IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

In the left front parietal lobe of my crucifixion window,

beatifically blue sky letting the slow motion clouds pass as if

they were too white and puffy to be solemn about things,

chilly sunshine casting a neatly cut geometry

of occult hieroglyphs on red brick heritage walls.

Sunday. Free. Blesses its own bells like the left-handed virtue

of a secular day to celebrate a shopping mall.

No mail. No bills. No threatening phone calls.

No answering machine that talks robotically

in the tone of a guillotine in the Reign of Terror.

Good day to write if you’re summoned by other voices

beyond the range of the usual crows who talk

about the dawn of another encore more like roosters than moonbirds

whose feathers turned from white to black

for going as they were told, but never coming back.

Words aren’t a medium for fortune-telling your afterlife.

They’re vital organs of the trees who have no other way

of singing about what they feel from the bottom

of their heartwood up. All lightning and root fires

flashing on the waters of life rippling like tree rings

when a fish jumps like the mind at a low flying insight.

Twenty first century siege mind, brain meat,

soft walnut in a scorched black skull.

I’m dragon-spotting forest fires from a long way off.

I’ve got a computer for a watchtower and a moat

and if I can see any folly in your madness

that passes for the grailquest of a loyal clown

I’ll lower the drawbridge of my lap top

and show you where to stable your horse.

It’s freedom itself to drift like the sport chute

of a dandelion with a flightpath of smoke

away from the thermals of the canyon walls

of an abyss that’s as open and closed as

a tight-lipped door with no expectations of

greeting my alienation like a threshold that means well

and even the silence doesn’t care if you’re listening or not

to every thought that crosses the moon

like a Canada goose that empties the urns of the dead

at midnight, the echo of an ancient pathos in its voice

even on its return journey to pick up

another payload of solitude like a hearse.

There’s no doubt daylight’s kinder to love

than most nights are because there’s less magic

in its prosaic approach to metaphors that only

glow in the dark like the shadows of strangers

in the niches of sacred doorways slightly left ajar

like a black star saving its last ray of enlightenment

before it goes out nirvanically to see better

in the eclipse of the mirror that nothing can be recognized

for what it is until it’s looking through your eyes

as if you didn’t have an identity of your own

but you were still willing to share your absence with them

like a well-thumbed starmap and a telescope

that occasionally weeps to wash the accumulation of stardust

off its lens for clarity’s sake on a seeing-eye night.

Down by the broken phalanxes of the cattails,

their pale ochre almost a shade of moonlight

on the broken lances of an old war gone long in the tooth

like the shell holes of biopic cannoneers sighting their guns

on the British fleet in the harbour of Toulon

and a sea of lunar tranquillity nothing disturbs for long

except the odd wolf nosing around for muskrat,

the willows waltzing with the wind like ladies in waiting

in the most vernal of their ballroom gowns

under the chandeliers of the stars to the music

of a river in passing like a mindstream retreating through time.

Funny what comes to you when you’re dreaming awake

on a late Sunday afternoon in a small town

that’s going on around you like circuitous ants

in the pheromonic labyrinths of the water-logged grass

greening their prospects of pillaging the larvae

of dragonflies that spend most of their lives as nymphs,

hand-picked by the sparrows like krill from the grills

of parked cars beached like baleen whales on hot asphalt.

PATRICK WHITE