EMERGENCY NOCTURNE

EMERGENCY NOCTURNE

The moon breathes its own reflection

on a late night windowpane

then watches it shrink, a tumour

or a civilization on the wane. A needle of light

draws from an inkwell of night

and signs an arm.

The stars go off like a fire-alarm.

A tomcat howls in the alley,

an agony of evangelistic hormones,

while the poet in the upstairs apartment

ponders suicide like a rose

he wants to give his bride.

Spring is a peacock in a chimney

that longs to bloom

stuck like a heart or a word in the throat.

Love is an empty lifeboat

crushed by the fractious thaws

and icy faults of March.

Across the street from the hospital

in its memorial garden of tungsten lights,

its parking meters and streetlamps,

perpetually budding daffodils,

metal madonnas with luminous faces

peering down on asphalt,

industrial pietas of aluminum and glass,

a living man returns to his ghost

like any other Tuesday

with proof of nothing on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE