SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

SUDDENLY THE NIGHTWIND

Suddenly the nightwind comes

and scatters me like dust, leaves, stars, birds,

flakes of blood and paint from a dried rose

and I am nowhere again among the extracted windows

compiled like used theories in the mind-dump,

cataracts, fog, ice between their thermal panes

an obsolete encyclopedia of seeing, image, view,

skating rinks and skies that shattered like eggs

from which nothing ever flew.

Believe me when I tell you

there is not a flame or a shadow

as lost as I am when I fall like moonlit rain

from this endless pilgrimage of clouds

into the wells and watersheds, the dark godheads

and cracked mud of ancient creekbeds

once urgent with my flowing. And I am a fanatic

of unknowing when the darkness

overtakes me on the wing, an apostle

of undelivered monologues

humming like a powerline

in the ears of inattentive telephones,

the dirty needle of a compass

that has shared one too many directions

with the addicts of the north. In the freefall

of this vast space that confounds my eyes

with numberless illuminations, gravity

is just another superstition, light

a bride that leaves me standing at the altar,

baffled by absence, time, and futile distances.

Even the atoms of my body

are the liberated doves of a scuttled ark

that waits in vain for signs of land

when the waters roll me like a drunken sailor

far from any port of call

that ever pressed me into service.

I grieve like a passport

for vanished borders, circumferences

subsumed in parsimonious points

once radiant with lighthouses,

and all the clandestine crossings of my youth,

the zeniths, nadirs, transits,

all the date lines and ecliptics,

the equinoctial colures

that adorned my green meridians,

my perilous explorations,

with nautical clocks

and astrolabes that shone like jewellery.

Now I drift, an empty lifeboat

through unknown waters, the toy

of any wind and current

that wants to play me like a map

or a spiritual castaway

that grew old on the way to the rescue.

Even the language that I use, the tongues

I once mastered to implore the world to stay,

the tines of disaffected lightning

that taught me how to pray,

are the fossils of white serpents, harps

and combs of bone between the shale

of books that sank like continents,

the cacophonous keyboards of burnt pianos,

the scales and frets

of Pre-Cambrian guitars

that never learned to lie

by listening to themselves

like birds in rootless trees.

And if now I write with the unmanned rocket

of a pen that’s left the solar system,

sending back these junkmail messages

these chainletters without return addresses

in my search for intelligent life

to thresholds that don’t exist

except as the lost and founds

of imaginary households,

it’s only my way of whistling in the dark,

of trying to make contact with myself,

of riding to shore like a boy on a dolphin

or the crest of a homing wavelength

from the ghost of a failing beacon.

And though the solitude is overwhelming,

the oceanic closure of the dark

a rock on the tomb of embryonic ages

that will rise to their feet again

and learn to walk from heart to heart,

star to star

in a revery of origins

that seeds the journey back,

certain of their courage in the open,

do not mistake the obvious fools

for the hidden harmony

that guides them with an empty hand; there is

no plea or warning in my voice,

no call for help or a place to stand

that isn’t already the ruined capital of the going,

and it’s been that way for years.

PATRICK WHITE