THE WILLOWS ADORNED BY THE RETURN OF THEIR OLD HAIR-DOS

THE WILLOWS ADORNED BY THE RETURN OF THEIR OLD HAIR-DOS

The willows adorned by the return of their old hair dos.

I’ve been mud-mashing my way down to the banks

of the Tay River lately through the primordial ooze,

now that the weather’s turned round, just to feel

with an overly sophisticated sense of childish anticipation,

Venus bright in the apple-green gloaming of the swallow-swept air,

as if I were playing with fire again, the flaring

of the wild irises of the spirit burning hot and blue

as hydrogen in the heart of a needle-shaped flame

that can see right through me into what goes on

behind the curtains of my theatrical third eye

when I come like an amorous arsonist,

bearing bouquets of dried flowers

I’ve pressed between the pages of a matchbook

as a token of an old love affair I’m annually immolated by.

Not as a martyr who takes things lying down

but as a heretic who does his time standing up at the stake,

though I’ve always been a little suspicious about the heroism

implicit in that. Even in the fires of hell

I’ve tried to avoid posturing. But there again, you see,

I’m assuming a virtue I may not have, I’m blooming in fire,

I’m shooting clowns out of cannons without safety nets

as the heavens come down around me like the circus tents

of the empty envelopes of day old loveletters

who’ve lost the scent of what made them so flammable

in the first place. Just because I’m waiting for wild irises

to break ground along the banks of the Tay

doesn’t mean I’m not a spiritual disgrace

that’s as hard to fathom as a shipwreck

in my oceanic consciousness as it is

to see myself raising the skull and crossbones

like a condor among the angel fleets of heaven

at anchor in home port just to give them a good run for their money

like the wind in an orchard in bloom

impatient to get beyond the first fragrance of things

and taste the fruits by which everyone of us shall be known.

Either that. Or I’ve got more of a river nature than I thought

and that could explain why I’m always talking to myself

like water in passing that no one’s listening to

in these solitudinous out of the way places along the river

I seek out like natural shrines in the woods,

trespassing against obstacles in the way of my pilgrimage

securing its footing on the bones of those underfoot

laid out like crosswalks and the rungs of ladders

stepped on like thresholds that stayed well within bounds

as you would expect any mystical stairwell addicted

to its spiritual vertigo like a Sufi at a crossroads

dancing with a dust devil of blue hydrogen stars

into ecstatic annihilations of satoric fireflies

who clarify the afterbirth of their clouds of unknowing

by sitting still as constellations on contemplative waters, to.

Besides, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with metaphors

to render the chaos of experience communicable

through some intimate form they can spend their whole lives

trying too hard to relate to as if it knew who they were

and were simply waiting for the right time

to let them in on the secret that it knows

nothing more or less about what it is or you are

than you suggested to it in the first place

when you began to take yourself too mysteriously.

I see a red and black baseball cap floating down the river

and right away I think of a decapitated tiger lily.

A fire someone put out too early to catch on and spread

like a spiritual conflagration of heretics

through the alphabetic birch groves of the Druids.

Does that mean whatever rises from the ashes

is thereafter struck dumb, deaf, mute and illiterate?

The counter-intuitive grammars of free association

are thenceforth to be demonized and burnt as witchcraft?

If I await the coming of the wild irises with poetic devotion

and the offshoot of my daydreaming to pass the time

is to see the eddies in the water like the tendrils

of wild grapevines trying to get a grasp on things,

couldn’t that mean that life playfully suffers

the same highly suggestive visual imagination I do?

And did its ears come late to the party as mine did too

and crash it as usual like an egg a crow drops

on the skull of a river rock anointed by the sun,

beaten away by the irate broomsticks of the sparrows,

because there is more instinct in swimming upstream

salmonwise against the flow of your own thought

on a return journey more dangerous than the first

than there is in painting watercolours

from the back of a hearse when it’s raining?

But don’t try to answer that question with your eyes open

unless you’re used to seeing things in your own light

and waiting for something as I am wild irises to bloom

like the sagacious fires of female dragon muses

on the dark, unmothered side of the moon

I’m seasonally inspired to sacrifice myself to

on the altar of a river rock that sticks in my imagination

like a vow of the voice in my throat

I made to the river as much as myself

never to let its beauty lack a messenger

that couldn’t speak in the tongues of the wild irises

without tasting my own ashes in the blue fires

of what they wanted me to convey

with a passion for extinction to the clouds and the stars.

PATRICK WHITE