THE SUMS OF AUTUMN

THE SUMS OF AUTUMN

The sums of autumn, the dark abundance of windfalls

on the ageing bough, a man, or a bell, groaning

under the weight of itself to cast the burden of its ripeness

down like a heart that’s been tolling in the sunset

and moonrise long enough to return its starmud to the earth

tasting of the harvests and famines that made the best of it,

sunlight in the spring flashing its knives like sabres of rain

off cold tears running like the juice of bitter, green apples,

summer in the blood like wild poppies in mangers

of scarecrow hay where he lay down for a moment

on insignificant hillsides along the way and was nothing

but a small perturbance of the wind silking the green grass

along the banks of the river as if he were watergilding with silver,

and the absolute clarity of the winter nights when the stars

were ferocious and beautiful, the bright vacancy of space,

brutal and uncompromising as an ice-age predator

that’s overcome its fear of fire. Dark nights of the soul,

stupefied by shovelling out the urns of nocturnal ashes

in mourning like doves, by the spoonful, when the lovers

throw their bodies like dragons on the pyres of desire

to gratify their death wish to immolate themselves

like sunflowers in a corona of flames in full eclipse,

as if life were self-taught, but love was mentored by death.

No lunar calendar of prophetic skulls, no rosary

of the names of God in transit like habitable planets

that might take a stranger in, no abacus of gravestones

in a cemetery of pioneer farmers can account

for the sums of autumn that sweeten the succession of zeroes

on the wild grapevines that bleed wine and water

from their eyes, spiced according to the season

by lemon moons and the rusty cinnamon of star-gazer lilies

when the honey-bees are firewalking the plinths of their petals

and the sting has gone out of the sweetness of an old man,

the anger and the hatred, the suspicion and the doubt,

reptilian moments in the plumage of peacocks,

the search for God in the spiritual lost and found,

the search for self, voice, fate, love, wisdom,

the mystic carillons of the spirit drowned out

by a choir of wrecking balls in a demolition derby

of upscale decadence in a free for all of unconditional chaos.

Listening as he speaks to himself now, he liberates

aviaries of metaphors that once captivated his ear and eye

like the picture-music of nightbirds that suggested

like a whisper in a mirror he was this and that

as if he were born the shapeshifting changeling

of a copulative verb with no future tense of now to speak of

or subjunctive mood ring to bring the blood to his eyes

like the longer shadows and wavelengths on the sundials

of his timely existence. Blue hellos and red farewells,

coming both ways like the embrace of a passionate triste

in the middle of a burning bridge with the lifespan

of a secret love affair with fire and water cancelling

the sums of autumn in longing and lament. As if

you came down to the river with a bucket

to help put a mirage of fire in the house of life out

like the overturned cup of an empty heart

and you’ve been shooting for the moon with both eyes open

to the rush of love in the rapids of a waterclock ever since.

In the silence of time, eternities expire when the sun

stands still at midnight and to have known it

as you know your own shadow, if only once in a lifetime

is to go on shining like Aldebaran in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, sign, cipher and paradigm

of the mystery of the meaning of your oracular bones

so much like firesticks in the firepits of meteoric thrones.

PATRICK WHITE