THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

THIS IS AN OLD SORROW

This is an old sorrow, almost beautiful in the way

it underwhelms me from above, a sky caving in

like a circus tent under the weight of the rain,

a ghost of fruit that could not bear the weight of its tears.

This is a random sadness that’s got me as its only friend

when it thaws like a mirror

looking back over its shoulder

at its glacial past, ex-lovers, friends, certain pets,

and eyes that were glass weeping

in the intense mystic heat of a blast furnace full of stars

for how little they understood at the time, things pass

like Canada geese migrating across the moon

like a river you can’t step into twice.

Though it doesn’t make any sense to say so.

This is an ancient sorrow. And though one direction

is as good as many, I’m still following

the herds of the grazing stars as far north as I can.

O we shall sit down on the good earth half lotus sometime

and cry together for the wound of being alive.

The rose has teeth. And celebrate the scars

in the herb garden as if they were crescent moons.

Or the eyes of a powerful wraith of sadness

saturating the atmosphere with the pathos

of a lament that’s been sublimely burning

through its heart for lightyears

like some deep emptiness it knows can never be filled.

As if God would never be enough for herself

and the whole of the universe were

one long maternity of endless creation

that is manifested in its entirety in each one of us

the way the moon’s reflected in a drop of blood

hanging from the thorn of a rose

with the last of two beautiful sunsets for eyes

like the sheen of auroral silk glancing off the scales

of a black watersnake at nightfall when the swallows go in

and the bats come out on the nightshift

like the winged heels of some demonic messenger

with minions that squeal in a frequency too high to hear.

But however you send it, by sound or by silence,

by light or by night, be assured the message you send

however time and space bend things

is the message that’s received, like a bee by a flower

or a star by the eye that transcribes it creatively

into hieroglyphic metaphors of picture-music

following a dream grammar of starmud

with a bird stuck in its voice like a phoenix in the Arctic.

Time washes the dust of the road off

by shedding the moonlight like a snake’s skin

and skinny-dipping in the fathomless lakes of eternity

it finds along the way like eyes along the mindstream

full of stars and fireflies and what blooms in the soil of its sorrows

beside the stairs at the back doors of all those tomorrows

that left the way they came without saying good-bye.

Volcanic lunar oceans that are only as deep

as the dark tears I have left within me

when I dip the leaking cup of my heart

like the goblet of an impact crater

into a watershed of compassion that looks like the holy grail

and share it with my fellow mirages in this desert of stars

as if they were all as thirsty as I am and everyone

deep down inside somewhere within them

like the green star you can find at the core of an apple,

had a fountain within them like a moon dial or a wine glass

they smashed on the high notes of the nightbirds

just to express their joy as a kind of defiance

in the face of their lots in life, though, in fact

nothing is longer or shorter than anything else in eternity

just as there’s only so much time and then there is forever.

And it’s the black magic in the roots of a demon

that blossoms like Venus in the west

or New England asters up around Westport in the fall.

And though there’s something beautiful in this sadness

that eludes me like a Braille starmap

I can’t quite put my finger on to see what’s shining

like Aldebaran through the tree line of a bride in a widow’s veils,

as I listen to a whisper of flesh

pleading in the darkness not to be excluded

from the presence of time, or left behind by the spirit

like a false clue of cast off rags on a hawthorn bush

to say where it’s gone forever and ever and ever

as if whatever the spirit and the flesh had

going on between them never mattered,

whenever the clarity cuts through

the thin-skinned mirror like this

as if it were trying to slash my eyes open

like an insight into what’s beyond the obvious,

immediately out of a wounded mouth

I am healed by the balm in a voice of compassion

that rises sweetly like the new moon from the womb

of a scarred guitar that didn’t know it had such music in it.

And it says in moonlit windows and nightbirds

that make all the dreaming children wake up and listen

to the intimate strangers that speak as gently as fireflies

to the vast nightskies of their own imaginations,

that the world that casts these shadows on your wall

like a crow preening its feathers, or a bell

that’s lost its faith in knowing, and plunges like an apple

into its next afterlife, are merely the holy petals

and sacred syllables taken like pages from the Book of Life

left out like an orchard in a nightwind for every one to read

like a story each of us writes for ourselves

to help us drift gently off into sleep again

to find out how it all ends in a dream that goes on forever

like the fragrance of lilac in an old woman’s memories

or the marrow of the apple bloom

that clings like the moon to our bones

or stars to the flypaper stairwells of our chromosomes.

No other way to explain the shining of this sadness deep within

as if my very blood mourned the passing of the things

that have drowned and disappeared into it over the years

like honey-bees in the lees at the bottom of a black tulip

full of rainwater, and by that I know

this is a sadness common to all

that’s worthy of the stars in its windows,

and the dreams in the mirrors that paint our faces

like quick watercolour life studies of rainbows in tears.

PATRICK WHITE