BEAUTIFUL DAY. FREE OF THE WORLD. CLOUDLESS

BEAUTIFUL DAY. FREE OF THE WORLD. CLOUDLESS

Beautiful day. Free of the world. Cloudless.

A gift of my dreams, hormones, doesn’t

matter much to me, play with your theories,

More immediate and real. Events flash

like kingfishers and switchblades over

halcyon seas. Words rollick as if I’d

forgiven them a day off as yesterday

and the day before that to sing as they please

when dawn hits the tops of the morning trees.

I don’t care if life is good or bad, mascara

or mother-of-pearl. No doubt it’s sad, no doubt.

Still too aghast at the million subtle nuances

of suffering, and the horrors that cake like blood

to the past to have resolved the internal contusion

of it spreading like a bruise of deadly nightshade

over my heart. A body made for love. A body

made for pain. I delight in the absurdity

of the agony like a man who’s gone half insane.

Astounded by my awareness of anything.

The way I remember the columbine this spring

on the skull of the rock as if it had had

a hair transplant of a thousand lamp posts of grouse

sceptred on the crowns of their heads.

Memory’s the biggest challenge time’s ever faced.

I feel graced by the lack of intent behind

my intelligence, to have outlived all

the old purposes for being here that fell

like apples from a tree with a dull thud

softened by the stargrass in the middle

of the night when no one was there to observe it.

Protocols of the particle letting its hair down

like a wavelength on its own in the dark.

Who can imagine what the world must be doing

behind their back, out of reach, empowered

by dark matter that doesn’t make itself

readily available for interviews? Life’s

not a teaching device. There’s not a lot

to learn from suffering except you don’t

make things up that sell like greeting cards.

Silence heals what words fail to find a cure for.

It puzzles me to say it but poetry’s beginning

to smell like a corpse flower in bloom. O

the pollen of words. And yet the bees still knead

neonicotinoids into the most translucent honey

to fill their cells with like the petals of solar panels.

Feel like I’ve been walking through a valley

most of my life trying to have a spanky conversation

with the jawbone of an ass. I am not denigrated

by the size of the mountain of starmud, nor

the depth of the grave I had to dig my way out of

to attain a freedom of expression that echoes

among the peak moments of silence that speak

like clouds and eagles of the way we keep changing

creation myths to the fixed starmaps we project

like insect planetariums on the roofs of our skulls.

Further in. More deeply drowned. Gone beyond,

I rejoice without having any reason to.

Words wheel like pigeons over the wetlands

of invasive antennae broken by a lack of use.

The doorway’s been torn down that used to

let me in like a thief and throw me out

for the eloquence of my fingerprints

in a labyrinth of homeless thresholds.

Nothing but blue sky to lose my infinities in

and the sunlight crisp as newly laundered sheets

folded away like poems in the drawers of the guest room.

The mystery’s evolving somehow I can’t discern.

I’m uplifted by a fire that doesn’t burn. I laugh

as I scatter my ashes along a path with no way back.

First the rose petals and then the thorns. Just

the way the moon transforms its eyelids

from night to night like the cosmology

of star-nosed moles with divine telescopes

photo-shopping the lunar complexions

of their cover-girl conceptions of a black hole

that’s full of light, the waters of life in a housewell

but, who could have guessed, bright as they are,

know less than nothing about shining without

relying upon the dark to affirm it. Things

end and begin in the dead of the night

and the rest of the day is unimaginably irreproachable.

PATRICK WHITE