NOTHING BUT WINDOWS FOR AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

NOTHING BUT WINDOWS FOR AN EMOTIONAL LIFE

Nothing but windows for an emotional life,

the town dead, Saturday night done, this heritage silence

I haven’t died here long enough to belong to

reminding me I will always be a stranger until

I’ve filled up half a cemetery with my last name

to claim I’m rooted in the local starmud

like vetch, loosestrife, common mullein or Bouncing Bet,

when in fact all I want to be is a backroad to an unnamed lake.

There should be a Russian olive whose silver green leaves,

spectral with moonlight and wind should suggest

the exquisite metalwork of the Byzantines when it came

to feathering mechanical birds that could sing.

Let the fireflies shine on a par with the stars

flickering through the boughs of the ironwood trees

like a lighter that doesn’t work, more spark than flame.

Neither intimate nor distant, may the toxic weariness

of swimming through the tarpit of the world

like a watering hole on the moon my childhood drowned in,

never diminish the shock of the insight that I’m alive,

do you hear me, alive, a pilot light of blueweed,

still on in this crematorium and morgue of a night,

a peer of the stars and fireflies, their constellations,

and the wake of the Milky Way they leave like waterbirds

skipping out over the lake like stones that never sink,

echoes that reply in kind to the solitude of my intensities.

No rural aristocrat, it doesn’t take a body count

to make me feel I belong anywhere. I’d rather be

as I am, nothing in the emptiness that keeps suggesting

life’s never as bad or as good as you think it is,

could be a curse, could be a blessing, but rarely,

is it boring enough to be self-explanatory when it speaks

to the mystery of remaining so clearly unknown

to those who have harboured a dark love for it the deepest.

Whether I’m ready for the wind or not in this game

of hide and seek, I’m an ageing lantern now and the light

hangs heavy on me like the bells of a bruised windfall

I’ll return to the earth like the fruits by which I’ve known

I’ve had more in common with abandoned orchards

than thornapples, more as a preference of luck, than

a principle I’m prepared to kill anyone’s garden off for

like an early frost in the autumn when I set fire

to the thousands of starmaps I’ve shed in my life

to give their myths of origin a taste of shining for themselves.

I know I said pilot light but I could have meant arsonist,

or just as easily, heretic, self-immolating like the protest

of a Buddhist monk, or setting fire to the ten cubic cords

of dry, cracked, two year old red oak I’ve piled about the stake

of a black chimney pipe that shoots demons at the stars

like the sparks of the fires I’ve started, trying to get to heaven

like Giordano Bruno in Venice, or the soul of a pharaoh

to Orion when he heard what the burning bush had to say about him.

I was born with two eyes that don’t take sides like the black holes

of the Satanic positivists who define the light as what’s left

after you’ve exorcised all its shadows and left the sun

feeling the dawn gets all the aubades, but the dusk

doesn’t get to herald in the night like the beginning

of the longings of the threnodies of a hermit thrush

waiting for solitude to return like the echo of a voice

that isn’t its own, wise with the melodic melancholy

of a hope that hasn’t died, making a go of it alone.

PATRICK WHITE