MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

MUSING IN THE AFTERMATH

Everything sings, the shadows of the winter branches against the streetlamp

laced on the windowpane ribboned by dirt, backddoors and rooftops

and yet I am enveloped in this silence without wings, this voice

that valleys the universe like a drop of water down the spine of a leaf

to the root of no flower, no heart, no simple mystery of the night

maturing into stars. I’m in a room with books, paintings, lamps,

plants, computers, easels and cats. Things are neither right nor wrong

though I flatter myself that I have grown from mistake to mistake,

defeat to defeat and cloak the sum of all my failures

in the unconvincing authority of experience.

It’s rude to take your masks off in the light.

I try to see myself in the darkness like a star

with too much to say that loves to give its hiding place away. Forgive

this indiscretion of my solitude, but my name has obligations

and there’s nothing in the house to eat but swans.

Soon enough there’ll be a term to all these spectral visions

that add their shadows to the lead migrations of my thought

and traverse the motionless deserts of the skull-faced moon.

And what can I say to the pilgrims who come to visit my heart,

all these lean feelings without deceit or art

who crowd around the miracle like damaged mystics and moths

hoping their agony will be immolated in the serene ferocity of the void?

Space is only the rough draft of my emptiness

and ghosts confer in the wings like uninspired actors 

or lie detectors trying to interpret the crimes of my last passion play. 

Before I was born to cross the sky in a blue coffin with a black rose

among all these islands of light, I was the ashes of a bird

in the cold furnace of my life, a jest of the indifferent wind

that toys with the lamp and candle of my seeing.

Now, in every word, among a hundred million burning stars,

it’s enough to watch a vagrant firefly, a constellation of one

blind the universe in a single flash with marvel

as I slide down the helical bannisters of every descending starwell

toward the dark by which the dark is known.

Together with everyone I heed the mystery alone

and I don’t know how I got this way

or if I’m a shadow or a wing, the gesture of anything,

but when the moon is in my window, the night arrayed,

musing in the aftermath of life’s homely escapade,

a little afraid, I feel someone dying, and I sing.

PATRICK WHITE