GENTLE THE STARS AND THE TOWN ASLEEP

GENTLE THE STARS AND THE TOWN ASLEEP

Gentle the stars and the town asleep.

No stranger at the gate. No door ajar.

The windows deep in their own affairs.

Flowers thicken the hot night air

with pheromones of sex and death

that follow you all the way down the street

like homeless kittens and lonely junkies.

Walking my solitude off alone,

the cold stone of the moon overhead,

the first night bird I’ve heard tonight

singing high in the leaves of an elm

strung like a guitar with power lines

and in my heart, a child of longing,

the half-finished spectre of a poem to you.

The streetlamps bud like day lilies

but nothing blooms in the tungsten light

though insects gather in impotent frenzies,

my poem to you makes love through its eyes

to the leaf and the star and the stone

seeking out images of you to adorn

this figment of desire in a shrine of thorns.

A woman dreams in a house far away.

The road grows darker and longer

out among the fields where the stars

wax brighter than the themes of a poet

igniting like fireflies down by the river

he sits by nursing his imagination

on the night shift of the inconceivable.

PATRICK WHITE