THE SWAN FLIES OVER THE LACE CORALS OF THE TREES

THE SWAN FLIES OVER THE LACE CORALS OF THE TREES

The swan flies over the lace corals of the trees.

Albireo in Cygnus homing west.

The boa of the moon unfeathered

by the brittle eclipse of broken shale

that shatters its vase upon the waters

like a high note cracks an hour glass

or a snapping turtle rises

from the bottom of a lake

to pull the full moon down by the leg.

My path is strewn

by lunar peony petals,

by the twilight of a blue rose,

by the silk parachutes of the milkweed pods

by the ghosts of the medicine men

among the wild poppies

shaking their dry rattles at the moon

long after the fire’s gone out

at a ghost dance for rain.

And I’m sad like smoke

for reasons I can’t discern.

A peaceful sorrow among

the bells in my blood as if

we all mourned for the same thing.

Tears falling from the departing wing

of a waterbird rising out of the shadows

like a startling revelation of things to come.

Late autumn and the work

of fulfilment and loss is done.

The winged samara of the maples

lie all over the ground

in a no fly zone of cancelled flight plans.

And there’s a silence

that isn’t the afterlife of sound

deeper than the night

that’s closing in upon me

and there’s the skull of a snake

like a crown without jewels

on the top of a ladder of ribs

laid out on a rock like wampum

it wants to trade for my eyes.

And looking up at the stars

who can say the word eternity

even to themselves

without making the world

and everything in it feel like a smaller place?

And who can say the word love

even as a master of metaphors

and not feel they’re apprenticed

to a work in progress

like Great Barrier Reefs

and Gothic cathedrals on the moon

painted like caves in the New Stone Age?

The last of the asters

exchange similitudes with the stars

as tokens of what they have in common

like diamond and carbon

without really knowing what they are.

Whether one is the estranged avatar

of the other in exile

or merely intimate familiars

with good spiritual manners

on a first name basis

with what they feel they see

of their afterlives in each other’s eyes.

As it is with everything here

speaking in an unknown language

as old as the hills,

older than the moon

like a Rosetta stone

buried in a desert of stars.

The living word, the cursive script

of the original wavelengths

of a snake with wings,

circumpolar Draco,

now a pictograph of bones.

I’ve been reading the constellations

all my life, the mother-tongue

of an alphabet that said everything

into existence like braille I can see

through my fingertips

and read under my feet

like the footprints of a long journey

I’ve undertaken to everywhere,

dead twigs in the Book of Changes

trying to decipher themselves like yarrow sticks

and withered leaves, gnostic gospels

burnt in the Bedouin fires of fall,

all Mayan glyphs of a clockwork catastrophe,

Cretan linear B that talks to itself

like the dream of a sleepwalking Greek

gibbering among the dead?

Polyglot grammars in the tree of life

trying to make an aviary of words

without tongue-tying the roosting birds

to any one branch of the mystery,

any one note of their infinite vocabulary.

Aren’t we all trying to express

the inexpressible through words,

through the sacred syllables

of trees, stars, stones, the black swans

of our occult history, pine-cones,

caterpillars in cocoons

foggy as smudged moons.

Or dragonflies who make

a chrysalis of our throats,

this little house of dead things

we keep trying to give a voice to

like an echo of ourselves,

these hovels and palaces of starmud

we glue together like perfectly bound books

patched from the rags of our tents

torn like wild irises

in this time-swept desert of stars

abandoning our ancestral campfires

for a distant mirage in a wanderlust of smoke

to undergo our transformations,

snakes that have grown wings and sing

three octaves higher than they used to crawl

like an ambush on its belly

through the silence of the river reeds,

a shuttle through a loom,

the loose thread

of an earthbound flying carpet

unravelling like the moon,

shedding its skin like a myth of origin

generation after generation.

Here the spirits of the dead

are not summoned to answer

their names in the mouth of a medium

as if a tree in winter

were to call its birds back

to the abandoned nests,

the empty hearts it holds up

like begging bowls to the sky.

This is not the bone-box

of anything’s final resting place.

This is not the paleolithic tomb

of a retreating glacier carving

spiritual moats around sacred moraines

to elevate the middens of its remains

keeping its fingers crossed

like the ecliptic and the celestial equator

at the spring equinox it will

be reborn again like the sun

hatching out of its cosmic egg

like a phoenix at the winter solstice.

Here, if you listen, if you see,

if you’re a windwatcher like me,

or the crows in the tops of the aspens,

you can read what the dead are writing

in waves shuddering on the waters of life

like the lines of a poem

that has just touched your startled heart

with a feather of breath so poignant,

everything you see before you,

from the hidden wisdom

in the bones of encrypted snakes,

to the runic striations

on the prophetic skulls of the rocks,

is the lyrical masterpiece of the dead

to the living that it’s dedicated to

like a genius to an unknown muse

that whispers something in the crowns

of the leafless birch that feels as if

even as winter approaches like a new moon

everything here in this cradle

of life, light and insight

can hear the ancient lullabies and requiems

of the hidden nightbirds of the dead

blossoming in their roots long before

they’re published on the wind

like tomorrow’s waterbirds returning

to the dead seas and mindstreams

of the harvest moon that inspires them.

Not the coffin, not the trilithon altars

and gates of red-winged sky burials,

not the pyres of the sumac

cremating a phoenix with a flight plan,

but this crucible and cradle of earth

is where it all happens like honey

pouring out of the dark ore of death

indelibly as gold, and water, and breath.

This holiest house of transformation

where the dead hold the new moon

in the arms of the old, not

to teach them how to exit hell

like a bell of light out of the darkness

but how to enter heaven

like a thread of insight

through a needle in the dark

with your eyes wide open

like the seedbed of the dead

to a clearing by the side of a river

they know as well as the names of the stars

that bloomed here last year

like the constellations

of the New England asters

who didn’t wear a black halo of comets

this far off the beaten path,

or a crown of thorns like splintered glass

chipped from the lens of a telescope

but handed out new zodiacs

like superannuated tree rings

in the heartwood of an early spring

like fish jumping

through their own ripples

to add a little bling and flash

like starstruck earrings

to hang like vital signs

from the lobes of the new moon in Pisces.

Here in this place

where the arrow hits the target

like the wavelength of a hawk

sparing the morning dove

with a sprig of peace in its beak,

isn’t the end of the journey,

isn’t the acquisition of anything we seek

but precisely where the bulls-eye

of the expanding universe begins

under these eyelids of water and light

living us all like shapeshifters

in a dream of transformation

where the preludes of our beginnings

are already nudging their way

like a crocus of thought,

a moonrise of emotion,

out of the earth, out of

the spring thaw in our hearts

even before the first snow flake falls

like a distant star on the eyelids

of the darkening hills

or this nugget of a snake’s skull

exchanging wardrobes with the moon

swallows it whole like a cosmic egg

that has swapped the bright vacancy

of the first and last crescents of its fangs

for the dark abundance of the new

as if death and life were

the particle and wavelength phase

snowflakes and stars, waterbirds

and the serpent fire of red-shifted dragons,

were the life and death masks of the same face,

the same breath, the same bone, blood, flesh,

the scrolls and gnostic gospels of skin

we abandon like the myths of origin

of our last avatars, our last incarnations

as if the same size of life and death fits all

even as our skeletons are raised up

like hot dice in the throw of a winning hand,

snake-eyes, or seven come eleven the same

up into the stars like circumpolar constellations

as if they were nothing but thresholds

and event horizons shining radiantly

in all directions at once with no fixed place

that lets anyone stand in the doorway for long,

whether you’re exiting your coffin like a seed,

or making a grand entrance among the stars

of your vast, palatial homelessness

as if you’d just returned

to this prodigal house of life

a moment ago, and hadn’t gone far.

No further than the front and back doors

of your next life, your next death, pulse, breath,

radiance of bright vacancy,

eclipse of dark abundance,

like the new moon in the arms of the old.

Mortal ore with a lifespan of imperishable gold.

PATRICK WHITE