FIRST YELLOW LEAVES ON THE BLACK WALNUT TREES

FIRST YELLOW LEAVES ON THE BLACK WALNUT TREES

 

First yellow leaves on the black walnut trees.

The original digits on the wristwatch of the sun.

Waterproof to any depth you want to drown in.

The trees are homesick.

You can tell by the way they’re giving up.

Comes the season of the dead in harvest time.

The dark abundance of the light

inspired by the muse of the earth

to write poetry

that touchs everyone

like water and wine

whether the apples are gathered or not.

The mystic grape finds enlightenment

in the mouth of a human

when it breaks like a koan

that tastes of something older than the truth.

It’s good to walk through an open field by yourself

as if home were just over the next hill

as the night comes on.

It’s good to feel fulfilled

without knowing much about why

as if some subtle stratagem of the sky

had worked out a truce with life for awhile

and everywhere the armies of the grass

were surrendering their shields like flowers.

It’s late August

and the cedars gather on the hillside

like old testament prophets

come down to the river

to baptize their roots in fire.

Chicory in the eyesocket

of a baby muskrat’s skull

half-buried in the earth like a small moon

that returned to its mother’s breast

several autumns ago.

If the medium is the message

then the message of life

is its timing

and the whole of its content is now.

The dead don’t walk among the living

squawking about things

they’re missing in paradise.

Ten commandments might be good advice

but there’s one bit of wisdom

that wasn’t written on a gravestone

that threatened to bury you

in the valley of the shadow of death

like an avalanche down the world mountain

for ever and ever and ever

should you ever wander off the beaten path

by as much as one black sheep away from the flock:

It’s not your door if you have to knock.

Your life’s the key to your own lock.

You can ask the flowers.

Beauty isn’t enslaved by its own powers.

Clarity sees through the brave

as easily as the cowards

as two sides of the same fear

and no river’s flowing the wrong way to the sea.

Autumn is a lonely voice

that sadly rejoices in what it must be

but what mad wonders

it hides under everyone’s breath

like marvels it keeps to itself.

The best place to hide

is out in the open

like being and seeing and thinking. 

And if you smell the wind

at this time of year

you can tell that it’s been drinking

to drown its wanderlust in words

heading south with the birds

who carry the souls of the dead away

like fires that ascended to heaven

on a ladder of bones

and a spinal cord

threaded through the eye of a needle.

A snake sheds its skin and vertebrae at last

and turns its scales into wings

to become a dragon

that burns its bridges behind it

like waterbirds without directions

disappearing from their own reflections

before the first ice.

I reach the top of an old hill  

and I can see what I look like

a long way off from here

as Venus breaks like a mirror

low on the horizon

through the black mascara

on the eyelashes of the backlit pines.

And there are spirits of the air

summoned by the darkness

with eyes that glow

like charcoal on the fires

of yesterday’s myth of origins

to look up at the stars

and make up some kind of a story

about what they’re doing there in the first place

like the afterlife of the mystery

of the night before time and space

as if the history of our prophetic skulls

could still foretell the future

of an advanced race of cannibals.

You are what you eat.

But the time is long past

when I could tear my heart out

and offer it up to the unappeasable gods

like the fruit of a human

who has wandered the earth

like a rootless tree

true to his own homelessness

like a fire that kept faith with a heretic

who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Who would be there to receive it?

If I wrapped it up like a foundling

and laid it on the stairs of the abyss

late at night when no one was watching

or sent it down the river

in a basket I wove from cattails

like a baby in an empty lifeboat

drifting down its bloodstream

on its way to something better

than a promised land it couldn’t enter

what life on what distant star

would bend down and pick it up

like a message in a bottle

from life stranded on an island galaxy

waiting to hear the likeness of its own echo

in the voice of the light that answered

help is on the way?

And that sword’s been long drawn

out of the barren stone of the moon

that gave it back to the waters

like the blade of an old perfection

it once fell upon

like the reflection of a man

with a noble calling

in the absence of volunteers.

I haven’t sacrificed my innocence

to that invincible agony in years.

And there’s more than one crown

I’ve thrown off a bridge

like a trinket of my powers

to self-destruct

as if I knew somehow

you can’t keep

what you won’t give away.

You can run deliberately straight as a highway

or weave spontaneously like a river

but if the first

just regard the extreme chaos

of conditioned conciousness

and if the latter

you’ll shed many lives

like skies and skin you’ve grown out of

following the long journey of yourself

all the way from your tail to your head

passing like a serpent through the grass

as if you had a secret

you keep to yourself

that were better left unsaid.

But there’s a third extreme

that just as intense as the others

which is the way I stay the course.

I put wings on a horse

that’s never known a saddle

or been bruised by the stars like spurs

and we’re up up and away

as if we’d never heard of the Medusa.

The Great Square of Pegasus

going down behind the pines

like a card up my sleeve.

I don’t want to turn anyone into stone

or blind them with my shield

as if the light knew judo

and how to use my enemy’s strengths

against it.

I don’t want to decapitate anyone

who was once the priestess

who fed sweetcakes and honey

to the oracular pythons of Delphi

and long before that

along with her two Gorgonic sisters

was the virgin wife crone phase of the moon

shedding her graces like skin.

I’ve jumped into enough snakepits

for one lifetime

to know how easy it is to get in

and how nearly impossible it is to get out.

One fang of the moon kills you.

The other heals you.

But you’re never the same after that

and there are scars that hurt worse than the wound.

But you can see things before the arising of signs

and there’s a crazy wisdom that embodies you

like a candle in the darkness

talking to itself.

And I can hear what the serpent said

quietly to Eve

just before it offered her the apple

from the forbidden tree:  

Don’t lie to anyone you’re trying to believe.

 

PATRICK WHITE