I DON'T KNOW WHAT THIS IS

Day: 13

I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS IS

It’s a hole, it’s a dread, it’s a gate, it’s a door, it’s a garden.

It’s a calender of labyrinths on the moon with my

fingerprints on it. It’s nothing, it’s everything, it’s oblivion.

The long forever with a tide that keeps going out

like the red wavelengths of the veils and the death shrouds

that hang like the spider webs, mandalas, and dream catchers

in the windows of the nets of wonder and allurement so the eyes

in its blood can mark the night with stars as if

the waters of life were forging swords in the moonlight.

It’s a threshold we put there to step across

into the vast night ahead of us like a firewalk with ourselves

among the wild irises when the obsidian water snakes

are hunting the eggs of the frogs among the wild irises.

Everybody’s got a window in their heart with a name on it.

Everybody’s got a tree they sit under with a god

that intrigues them with its silence, its solitude,

its chaos. An abyss that sprouts quail in the burning underbrush.

A conflagration of daylilies started by the pilgrims

lost in the valleys of the rootfires of the holy ghosts

of the cedars and the birch trees, worshipping smoke

that reeks of oak and mistletoe. Lonely nightbirds

who’ve given up waiting for an answer to their prayers

and just sing in the ear of the silence that’s unattainable

with longing made fair by the intangible moonrise.

A bubble, a lightning bolt, a firefly, a hungry ghost, the mist

hanging on a blade of stargrass like the pearl

of a sacred syllable that spoke like water of darkness

and light, equally alike, without staining the mind

with a choice it didn’t have to make for itself to stay outside

and keep a firepit it was in love with company for the night

as the wind and the dawn appointed windfalls to the stars

like shepherd moons and planets they gathered

like a rosary of prayer beads that had forgotten

what they’d ask for in the presence of a magnificence

that already knew them. La, la, the lives one sing in lonely echoes

of the waterbirds and hills across a gulf of dread

as empty as the urns of the dead that were scattered

across the rootfires of the stars and the ashes of the roses

that adored them. Never let it be said the wind

didn’t know the weight of our wings, or the sun

didn’t cradle our faces in the hands of the light

and look upon us like a child that had done something

right for a change of heart toward the darkness

that surrounds us like a window with a name on it

blithely perishing into its own blindness like a candle

in the morning light of a chimney where the birds

are singing brightly to the angels that awoke them

from the dreams of the locust tree that slowly died

on the nightwatch of the moon that softly cried

in the shadows of providence foregone with time

in a tide of bells and watersheds and housewells

that closed their eyes like the brine of a memory

that hurt because it was so beautiful it was wise

in the ways of the remote like a secret it kept to itself

among the leaves and the unsigned loveletters of an event

so spectacular that silence put a finger to the lips of solitude

and said speak no more of it as the words descend like snow

through the lamp posts of what was not disclosed.

PATRICK WHITE