to the memory of Charles Fisher
Where did you go? In what absence,
what recess of the mind are you abiding,
that I cannot see you, and yet
on the mast of a man still above the lifeline
your auroral pennant of blood
arises within me,
the distant intimacy of an approaching wind?
Elusive these first grey days of spring, as you were,
not an oath of the snow forsworn,
but the advent of a suppler genius in the promising,
as true to its beginning as you were all the way
to Bangkok and the end,
or as you were fond of quoting Horace:
“now it’s time to go out.”
But I never encountered you once
you weren’t returning from somewhere,
so where are you now that you haven’t come back?
Is there a gate in the terminal
for the eternally delayed
where your life’s being x-rayed
for poetical contraband, and you
savagely amused by the confines of the search?
Welsh eagle on the bough of your pipe,
you never grew old,
even when you were, you never
hobbled along those expiring roads of smoke
you exorcised with every breath you took;
ninety and change the last time I saw you
and you were still turning heads like heliotropes.
If ever a man knew how to live,
if ever a man knew how
to make an impression on the moon,
if ever a man knew how
to refine the rapture of life from the ore of his sorrows
and shape it into a flute
and dance to his own music
like fireflies over the water at night,
to the joy of all, it was you, Charles,
your special gift
to alert the ambiguous profundities
of the usual tolling of the lead-footed bells
that the young might live for poetry,
but ageless,
the poetry lives for us. As this does,
does it not, Charles,
trying to find you again like dark matter
behind the small blaze
of all these occlusive lucidities
crowding into the mirror agog with the light
so that all I have to go by
is a starmap written in braille
and this abyss in my voice
I release like a dove
to summon your shining
back to this candle wicked for the leafing
as if a love-letter from the spring
could still tremble like an early blossom
in the hands of the dead branch,
and knowing you, might well be answered
by a scarf of fire
around the cold throat
of the gypsy air
warming up to the solar flares
of your irrepressible flamboyance.
You gave me an iron ashtray
from a Zen temple in Kyoto.
You gave me the yellow belt of a monk from Thailand.
You gave me Dylan Thomas’s sweater
and a bag of ties labelled with the names
of the famous writers of Britain
who had worn them.
You gave me money when things were desperate;
and whenever I met you
I was always greeted like a poet.
Once you even wept over coffee,
saying I would be the last you ever knew
as we stared at each other
not knowing who
was the more endangered species
and the tears overwhelmed your eyes
and when I asked
how it was with you,
you said imagine a train platform
choked with people,
vital with arrivals and departures,
children, lovers, friends, trainmen, trains,
the laughter, the smudged farewells,
the exuberance of the greetings,
and then imagine
stepping out onto the same platform
fifty years later, abandoned,
grass growing between the warped floorboards,
tracks rusty, tall weeds between the ties
and not a soul in sight,
nowhere to go,
nothing to come back to.
I loved you in that moment; I never forgot:
you, so much a fountain
outside Voltaire’s studied window,
suddenly a well
you dropped your heart into,
knowing it would fall unanswerably forever.
I said something vague and numbing
and we both let the silence observe itself.
The Greeks may have honed you,
and the Romans and the French,
but the blade that cut through the bullshit
of that moment
was Welsh.
And here you come now, my friend, imagine;
twenty years later
and you a shudder of light
among your own stars
and your heart flown back to Ottawa
and your body prompted for death
and the earth on the chest you were so proud of
more than you’ve ever bench-pressed before,
and now only these scintillant gusts
of commingled memories
slipping themselves like postcards from anywhere
out of the inscrutable night
through the iron mouth in the door
I’ve left ajar for you
like a forwarding address.
It’s time to come in, Charles;
it’s time to marry the gypsy night again
and be Carlos in the caves above Malaga;
it’s time to swing your black cape
across your shoulders
like the eclipse of the night before
that covered you like a woman
whose passing you and Dante were devoted to;
and look for typos and grammatical errors
among the more literate constellations;
time to finish your book
and add another ninety years to the prelude,
time again to play keyboards
in the hottest rock band in southeast Asia,
time to tell a nymph of the Thai moon
like an owl on the first impulse,
that you love her
and you must have her
and descend to your assignation
with Eurydice
in the labyrinth of a slum
that turns around to watch you disappear.
I see you standing in the man-sized hearth
of a great estate in England;
and reading the Bible with monks
in a monastery in northern Italy,
and stuffing a Luger into the cord
of a silk smoking-jacket
to interrogate a Nazi tank commander
in the rubble of France
over chess and sherry and Shostakovich,
letting the amicable silence of the cultural moment
pry his mouth and baffled apprehension open
because you didn’t ask him anything
for weeks.
And show me a man now
who needs to know about the crow songs
the beggar children made up
to sing freely through the gates
of ancient Athens,
on the morning
of the festival of flowers,
and finds out:
and then takes a ’52 red Jaguar convertible
out of winter storage
and drives to Ottawa, top down,
as if Isadora Duncan sat beside him,
flaring like a scarf all the way
and there were no wheel
but the planet underneath them
to get caught up in.
Singular, Charles, unique, cavalierly specific,
people loved you, your character and style,
the intriguing simplicity of a potted cup
in a Japanese tea ceremony,
intimately regarded
for the masterful spontaneity
of the way the lacquers and glazes
flowed into each other
just so far up the shore of the clay
and no further as if not
to mask the elemental man
with more finish
than the moon or the cup
or the emptiness within demanded.
As the long and short of the bamboo would have it,
and the wind can’t help it,
and the fire doesn’t care,
you were always more of a guest
than a host,
more the leaf than the branch,
though the branch was always
amused and adorned
as it is now
on this first warm night of spring,
waiting like me to hear from you.
I heard a boy singing today
at the side of the road,
a stick in his hand,
mud, mud, mud, mud
and then pizzicato,
mud, mud, mud,
and I could feel you smiling within me
like an open gate
as if you had written the song
he entered by
and a genius as uncomprehending as spring
had inspired you both
to craft the new medium
into a ubiquitous longing fit for flowers.
So come in, come in, from everywhere
and wait with me, here, Charles
for the trains and the comets
and the blossoms and the children,
and the poems we will write
and the silence we won’t
to plume and blow in the offing,
and you can unfold the rising moon again
like a scrap of paper you took from your pocket
and read me the beginning of something new
that kept you up all night,
lines stronger than trains
and more elegant than willows,
the metre neat as whiskey,
as you travelled light
and declared much
in the terminals and stations
of your life and work.
Now I’m looking down
the long vista of these parallel tracks
keyed like guitar strings
to the distances they disappear into,
and my heart is the red lantern
of the spring’s first columbine,
waiting to flag you down at this crossing
like an overnight express switched back
into the nascent tumult of an unscheduled morning.
I’m trying to honour you
in the only way I know how,
but the margins are crammed with the inscriptions
of broken entablatures
and I will not suffer the redaction
of a pillar that is not fallen.
I will not rewrite you
in the weeds of a lighthouse in mourning;
I will not open my mouth up like a wound to the sky,
I will not lament the beads
of the returning geese
like the names of God on a rosary,
nor mulch the leaves of withered laurels
into your grave
when all of your life was the greening of the wreath.
What I owe you
for things you can’t even begin to imagine,
because there was no invention in the giving,
has enhanced the quality of my tears
so that now when the night urges me
to howl like a famine in a silo,
thinking of things that will never be again,
as if all of space to the limits
of what we are
were nothing but an acre of salted pain,
and poetry the mere tale of a scar
contracted in a holy war fought in vain,
I think of you, Charles,
buried like fire
among the roots of the living
preparing their flowers like floats
for the gala progressions of the spring,
the crow songs of the urchins,
Elueusis in the grain,
and I see your face through the mist,
a promontory off the mystic coast
of the country that wrote
the carol of your name
in the sprouting seeds of the firemusic
rising from the staves of the dull earth
like quavers of flame
and over the immeasureable worth
of everything that comes again like spring
to Almonte where you lived
as to me here in Perth,
as if it were always your calling
to enchant the fields like heavy bells
from their dark domain,
the godess ascending her stairwells,
fire in the vine,
over everything, Charles, over everything, everything
the gentle falling
of a warm Welsh rain,
the inextinguishable lyric
of passion and grace
that lingers on the face of a friend of mine.
I never knew from day to day
how young you’d be tomorrow
or under what star,
but I could read your face like a Spanish guitar
that had seasoned the vinegar into wine
and run it like a flag of blood
never at half mast, up your spine
to signal there would be no surrender to sorrow
lifeline after lifeline.
It’s right that we last embraced at a poetry reading,
You were the white stag on the hill,
looking back one last time,
the easy dignity of your bearing
before disappearing
deeper into the grove,
almost startling in the way it moved me,
the way it softened your eyes
like a cloud on the world mountain
that had shaken a man
out of the dream of a god
and raised him out of its shadow
like a fountain of stone
unravelling its streams in the light.
And I thought I heard
a wheel of distant thunder,
enjoining the clearest skies
you had ever wandered under
to drink their own reflections
from your peregrine lucidity
that they might know through your eyes
the vaster expanse
of the luckier perfections
that divine our chance humanity
and every once and awhile, Charles,
go that last, lucky, extra mile
that you always took,
with real style
and where they glanced
at the part about the heart of a man
who got up and danced with the wind,
the stars tangled like fireflies
in the hair of the willow
who was always your truest lover,
they marked that passage
with the tassel of a comet,
that page of the man and the book
that read like an ode
that even Horace couldn’t write,
and no one will write again,
you, Charles, you, my good friend,
who enlivened the light
like a tree full of morning birds
more vital than words
and when the wind turned your head
like the star above the eagle on the weathervane
so you could know the deeper skies
in the growing freedom of her eyes,
wiser than the lightning in the windowpane
that traces your name in its breath
and humbler than rain
that was never wasted on death.
PATRICK WHITE
