I CAN STILL HEAR THE RETICENT ECHOES
I can still hear the reticent echoes
of my wary adolescence among
intellectual radicals
demanding the nightwatchmen of insight
open the gates.
One stole an Underwood for me from the
student newspaper,
saying I would put it to better use
than they would
and another drove me to my astronomy
exam
against the will of my drunken
declinations.
And I remember White Rabbit playing on
the radio
first time, and the turmoil of sun and
morning shadows
playing Scarlatti on the keyboards of
the arbutus leaves.
Happy. Free. And sixteen enough to get
away with anything.
I was bright and fearless. No one could
take subjective risks
the way I could, but I still had to
stand up
on the book of experience to see over
the steering wheel.
Spectral figments of the past, smokey
remnants
of the fires we once sat around without
giving a thought
to how long they’d last. We were
zodiacs. We were
hedonists of the light, trying to
believe
in our own arrogance enough to roar
like dragons
and write like the first green tendrils
of an ancient vine.
I was apprenticed to the signs I saw in
everything
like a library of eyes in flames, and
the subtlety of fireflies
that came like the nuances of midnight,
and shone upon my path like lighthouses
among the stars.
Famous days. Baby turtles urgent to
reach the tide
among swarms of hovering seagulls, sky
rats,
thinning the odds of any of us ever
making it
out of the shadows of our predatory
circumstances.
Everything a test of our fitness for
life, and a laurel
awarded randomly to the luckiest if not
the most talented.
Genius was mean and cruel and scoffed
at the slightest adage of the
pretentious fool
that published on the back of
sententious matchbooks
but at night, in its writing window,
overlooking
the lights of the town, it took off its
war face
and summoned the moon to a tender
seance
like a medium in love with the ghost of
a muse
that was playing hard to get. O the
fallacious brilliance
of our teaching errors. The illustrious
craving
for dangerous love affairs with
thresholds and taboos
that had never been crossed or broken
before.
Did a knife ever sink into the heart
as deeply as those we fell upon
to discipline ourselves in the black
arts
of our tragic flaws? All our fire pits
smothered in ashes by grieving women
who really meant it, though we were too
depressed
to see them scattering our urns on the
wind
to ceremoniously exorcise the feelings
they had left for us.
Leave things as a token of what they
are,
like stars light years ahead of
themselves
plummeting into the darkness of the
black holes
that lay ahead like hourglasses that
would invert their souls
and leave them on the receiving end of
their own hindsight.
Let the mirages deceive the deserts of
the moon
into believing they were the
ambassadors of watersheds
that could green a sea of shadows with
wishing wells.
Permissive in my joys, it didn’t hurt
to be sparing in hell.
Something infernally elegant about
compassion in a demon.
I wrote like a carillon of apostate
bells, and books
began to appear on the staves of
library shelves
like night birds in a museum, singing
to themselves.
My life in art back then. A lucid agony
of embryoes
curled up with their knees under their
chins
like fossil question marks in
encyclopedic shale
that preserved them like the juvenalia
of my first attempts
to write about life as if deep in its
heart
it secretly exceeded it own table of
contents
in a hidden harmony of alternative
endings.
Exotic exits from homely entrances,
after every poetry reading more people
felt like poppies than they did like
wheat.
And I could see I’d made a good
impression
on the death masks of the scarecrows
as I threshed the harvests I had sown
under a new moon of well-seasoned
potential
that I shared with the birds like
sunflowers at zenith
not earthworms in the starmud of a
walled garden.
O delirious moment that counterpoints
the past
reduced to the absurdity of recounting
it
for the trivialities it turned on like
microcosmic gates
that escaped our notice, but made all
the difference
in the elaborate depths of the outcome.
A stolen typewriter in the hands of a
radical friend.
PATRICK WHITE
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