AS THE NIGHT AND SILENCE
As the night and silence fall over
and random voices are dwindling in the distance up the road
as I vow not to remember anything at all the right times
to the muse of broken gates hanging on the hinge of the year
and o most rare
not to forget a single intimacy
of the mystic love tokens she’s offered me
like black walnuts and ruby-throated humming-birds,
I realize I’m swimming in beautiful illusions
where the starfish lie down with the sharks
and inspired by my own absurdity
and the lack of any kind of enlightened credibility
I’m free of delusion and reality alike.
Crazy wisdom.
The penultimate insight into nothingness.
Who could wish for more?
The streetlamps are still in bud
in the third week of September.
And there’s a painting on my easel
with an autumn sun covered in black spidery birch branches
like a detached retina
that’s been keeping its eye on me since
Free enough to risk entreating the stars to be kind for once.
Free enough to be attached to the things of the earth that are perishing
to ensure they don’t as if I were one of them
on the inside of the joke
that’s stranger than not getting it at all.
Show me the wise man who hasn’t learned
to take his inner clown seriously
and I’ll show you an eagle born without eyes.
Fortune-cookies with all the answers
like dancers with knots in their muscular thighs.
Overhead I hear the
as things are slowing down
and there are fire hydrants all over town
who’ve exhausted themselves trying to put the autumn out
that long to go with them just to know
what they’ve been left out of by holding their ground.
Does in the headlights,
two young women ditching a roach
at the approach to
wondering if I’m the troll
or the pot of gold that lives under it.
I sublimate my indifference with a smile
and keep my distance
not to spook their high
as I pass unnoticed as I can
up the wolf path to lonelier timberlines
without them knowing
I think one’s a willow with slender blonde sorrows
and the other’s a raging sumac with phoenix wings
who eats her own ashes
like the flesh of the anti-Christ
just to get a rise out of things.
PATRICK WHITE
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