I'VE AGED LIKE SNOW

I’VE AGED LIKE SNOW

I’ve aged like snow

rounded by my own thawing.

Something’s gone cold inside

like the grave pit of a jewel

that rose from the dead

and left this terrible absence

as if one my eyes were missing.

But when I think about it

a minute or two longer than I should have

when has it ever not been so?

Cold, but I can still burn.

And not one candle in a niche at a time

but whole constellations arrayed

to squander their radiance on nothing

as if they were showing time and space

how to party.

And I’m not deaf to the big foghorns

groaning like dying dinosaurs

on the Pacific coasts of consciousness

that remind me time is passing

like an island in the night

I might be marooned on.

Desolate assessments of what’s ahead

through a long winter of solitude.

The worst lies are the ones

people stick in their ears like fingers

not to hear the cries of the drowning.

So I don’t. I listen.

But sometimes my helplessness drives me so mad

not knowing what else to do

I start dancing with the fireflies on shore

until I’m so tranced out

for one more night or two

I feel like a great bonfire of life

that set its last lifeboat ablaze

to shout out into the darkness

at the first star I see

break the gloom

like a ship on the distant horizon,

for the sake of the fireflies, the dance,

the drowning, the island and me,

Hey, we’re here.

We’re over here.

For God’s sake, we’re over here.

But after awhile I return to my senses

and it's just one more wavelength after another

like the widening wake of something that’s passed,

washing the bodies of people

I used to know and love

like blood of my blood

and flesh of my flesh

up on the beach

like a cargo of immigrant dolls

who’d paid for their passage to the other side

where things were supposed to be more beautiful

but the way things went down

couldn’t swim for their lives.

With sorrow and anger

for what’s happened to them

not caring if it’s the right attitude or not,

only that it’s human,

I gather them up one by one

and sit them around what remains of the fire

to dry off and get their bearings again

like a zodiac that lost it for awhile,

and I talk to them

about all those trivial things I remember

I never thought would mean

more than the world to me now.

PATRICK WHITE