lives.
How easy it is to open our eyes like
windows
balanced by lead coffins lowered into
wishing wells
and take the executioner’s hood off
the bird cage,
the sky off its perch and let the
spirit of life spread its wings
and fly with Cygnus and Aquila on a
brilliant seeing night.
I crack the seal of the past like the
plack of old paint
supergluing my eyelids shut with
thick-skinned dreams
like a massive picture frame that
squints like a postage stamp
through the keyhole of an astronomical
view
of a shattered mindscape lightyears
beyond the windows
I let the birds and the fireflies
bearing the souls of the dead
whose bones are chalk dust on the moon
come and go by
in a riot of spontaneous mayhem full of
vital possibilities
acutely aware of the chaos that
troubles their graves.
With every breath they try to take like
a candle in a vacuum
that abhorred its nature enough to deny
the moonrise
passage through the whitewater turmoil
of their apple bloom
scattered by the cold-hearted gripe of
bitter green winds,
I try to mingle a lost atmosphere or
two of my own
hoping they can cling to that for
awhile like shepherd moons
trying to reanimate the dragons in the
ashes of their urns.
I let the dead dwell within me in the
empty warehouses, silos
whiskey barrels, abandoned hives and
aerodromes whose wings
have lost their flightfeathers like
grounded maple keys,
so they can still taste a patina of the
honey and firewater
that remains like an echo of the
longing to live again
like the lyrics of the excruciating
nightbirds
that destroyed their voices crying out
for the unattainable
like a crosstown train keening like a
hopeless wind
through an unmarked cemetery of
palliative road kill.
PATRICK WHITE
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