FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN

FULL MOON AND THE MOURNFUL THUNDER OF A TRAIN

Full moon and the mournful thunder of a train

passing through town. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury

long gone down for the rest of the night.

Orion a pale imitation of itself in the west.

Mars near Regulus, the little king with the heart of the lion,

and Saturn off to the east. Like water returned

to the river it came from, everything immersed

in the fluidity of silence

swimming through the trees

as if virgins were older than fish at the spring equinox.

A habit of wandering when no one else is around

walks me out of town like some unknown journey

stringing my feet along with a line

and two minutes with a lunar hook dangling

in the effluvial plains of the moon’s volcanic seas

as if I needed to be played into it by the sacred syllables

of ancient starmaps talking in tongues like oceans of awareness

into the ears of the seashells who can repeat

every word they say to themselves in secret.

All I’ve done most of my life is write and paint

spring, summer, winter, fall, four seasons,

and a writer not only adds another dimension

to the state of affairs, but constitutes

a fifth season of his own as well, a sphere

of thin-skinned spirit that covers the earth

like an invisible aurora of imagination,

the third eye of a wobbling satellite

lost in space with spiritual vertigo

like the black sheep of a shepherd moon. Five

seasons in all, but the fifth includes the other four

like a mood ring on a chameleon in front of a mirror.

And the rest of my life in between

exotic flame-outs and catastrophic inspirations

has been about running back home to my life

like an ambulance, a squad car, or a fire truck,

and, yes, even the occasional water bomber

to put a root fire out before it broke into blossom

and spread like daylilies to the rest of the neighbourhood.

Just as I can’t help looking extemporally at

the extraordinarily ordinary dandelions sometimes

and thinking they must have been born middle-aged

because they all look like yellow G-7 type bachelor suns

that have rubber-stamped themselves all over the place.

Dandelion wine, but I wonder if anyone of them

ever longed to be born a red head, looked

at the gypsy poppies like blood at the side of the road,

wearing too much black mascara , and wished somehow

they could be just as uniquely scarlet and carefree.

And in the night, out in the woods on my own

without a light or a fire for a companion

you’re never alone with, I think, o yes,

a poppy or a dandelion would be good right about now

and I make them a mental substitute through

intense creative visualization and though

I’ll sit out here spiritually naked all night

somehow by the morning I’ve melted a block of ice

like a Tibetan monk in the Himalayas

who was trying to focus on stars.

So when I take these long starwalks

through the desolation of stark and delicate things,

and their ferociously bold slow-hand insistence

on returning the way they came like fruits

ye shall know them by, back to the wild apple trees,

I’m not just walking among solid things

that overemphasize their reality at the expense

of realizing their full potential as an event of metaphors

that can shapeshift musically into anything they want to be

from dandelions with short haircuts

to poppies with the manes of solar flares.

My life is being conducted by a symphony of fiddleheads

at a seance of violins. I look at the desiccated milkweed pods

and I don’t see a coffin or a brittle fortune-cookie of a womb

that’s gone to seed, but the eyelids of visionaries

who gave up everything to the seeing they had to give

like millions of little ghostly white parachutes of moonlight

landing like prophetic time-capsules from the flowers

who refused to go blind, even after jumping from paradise,

and emptier than a widow’s mailbox

still stare blankly up at the stars

with their mouths open in utter amazement

trying to remember all their children’s names and myths of origins

shawled over their shoulders like the Milky Way

as if that were some kind of cold comfort

for a lifetime of absurdly trying to rinse

the shadows out of the light with their tears.

PATRICK WHITE