A HAZE OF DUST ON THE WINDOWS AT DUSK

A HAZE OF DUST ON THE WINDOWS AT DUSK

A haze of dust on the windows at dusk,

cataracts glowing in the epiphanous sun

that leaves the night coming on like a door ajar

for the light to get out on its own like a cat.

And the next moment all the eyes

that were on the road to Damascus

blinded by a revelation are returned

from the darkness of their clarity

to their normal muddy mundane vision

and I can see the birch groves from here

upping their quota of white canes on the nightshift.

And isn’t it strange how things emerge

from one mindscape into the next

like a serpent shedding its skin

like a sky it’s been consulting about wings,

or the effortless birth sacs of the dragons

who have made the same transition

from the lowest of things to the highest

like a flying doctor bearing true north?

Polaris and Draco wrapped around

the tilted axis of the earth as if it were

the sign of a caduceus in the hand of a messenger

that says night is the best time to heal

and leaves us to the moonlit herb gardens

we planted in the spring of our dreams

when wild crocuses where just beginning

to poke their innocent noses through the snow?

Now the dark when the magicians come out

and the bats and the stars, and the fairies

are enthroned on their mushrooms and sacred stones

and retinal responses to reality

turn visionary in their pursuit

of an earthly excellence of their own

that doesn’t belittle them again

as the gods and goddesses of a world of their own.

And me, I’m sitting here alone

wondering if I do empty myself of myself

so perfectly there’s no one left to tell me

I’ve finally become no one fit enough

to lift the veils of Isis without expecting

to find just another starmap in hiding.

Or if I’ve rinsed myself clean enough of myself

to be washed from her eyes in tears

that fall like mirrors of mercury

in a fever of mystic thermometers

stuck under my tongue

like the silver bird bone flutes

of the perennial theme songs

I’ve been offering to ferrymen

in lieu of the obol of the full moon,

my penny in a wishing well,

to pay for my passage into death and back

like an enlightened return journey of a poet

who knows how to find his way home on his own

like a prophetic Orphic skull.

Ride the dragon. Play the flute of fire.

Cast a spell on the winter sunset

and take it off again in spring. O

inestimable nothing

what could I ask of the flower

that I didn’t receive from the leaf?

It takes a rootless tree

to show you the way home.

But it doesn’t take a road to know you’ve left.

I can hear my eyes weeping behind a deathmask.

Early wood sorrel under a leaf of duff.

Venus is in my rain washed window,

closer than blood could ever be.

The sky thinks it’s a strutting peacock

but I know I painted that window

well over a year ago when I grew weary

of being myself like a stage without a play.

Do you know me yet? Can’t you tell

when the roses bloom in the palm of my hand

like the stigmata of a starfish on the moon,

I’m the lost cause of a shadow

demanding more of the light

than a sacred clown on a burning ladder

could possibly know what to do with?

Meagre, meagre me. What immensities

I aspire to with a broken bouquet of arrows

like stalks of wheat in Virgo after a hailstorm.

I am not the slayer. I am not the slain.

I don’t hold the crescent moon up to my jugular vein.

Or cut the throats of poppies to milk the dream.

And I don’t care a hair for the difference

between the enlightened and insane.

I look at Venus through my windowpane

and the window’s clean. Burn white. Burn silent.

Express yourself, but don’t ask it to mean

anything more than you are to yourself

when no one’s home, including you,

and you’re shining for someone else.

PATRICK WHITE