RUBIES OF BLOOD RUNNING LIKE RUPTURED CHERRIES

RUBIES OF BLOOD RUNNING LIKE RUPTURED CHERRIES

Rubies of blood running like ruptured cherries

down my arms. The night swarms

like a feeding frenzy of junkies

all in for a little taste. The heat hangs

like something dangerous in the air

as if the atmosphere were on a short fuse

and you can feel the fangs of its potential bared.

Like a bear to berries, I come here for stars.

It’s a lair of sorts for wounded wolf hearts

gored by the moon, and it’s healing

to look upon the waters when you’re in pain.

There’s nothing undisciplined about the chaos here.

Everything just seems to fall into place

of its own accord without anyone having

to explain anything to the animated silence

about how it all works effortlessly

in an unintended harmony of living and dying.

The trees understand like an alphabet

that’s never gone out of use, what it means

when the wind skims through their leaves

like the synopsis for a serialized book of wisdom

with an ambivalent happy ending

that takes your breath away in awe.

And the waterlilies show their poems to the stars.

The serenity here could almost seem offensive

in its aloofness, as the genetics of random chance

get on with fate, and if you’re noticed at all,

it’s as a possible threat the beavers choose to ignore.

And the white-tailed deer cue off of them.

Not one of the wild irises clustered

like the indigo fires of the Pleiades

where the river slows down to pay homage in passing

to the decimated groves of the fallen birch

that lie like wrecked wharves in the water

the turtles and the frogs could sun themselves on

like happy freaks with no concern at all for their downfall.

Everything acceptable as a matter of course

with equanimity. A kind of impersonal poise

sustained even beyond death

in the way all living things

give themselves back to things as if

they were returning to the source of their own lives

to lavish the watershed with inexhaustible gifts.

Moonlight on the blades of silver swords

forged among the stars, surrendered

from a bridge between life and death

in a wordless tribute to the crossing of the river.

Or the unsayable insights of the rocks around here

that keep the epics of the glaciers

like enlightened haikus to themselves,

or a poet retreating into his solitude

to see if he can still remember all the names

of the stars that were the herbs and flowers

in the chalice of the ailing kingdom of his childhood

and if they still had the power to heal

what the man in me has left for the boy to feel.

PATRICK WHITE