PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

PINE GROVES ON THE BATTERED HILL

Pine groves on the battered hill

giving birth to a bell on the nightwatch

as the moon rises like a midwife with a clean towel.

Pine cones like pagodas enlightened into life

like the eyelids of a fire that passed through

this summer like a poet with a seed bag

of first drafts. Ancient melancholy, lachrymose

secret, I can feel the ghosts of things

I don’t understand, slow tears at the edge

of the grasslands they’re lost in at the river’s edge.

Should I care for a darkness I’m not meant to know

as the bears are stuffing themselves on town dumps

and windfalls to fuel the winter in their layers

of candle fat as if they were still worshipped in caves?

I sit around the lotus of my many-petalled fire

blooming in mythic shadows enlarged

by the coven of trees they’re dancing with.

Here evil isn’t deliberate, and violence is innocent.

The thieves take what they need to live

and leave the rest. I’m afraid sometimes,

but the beast in my blood is in accord with the risk

and the cold air smells engagingly dangerous.

A warm rose spills from the throat of a quick kill,

the only mercy available to a snow owl that has to eat.

There’s more integrity in dying alone

in the woods at night for indiscernible reasons

with perfect timing than there is in dying en masse

in a drone strike as collateral damage.

It may be preyed upon but the white-tailed buck

doesn’t feel victimized by the unlicensed culls of the wolves.

Nothing can happen to me out here

that the beaver and the muskrat don’t

have to live with as well where skulls

are flowerpots and the ants mulch the Monarchs

too old and late to make the trip back,

that sipped on milkweed unfouled by pesticides

until they pressed themselves, intact,

between the covers of a collectible chapbook.

I like poems from the heartwood

with the bark still on them and a growing edge

more than those that have been pulped and milled

through a creative writing school

that sits in the corner like a piece

of erudite furniture meant to impress

more than unjam a logboom with the pike of a pen

or offer anyone a chance to take a load off.

I sit on a glacial rock and it feels like

the throne of the Stone of Scone returned to the Scots.

I hear a twig break like the wing of a tragic nightbird

in something’s teeth, or the dead are walking

the way the Algonquin used to along this riverbank

without ever imagining someone like me

camped here painting their features in smoke

as if all we had left of our common humanity

were the stars that looked down upon us

with the impersonal compassion of the tears

of the pines in their eyes hardening like a river

in the approaching cold of the dragon that shed them

like incense over the pyre of a coniferous miscarriage.

PATRICK WHITE