TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

Time grieves in me, autumn in the apple.

Warm sugars in the dusk, my body mourns

the flowering farewells of what has passed,

the eerie twilight smiles of ghosts at the gate

I haven’t seen in lightyears, heraldic seabirds

this far off the coast of an approaching landfall

where I’ll step out of the lifeboat claiming

nothing in the name of anyone who doesn’t

already live there like the private diary of a sundial,

whether they cast a shadow or not, or time

loses its sense of direction in eternity between

one thought-moment and the next, and the waterclock

I was will say out of what I remember of being human,

no destination, you’re free to drift as you wish.

Or if the arrows’s broken for good, the weathervane

doesn’t crow anymore like a cast iron rooster

in a dawn that doesn’t distinguish its voice

from the silence of the darkness that absorbs it

like the white noise of the mute and the dumb

as back up singers to the background cosmic hiss,

let space do the flowing as a change of pace.

Sit on your hands. Unborn. Unperishing.

Embrace your own stillness like a starmap

making plans not to do anything more for the night,

knowing space is as important as timing used to be

to content, when you were all creation myth

in the beginning, and untimely allegory of perishing

at the end. And the young? How you baffled them

lingering in the doorway of an abandoned house of life

they ran to for sanctuary like an old man with nothing

but room on his hands. Be a sea to the waterbirds.

Be a sky to the stars. Death the measure

of how far we’ve walked together without ever

coming to a fork in the roads where we parted company

and birth, the second innocence of the return journey,

better than the first, because, like the flowers of earth,

didn’t we always cherish those most that bloom last?

Oceans ago. When we took the height of starfish

to know how far we’d sunk, and plumbed the eyes

of blackholes with galactic irises for haloes

to determine how long it would take for a shipwreck

to rise again on the event horizon of our next port of call.

Black sail, white sail, same photograph

flying the colours of a country not our own.

Cool bliss I’m beginning to trust, and lust,

God bless lust, taking its time like a slow cologne,

savouring what it used to gulp as if it were

trying to make an ice-cream cone last. Self-sufficiently

mad enough to be gainfully-unemployed finishing

the long labour of destroying my life creatively

I’ll go down into the underworld with my tortoise-shell

abalone Chinese voice-box within a voice-box,

that’s saved every echo of the sirens and muses I’ve ever listened to,

and death or no death, I won’t waste my futility on

trying to make sense of it all, crying over

the vaporous nature of tears. Death is no business

of mine. And life’s a long holiday I took in the flesh.

But I’ll ask her to come with me just the same.

She’ll look back on everything and her hand

will slip from mine like a loveletter of lifelines

out an envelope that hasn’t got anything

to look forward to but what’s been left behind

like a name traced in an afterthought of dust

on a windowsill, an old threshold of seeing

like a bird with a message, a star, a housefly,

the tuning fork of a mosquito, a lightning strike,

a firefly, the wind before a veil of rain, a firefly

that looked down upon the rooftops of a small town

with tears in its eyes for what transpires here,

and a telescope with a hand-painted lens of what it wants to see

when the mirages I crossed starless deserts for

are too near, far too near to my heart to be believed.

Never tell anybody the truth about the causes

and conditions of suffering, and love that asserts

it doesn’t have any, unless there’s enough

mercy in your heart to remember that we

are all humans, expressions, not definitions of ourselves.

But I’ll praise her in such sad, hermetic songs

the great secret of love and life and art

can’t help but speak for itself through her eyes alone,

neither true to the sunset she shines in, nor

false, when she rises before it, to the dawn.

PATRICK WHITE