COME NIGHT

Come night and the ease of being alone with the rain on the window. The pain is more acutely human. And the mournful trains in the darkness get on with the homely business of being us. I turn the light around more deeply inward and discover there are tears on the other side of my eyes that have been falling for years into the mirrors of a kindlier likeness. So much doesn’t matter, but the little that does, overflows the cracked cup of the world. Come night and I am swayed like a leaf on the stream; come night and I am the ploy of a thousand suggestive faces that people the way things seem. I am the dream, I am the dream, I am the dream, and when it’s true, the dream is me. So much I wanted to do; where did the wanting go? The clock limps royally by in iambs contemptuous of the freedom of the verse, but it isn’t time that heals the unspeakable wound that is suffered by everything as if the sky wore the moon like a scar; it’s the night that grows its herb in the injured seeds of who we are. On the tongue of every blade of grass, a star, a voicing of the light within no cloud could foil. Come night and our roots digress in the soil that fervently dreams of us, that summons our lucidities like inspiration to enlighten its toil with urgent transformation. The trees, our lungs; the seas, our eyes, and our minds, the unwitnessed clarity of a sky that isn’t there to obstruct the night, there are water and fire, light, blood, star, and thought streams within that run down from the mountains far beyond us like the coloured threads of a forgotten wholeness unravelling like a childhood sweater, lifetime after lifetime, to thread the eyes with vision and amend the absence with poetry.

PATRICK WHITE