AT PEACE WITH THE SADNESS OF MY SOLITUDE

AT PEACE WITH THE SADNESS OF MY SOLITUDE

At peace with the sadness of my solitude

I sense your presence like the estranged music

of a mood drifting out of a miasmic abyss

that almost overwhelms me as intimately as it did

lifetimes ago when the thorns were still green

on the rose and I wasn’t quite as sure then

as I am now they’ve hardened enough to penetrate

the heart with how immensely someone

can long for the dead like an empty lifeboat

appearing out of the soft glow of the fog

in a blur of moonlight, the fragrance of an apparition

that ferries me back in the undertow

of oceanic emotions like an s.o.s. at a seance

intimate with the prophetic sincerity of your absence.

More springs than I have left to live

I gave up judging the insufficiency of my love

to break the generic grip of death

you so severely desired to die in the arms of.

I see you in the feathered war bonnets

of the new leaves of the trees I’ve forgotten

the names of since I stopped sitting under them alone

too numb to be troubled by the lightning,

too cold to rise above the absolutes

like a thermometer filled with frozen blood.

Land-locked among the ten thousand lakes

of a shattered mirror I held up to my broken nature,

I followed you as far as I could like a train whistle

into the distance where time and silence

are indistinguishable destinations, and then

I sat down like a drunk with a lantern

at the side of the tracks, and I waited, o

it must have been eras for you to come back

before I lifted my head off the rails

of our parallel thresholds and returned

to the spiritual hovel of my homelessness

grateful to touch something solid again

as if all I had to lose was a key to a door

that didn’t recognize me on the inside anymore.

Nor would you any of the death masks I’ve shed

like the eyelids of the white peony of the moon

scattered in diaspora on the waters of life

when I woke like a ghost from a recurring dream

of the way I once imagined you returning

to the surface like the buoyant skull of a moonrise

asking me if I still remembered your face

and could I love you now like a leper colony.

It’s still easier for my heart to make sense of your love

than it is for my mind to attribute a meaning

to your death as you once said it wouldn’t have.

But whenever I grow weary and irritable at

the chronic torment of casting lifelines out to you

that have inadvertently rescued many for your sake

like dolphins cut out of the fishing nets of the constellations,

I bury you in pearls like new moons among the coral

in the lunar gardens of dead seas swaying

to the music of water snakes among the shadows of kelp

beyond the range of the wavelengths of the nightbirds

that haunt my voice like a mindstream whispering its way

through the hidden watersheds of the willows

with stars in their hair as bright as they were in your eyes

when these clouds of unknowing were dispersed

like nebulae breaking into light with every breath

you took in and let go like a woman swimming away from shore

as if we’d all learn to live out of our depths at last.

Diving bells among the shipwrecks that don’t ring

when they mourn. Foghorns that don’t bother to warn

ships in the night there’s no shallow passage

when they encounter each other on the Road of Ghosts

like the lights of Port Angeles across the Georgia Strait,

heavy with a cargo of imported coffins, and the heart,

as always, ballast they’re trying to throw overboard

to lighten the load and rise above the waterline, float

like waterlilies umbilically moored in our starmud

or the Little Dipper of the north star bailing glaciers

like delinquent waterclocks out of a sinking lifeboat.

PATRICK WHITE