SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE CONES

SNOW ON THE EYELIDS OF THE PINE-CONES

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.

Zen pagodas, meditating. Snow

on the withered stars of the wild rose hips

attaining the unattainable like Buddha

enlightened by what’s become of Venus in the dawn.

Beauty in the truth of abject desolation.

There’s a war going on somewhere

to judge from the number of amputations

the fingers, legs, arms, toes, hands,

the limbs of the dead trees

lying all over the ground as if the woods

were the collapsed tent

of an army field hospital in the Civil War.

The Fort Delaware Death Pen

if I were to take a wild guess,

or maybe Andersonville, who knows,

but I feel I’m walking more like a warden

doing his rounds through the woods at night

than a visitor among these who lie here

in this graveyard of wounded swans

glazed and broken like the handles

of old china shop teacups

butting their empty skulls

against the horns of a bull.

Not like mine. Pure crystal

from glassblowers in medieval Germany.

At least these get to thaw.

And you can see in the withered eyelids

of the leaves whose chlorophyll vision

was once poetically green,

now laced with strychnine and arsenic

when they burned like solar flares in the fall,

and the curtains caught fire

like the veils of an open window

with no one’s face in it

to reveal the mystery of who she is

behind the northern lights,

the works of an entire lifetime

clacking like abandoned fortune-cookies,

the hollow carapaces of crabs across

the silver pates of the blunted snowdrifts

ground down like the Appalachian Mountains,

older than the Rockies, worn down

like molars and glaciers

grinding their teeth in their sleep

but infinitely more habitable

than the nose-bleeding heights of renown.

And yet the leaves are not wasted.

The word was spoken.

The fortune foretold

of better things to come

like pears and apples and plums.

The slow autumn dawns of poems

ripened by rising stars and falling flowers.

Snow on the eyelids of the pine-cones.

PATRICK WHITE