FOUR A.M. A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

FOUR A.M, A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

Four a.m, a fraudulent silence falls over the town

like the night ward of a hospital, things going on

after the felonious ecstasy of people getting away

with Friday night, underground, healing the damage

by appealing to a new affliction more threatening

than the last just to keep some danger in their lives,

some occasion for the irrational, some implausible rapture

of sex or violence to break the spell of the credibly predictable.

Look at that. Eight lines of abstractions

and not one of my sacred syllables bleeding

like a rose in an abattoir, a thorn in my third eye.

I suspect myself of subterfuge behind this death mask

of ash and shadow. I’ve given my heart up so many times

I’ve lost track of the gods I’ve been sacrificed to.

Did it ever matter we’re estranged by everything we love

in time? The question summons old ghosts

and the moon smears a snailtrack of light

down upon the waters of life I’m not willing

to follow anymore like a star stuck to flypaper.

Let the ghosts fall like chalkdust from the blackboard.

Blood and bonemeal from the zoo of the past.

Those rootfires blazed awhile and went out

like a burnt oak writhing on the crest of a hill

like Pompey caught in the act at the moment of death

a long time ago when Pliny still taught the orators

the memory of deranged pictures is stronger

than the aniconic memory of words. Since then

all my myths of origin are apprenticed to a dream grammar

that has vowed like a copulative verb that means

what it says never to orphan me in a house of mirages

ever again. Never to root the cracks in the mirrors

of the insane in my starmud silvered by flakes of pain

peeling off the windowsills of the moon like petals of paint.

The sinner might care less, but when grief

starts to insist it’s in danger of becoming a saint

that’s far worse than the sybaritic beatitudes of Friday night,

drinking the gods under the table until all you can see

when you look straight in their eyes for the rest of the week

are the stupefied revelations in the lees of the light.

PATRICK WHITE