SILENCE HERE

SILENCE HERE

Silence here, long whispers of moonlight

suggesting things invisible appear,

occult constellations I read in reverse

on the chilly night air. Wildflowers

in the high abandoned starfields

soaked in the dew of ten thousand eyes

as the lone nighthawk of my overview of life

tilts its wings toward you as if the wrist

of the falconer were the bough of a tree

in the sacred groves on the island of Mona,

though I know you sleep in the shadows

of the mountains of Arizona.

Hear me, sweet one, do you in your dream?

I’ve filled your pillow with clouds

and the whimsy of mystical flight feathers

to replace the hard rock of the world

you lay your head down upon,

and pull the sword out of the wound

like the thorn of a star

from the palm of your hand,

from the kissing stone of your meteoritic heart.

And I circumambulate it thrice

like a rogue planet with shepherd moons

like lambs that lie down with the wolf

as if you were all directions of prayer at once

and I was marking out magic circles around

your house of life like a wolf star on the wind

high above the timberline

in an agony of longing to touch you

like candlelight in the secret shrine

where you go to heal the eyes of the flowers

the blazing of the desert sun

blinds like midnight at noon.

Too long I’ve been a lighthouse on the moon

for shipwrecks well past warning.

Too long I’ve been a night light in a morgue

to usher the ghosts of the dead to the best seats

in the darkened theatre of classic reruns

of the karmic movies they made

like double features of their lives.

Too long I’ve been the antidote of those

who were snake-bit by happy endings

that were mesmerized stone cold in the eyes

of snakeoil salesmen in a cult of spitting cobras.

Too long I’ve been the nightwatchman

who walks the long lonely halls

in a library of Coles notes and cheat sheets

where the ingenuous come to apprentice themselves

to the arcane grammars of an antiquated magic

that long ago dropped out of nightschool.

Too long I’ve been shedding

these old musty graduate robes

to walk alone in the skin of dragons

who know that true enlightenment

doesn’t maintain a teacher, as the masters say,

making a deep bow

and then going their own way

knowing their small magic is merely

the porchlight to a palace of wisdom

where you leave your eyes on the threshold

of a doorway into a zodiac of eclipses

where all the house lights have been turned off

and aren’t the signs of anything

you can see better in the dark than you can

by the light of fireflies trying

to organize their insights

into a constellation of first magnitude stars.

Existential mobiles! Humanizing chandeliers!

Who asks for passports from the mirrors

that coyote us through the desert

like mirages without any tears?

I’m a mountain range of ice bergs on the move.

I’m breaking up camp like a star cluster

to follow a gazelle across

the grasslands of the Sahara

long before paradise poured like sand

between the fingers of an hourglass

to tell it how beautiful it is

when it runs like a flash flood over the rocks

of a dry creek bed with a frayed delta

of lines around its eyes

like a waterclock of life

that knows it’s never too late to meet the sea.

And how much thrives in the wake of the journey.

PATRICK WHITE