AS IF BEYOND DEATH

As if beyond death today,

as if I lay already under the eyelid of the moon,

the echo of my heart

pumping shadows

through my perfectly preserved corpse

in a silence that’s never known the wind,

a fallen wharf without arrivals or departures,

and sad enough not to care why,

blood on the dolphin in the black tide

that pours me out of the horseshoe of the bay

like a road from its boot,

wipes me like the pollen and dust of dark matter

off the windowsills of the constellations,

my unknown mass crucial

to the cosmic contractions

that might give birth to the world again,

and I’m here alone in the high field

drowning in the twilight with the wildflowers

and the sky a last exhalation of the blue-green luster

that flirts with the mystic violet

on a homing crow’s head

as the shadows assemble the wings

of a total eclipse

and a new dragon is born of the pain

that shrieks like lightning in the mouth of the abyss,

a torn animal

peeled out of its own skin like an eye

to add its darkness to the furnace of the black rose

that roars in the night

to blood the hungry mirror

with the thorns and talons of clarity,

to feed the wound of its existence

its existence.

And when I walk to the end of myself

through the golden rod and waist-high asters,

the seed of the stars that sleep with the daughters of men,

some of the flowers close up like fists and kisses

and others grasp themselves like a key

to a door that the whole universe can walk through,

and there are strange birds

flying from the eyes

in the rising skull of the moon

that sing like the pyres of cremated guitars

that died like trees in their solitude

and even the gates are weeping like wild dogs.

And there’s a wind, intelligent, dark,

the ghost of an ancient serpent

horned without ears,

an ocean of mind that exceeds itself like a wave

that howls like a secret it can’t tell itself,

like a root blind to its own flowers,

that wants to lead my voice away in chains,

that wants my tongue to try

like a leaf in the updraft of a fire storm

to scream its agony out in the night

so that even the furthest star shudders

with the horror of its final liberation

like an arrow through the throat of a caged hawk.

PATRICK WHITE