AND SIDELINED HERE LIKE A BOXCAR

And sidelined here like a boxcar without an engine always from somewhere else waiting for them to lay track on the moon so I can get on with my ambitious deliveries a lifeline ahead of myself, everything sounds like the mournful whistle of a wounded bird, a killdeer passing away through the starfields just beyond the apricot glow of the tungsten roses that hover over everybody in town like tents. I can remember, young, when I burned with the ferocity of unadulterated salt to rise like a constellation of my own, a legend of luminous eloquence to crown the endless darkness of the throbbing sea that surrounded my empty island throne like a wound without a voice that couldn’t find its way home. I wanted to grow eyes that could write loveletters for the starfish imprisoned in a confusion of tongues; and a heart that hung like a lone apple that stayed ripe even in an abandoned orchard in winter for the bluejays, redder than an emergency exit in a morgue. Now I bow my head to the years like a streetlamp or a sunflower under a yoke of snow dreaming of seeds like lovers and poems I let go of to open their vagrant eyes in gardens of their own. And I’m not dead yet, but the voids that have come like the homeless to the wrong return address, deepen the echo of my own pleading through the vastness of a wilderness that swallows me like my own words in the wingless distance. But there’s no point in bewailing the failure of the astral gravel I tamped under the ties of all the translunar runs the soft clay of my own shiftless humanity derailed, the headstrong midnight expresses that toppled into a junkyard of thought trains that over-reached the trembling trestles of my bones only to fall like a bad hand of death stars from a plague-marked house of cards. I still follow the blind Polaris of my destiny, an outrider on an iron horse that follows the lines of track like surgical stitches on starmaps of my own even if it be to have none, even if it be I do nothing more than trace my name in the scars of a hundred late-night collisions with my own mountainous immensities, the ghosts of an extra-gang in northern B.C. aligning the lengthening shadows of my passage to the sea. PATRICK WHITE