FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

Foxfire blooming in the afterbirth of the ashes

that engendered it, green violins of unaged bracken,

the timeless lyrics of life reviving an old songbook

grown hoarse as paddlewheels and swans

making their way upriver by the lights

left on in the ghost towns of familiar ports of call

where breathless singers busked by the wharves

and watergates of the straightforward stairwells

anyone with sea legs ascended like a special form of a curve,

the uncarved block of the ten thousand things

the womb of an unborn guitar attached by its strings

to the abyss in the heartwood of a song that will

never be heard like the wind whistling

through the umbilical cords of a suspension bridge

swaying like an empty cradle in a forgotten lullaby

as if life burns its bridges, not just after, but as often,

before it crosses them to the other side of nowhere.

The words run off track, scuttle on the sandbanks,

dodge the light like fish along the shore, lose

their bearings in a gust of starmud from the bottom

up to the abandoned crow’s nests listing to the left

of the angel fleets like the masts of old growth forests

that put to sea like the skull and crossbones

buried in a piratical cemetery like the teeth of dragons

sown among nautical gravestones keeping one eye open

on the lighthouses waiting for salvage

to wash up on the beach in the red sky

of a false dawn in the morning that gave

sound warning to sailors in the know to pass by.

I say what I mean but the meaning’s drowned out

by the uproar of words with a voice of their own

that pass like carrier pigeons with a message

for their ears alone, the medium, an ink-soaked scribe,

blue as the glyphs of Picts, taking the minutes

at a seance I’m never asked to participate in

regardless of how I tattoo the inside of my eyelids

with the Etruscan zodiacs of the dreamscapes

and shapeshifters gathering at the transmorphic bend

where the river turns like the mindstream

toward the deepest watersheds of its collective unknowing.

The wind behind them, how many have set out

like beautiful schooners in full bloom to be

abused by their lives like garbage scows

after their sails were taken down like shark fins?

Set out to chart the stillness on the dark side

of the moonrise and run aground on the mountainous reefs

of lunar corals like sundials and astrolabes

taking the measure of their own shadows

in the shallows of the floodplains scabbing

for the lack of any volcanic depth to the pre-eminence

of their immanental extinctions. If the head

of the fish is rotten the tail will follow

like a thought wave in the wake that encompasses it all

in a heartbreaking farewell from the deck

of a shipwreck to the last lifeboat to leave the island.

Sooner or late the fire will run out of heretics

and no fat to keep them burning, the lanterns

the orthodox hold up like candles to the sun

to see in the dark will grow thin, dim, and lean

as the lights of the city of God disappearing

over the horizon of a black hole with no regrets.

Gravity the tugboat of the tides our lifelines

are anchored to like barnacles on a rock

we buried at sea, tears we shed at Gravesend,

all hands aboard, moonset to the west

of the unthinkable, sinking nevertheless.

Her pillow is soaked with snot and tears.

Her nose is running like a garden snail

that smears her stiff upper lip. Not the agony

in the garden, but still, a bitter cup to drink from.

He quotes his duty as a cover story

for following the psychological profile

of his desire into the misunderstood bedroom.

Garlands on the altars of love and disdain,

and everyone’s partially wrong enough

to be wholly right, and blame it on the zeitgeist

of the witching hour that has come upon them.

I walk by the Tay River like the grave of an old lover

some nights when the stars are blazing overhead

in the country dark, the infra red aura of the town

glowing infernally on the indifference of the clouds

as if it were putting lipstick on the mouth

of a drunk clown in a coma as a puerile joke

to mock him into laughing insincerely at himself

when he wakes up to wipe the smile off his face.

I’m isolated by the surrealistic absurdity I feel

in the mass appeal of the inexplicably funny

when the joke’s on anyone but this black farce

of common humanity like a punch-line in a morgue.

No epitaphs, but a gesture of living at its best,

Graffiti on the box-cars of our coffins laid to rest

after a few hollow laughs at the corpse’s expense,

the last call and curfew to top up our emptiness

as we steal the Buddha’s purse to buy the Buddha’s horse.

Those are the Buddha’s words. Mine have run their course

like a rootfire in the tunnels of star-nosed moles

digging like archaeologists for a future in the ruins

of their solitudinous starmud baked and glazed

into bricks of lapis lazuli left in the sun at midnight

they can aspire to like the past tense of the light

flashflooding like time and the Pleiades

through the circuitous labyrinths of their black holes.

PATRICK WHITE