GREY INSIDE AND OUT. OCTOBER RAIN

GREY INSIDE AND OUT. OCTOBER RAIN

Grey inside and out. October rain.

How much darkness can a room contain?

Not much left to let go of. The glory

of the yellow elm across the street

revelling for one brief moment

in the eyebeam of the sun, naked

as a cobweb in the doorway of a cold furnace

the next, as if it had given some kind of offence.

Black bones of a bird that burned

and shed its feathers like a boa

on the playbill of an opening act in vaudeville

featuring one night tragedies with slug lines.

Only so many times you can rehearse

what went wrong with your life before

you begin to catch on to your own spontaneity.

Nothing happens for a reason. Relax.

It’s all out of control. Shallow-bottom

river boats without a rudder and only the leaves

for down to earth starmaps. Venus, Saturn,

Jupiter, the moon, I remember last night

when things were clearer than tears

how beautiful everything appeared

as if there were a sacred dance going on

and you could hear, even at a distance,

music coming out of the windows

of the broken-hearted darkness

that gave voice like ore to their shining.

Mortal. I don’t mind sitting this one out

while I watch the lords and consorts of life

weeping like mandarins geishas in the shadows

of the willows who’ve gone savage

over the last two unmannerly months.

The boy plays with fire. An old man

walks his mile scattering his ashes

before him on the pathway to senescent solipsism

or the possibility of being enlightened

accidentally by the appetites of Thracian women

for Orphic prophets that sing in their sleep.

I’m a waterbird in mourning on an abandoned lake

where all the canoes that once drifted freely

like moonlight among the stalks of wild rice

are in chains on scaffoldings above the waterline

and though the indignity still raises my ire

volcanically, I’m as apt these days to fall

into the caldera of a depression in a fuming firepit

as blow my top like the war bonnet of an ageing eagle

soaked in the rain like the flaming flightfeathers

of the staghorn sumac going out in a blaze of glory

like a wet matchbook trying to keep its pyre alight.

I’ve been saving my last blessing like a needle

when it’s asked for to reinforce the unravelled threads

that have spread across the palm of my right hand

like fossils of lightning tinkered out of the Burgess Shale.

One of the great advantages of having a longer fuse

than you’re ever going to live to see go off

like fireworks above St. John’s High School

is the creative freedom not to care if anyone

comprehends what it is your protesting

with a celebration of the lives of inflammable heretics

who died in agony still believing life was good

despite its reputation for being misunderstood.

Black walnuts, crushed like new moons,

eclipses, chimney sweeps on the sidewalk

as if a whole solar system had come to grief.

The amphorae of the milkweed wombs

more the urns of ghosts they breathed out

like a gust of parachutes on time-released

space capsules crash-landing like collapsed umbrellas

on rock and skull and good soil alike

as if the living were summoned to a habitable seance.

No more worrying about the buoyancy

of your swim bladder when you’re the shipwreck

of the first submarine on the moon to go down

like a fathomless windfall into the depths

of a life that doesn’t depend upon light at all.

Infernal fumaroles of Titanic smokestacks

belching like foghorns in a sunless atmosphere

longer than six months of midnight at the north pole.

Neptune’s off its axis. Must have been a fly by.

Or it’s bobbing for apples like shepherd moons.

No one in my life to leave myself to.

I’ve got kids. But I don’t think they’d know

how to relate to the paternity of a dead poet

who hung his catkins from their earlobes

like a do-it-yourself kit of home spun chromosomes.

Should I eviscerate myself like an Aztec sacrifice

of the heart to an unfeeling moon goddess

that’s never tasted the severity of her own knife?

She bathes in mother of pearl. I wipe the gore

of my starmud off in my grave and come up for air

like a white voodoo whale of unsinkable harpoons.

I doubt at this late remove we’ll ever see each other

again in this life quite the way we did once,

but if it means anything that can’t be doubted,

I still love her like a lighthouse that went

swimming alone in a storm without warning anyone.

PATRICK WHITE