A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A good day and night on earth for me would be

hurling paint at an eight by four foot canvas

propped up on a rusty hay rake for an easel

on top of a hill by the soft basswood trees in late September.

A thin thread of blue smoke rising from the farmhouse

down below, somebody home and a satisfied ghost,

rising idly like a spirit from the heartwood of a log

of two year old maple I cut and split and stacked myself,

ten cubic cords of habitable planet to make it through the winter.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

like the early Muslims under Umar ibn al-Khattab’s caliphate,

knowing the angels were going to visit the town

around four in the morning, knowing everyone on earth

were given bread and flowers enough not to go to bed hungry tonight, 
that everyone had something they wanted to get up for in the morning
that made it easy and exhilarating to be alive, wild asters

saturated with sunlight and the humming of clumsy honey bees

just below the window apprenticed to a telescope.

Short focal length, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector

on an equatorial mount with a clock drive synchronized

to the wheeling of the earth like a moonrise in Virgo.

A good day and night on earth for me wouldn’t be

knowing I was loved, but looking back over the tree rings

in my heart like the history of rain that left its mark on me

like every woman I’ve ever loved, sad, mad, bad, beatific

or indifferent to the fact she could make a locust tree bloom

as if it were enraptured by its own crucifixion, the crowns

and stigmata of the thorns it wore with prophetic distinction

like the first heretic ever burned by the new moon

who could taste the mystery of life in the ashes on his lips

when she kissed him one last time, and to steal a line

from Jim Morrison, turned his blood to mystic-heated wine.

Not to assess how well I was loved, but to feel extinct

knowing I gave everything I had to love and still fear

it wasn’t enough. It’s an indelibly memorable mode of madness

I may have fallen into like a habit that stuck like the La Brea Tarpit

somewhere along my antediluvian way, but I hold

the onceness of forever as lovers step away from each other

like an abyss on the downside of a dangerous precipice

up to my jugular vein a razorblade away from where Allah says

he is when I have no reason to disbelieve him. Love

is a sword dance with a waterclock in three four time so

a good day and night on earth for me would be

out walking with the stars alone through the high summer fields

quilted by wildflowers as the moon came up like a water-gilder

and breathed a skin of gold around every one of the tears

they’ve ever shed in joy when some cosmic egg cracked

like a koan in a dragon’s jaw and they were set free

like a winged horse beside Aquila and Cygnus to ride

their own eyebeams in the free range of the sky anywhere they liked,

when the wind throws off its chains like the rain

and I feel forgiven like a starmap for the times

they stubbed their hearts on my life like an asteroid belt

they couldn’t see in the dark on their way to the black market

of a species exchange on earth for something completely different.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

advancing backwards through all the stations of my childhood

and father myself like the man I always wanted to be

like some kind of playful wizard who knew he was

a great fool to squander his life on joy, but knew how

to stop the bleeding in a boy by uncuffing his life from a bike chain

or at least, when the lifeboat goes down, keep him

from feeling like salvage that should have stayed aboard to bail.

I want to mend that wound in every adolescent heart with gold

like the midnight sun smiling on good starwheat in the siloes

of a radiant end to a dark start. That what I sow outlives me well.

Like morning glory in the lobby of the Hollyhock Hotel.

If it were a good day and night on earth for me, it would

have to be for everyone else as well. I’d have to see

the homeless wearing new thresholds on their feet

that welcomed them at the door like prodigal sons and daughters

that didn’t want a black sheep slaughtered in their honour,

and every young girl weeping in the corner of a restaurant

right now so her friends don’t see her nursing a broken heart

like a voodoo doll gored on the horns of a heavy curse

might rise from her gloom like the moon-rise

of a Minoan bull leaper vaulting through the crescents

of her dilemma and landing on her own two feet on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE