I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I HAD TO WALK BESIDE A LOT OF RIVERS

I had to walk beside a lot of rivers,

miles, lightyears, trying not to impale myself

on a mace of dead trees or be swept

down a bank of slippery starmud

like an otter overconfident around the water.

I wasn’t breaking trail for anyone to follow.

A broken trail is where we all end up.

Poor Medusas. The toppled roots of snakey trees.

Frog spit on the stargrass and the trees

and the wet leather of last year’s leaves.

Dung, duff, and detritus. Sounds like

an epic poem. How burlap fell in love

with the aristocratic velvet of a rose.

Is that how it goes? Then let it.

With this proviso. That it never ends.

Misery and finesse were never friends.

The nightbird doesn’t begrudge the bell

its one note, and I drop anchor these days

like the moon going down behind the Lanark Hills,

just for a night or two, until the wind

can mend my sails like broken ear drums.

The chittering squirrel tries to have

a conversation with me but I’m sick

of the busy colloquies of hack writers

who think they’ve got a fix on the dark matter

of the mind in autumn, bluing

the post partum depression of the harvest

with shades of the moon that just came

to say farewell. The waterbirds have already left.

Homesick starmud exiled from death awhile.

The black walnuts in their jowls

are about as big their skulls, and it’s hard

to imagine anything larger than a chokecherry

for a heart. A drop of blood. Nuts

stored in trees like gravegoods in a library.

I’m imbued by the silence of the afterbirth

of the sacrifice that still wonders if it was worth it

to unburden its heart like an emergency exit.

There’s a sad equilibrium to what I become

in the fall like water finding its own level

because nothing much is going to bloom now

under the changing guard of the cold, cold stars.

I could cry my eyes out but the roots won’t

make flowers out of my tears until late next spring.

I could sing arias all night like a thirteen century

troubador in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine,

but there’s no one at the window of the heron’s nest,

and the crows roost when they should be on nightwatch.

I walk in the ruins of all I tried to attain

like a warm summer rain that had washed

the corpse of a human the night before

and felt the abyss of what it is to be no more

and throw a few cornflowers you grew yourself

into the grave like metaphors of what you hope

might come of them, or, at least, might

speak for you like the proxies of an everlasting silence

when death sees what’s it’s done, and lies about it.

Odes of rosaries around the skulls of the firepit

that hung itself from the rafter of a shedding oak

in one last attempt to come to fruition

like mistletoe for the lovestruck, and acorns

for the feral pigs with the tusks of the moon.

Too lush, too cold, the grass greens the husked fields.

The cattails explode like upholstery.

The cedar rail fences are slimey with archipelagoes

of orange mold. The bracken Jurassic in nature.

Eras roll by like oceans playing musical chairs.

The rat snake slows as its blood runs cold.

The waves flap like wet laundry on the line.

The inconceivable goes on forever, but it starts

long before we’re born and and goes on even longer

after we die and die and die and die

as if life held a grudge and couldn’t kill us enough.

Sixty five autumns have I seen. And the spring

begins where life left off at the first snow as if

everyone had to live November all over again.

Life’s a catacomb trying to build a water palace

out of uncashed pop bottles. Death’s

a pale young man on a crutch that isn’t

going to let the surgeons take his other leg off.

Or an Aztec conduct a heart transplant.

Must all living things suffer what they love most?

I hold a child in my arms and life is

perilous and good. An old man cries

like chrysanthemums for a woman who

once ran like a river through his dry heartwood

and though there’s no argument that time

can’t abide humanity, life is torturously beautiful

to no purpose in the damp solitude

of an old man’s eyes humbled by a second innocence.

The white meteor of a salt lick for the deer.

PATRICK WHITE