AMONG THE SKELETONS OF THE SUNDIALS
Among the skeletons of the sundials
what deficits of time remain unlived,
unfulfilled?
So much forfeited to what crowded it
out.
And the more that was said, the more
fraudulent and incomplete what we
wanted to sing.
Too many murmuring windows, too many
trashed doorways to the collusive
shelters of the heart.
We saw the stars, and how few learned.
We went to war for reasons
that have forgotten us now
and though there were those
who sternly waited like iron gates
no one returned to their secret gardens
or the silence as they had left it.
I watched from an island as the sea
flexed
into the muscle of my generation
to celebrate a dream that hasn’t
happened yet
and tear the veils off the multi-eyed
spiders
and make them wince in a succession
of photo-op acid flashbacks
that stunted the weaving a moment or
two.
It was what we could do, not what we
did it for,
and the idealism of it all was merely
the afterthought of the alibi for the
release
of so much sunamic energy that would
sooner
walk on water in Jesus boots, than
float
the way the usual bloated corpses did.
The earth shook and the bridges and
cornerstones
sank into quicksand, and the black
roses
of the La Brea tar pits swallowed their
worms.
And then the profit margins of the
corporations
went helical as a stairway to heaven
and heaven came down to earth, and
money was made.
Love and understanding exploited
as natural human resources. Spiritual
materialism.
Light My Fire became the enlightenment
path to cars.
I was there. I still wear more scars
than I do flowers.
And I can remember the day the sundials
died
in aesthetic gardens of unconcern and
though
I loved the colours and the creative
efflorescence
of unconditioned minds here and there
who had avoided madness by an eyelash,
it was only our lack of years for a
summer or two
that kept us from saying the word,
pure, with filthy mouths.
Too early for the fountains to fester
yet.
Too late to heed the omens of the
sundials.
Alchemists of liberty, we had turned
our iron cages
into golden ones and the doves shook
against their bars
like philosophers who could still see
the stars outside
that beckoned them to leave, the doors
were open,
but stayed within the precincts of
their lamps and candles,
like Luna moths and houseflies. And you
who see the tv sixties like the
capstones
of ice bergs and pyramids, the all too
human concerts
of the indefatigable music where the
painted breasts
of the wild Pictish women from
California
danced like the fruit of low hanging
branches,
give some thought to the sweating
horses of the past
and the number of flies that fell into
the Milky Way.
So that purity doesn’t appear like a
ghost again
detached from the earth or swept clean
of mirages
in a desert of stars that didn’t keep
our footprints very long.
You might have missed the greatest
party on earth
but you didn’t suffer the depressive
hangover of the end
when the junkies sat up against the
wall listening
to Jimi Hendrix kiss the sky for them
all,
paralyzed in the shadows of their own
gigantism
as the tragic heroes bemoaned how
useless their deaths were
to those who were determined to live to
the end of the play.
PATRICK WHITE
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