SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

SUMMER TRIANGLE THROUGH THE LEAF COVER

Summer triangle through the leaf cover

of the birches and pines, Deneb, Al Tair, Vega,

a swan, an eagle, and a lyre, and the sun

headed toward Vega at l8 km/sec. Arcturus

sinking into the west. Knowledge disconnected

from the stars. How could they know how

I see them paradigmatically, how they’re shaped

into the legends of our seeing on a starmap,

the powers that have been attributed to them,

though for me my solitude evaporates

into their lucid immensities like dry ice.

I hug my knees on a moonlit outcrop of rock.

More lichens than a suitcase has travel stickers

or a bike gang has patches and rockers. Grey green

and a muted arsenic orange. Alien aspects

of the rags of life from Mars. Cold temperatures

and high carbon dioxide atmospheres and they’d thrive.

Now they’re a wardrobe paupered by the Canadian Shield.

Fossils of moondogs. Decals of lunar seas.

And underneath the pines, a graveyard of compass needles,

rusty eyelashes, amputated hands of analogue watches.

The woods are alive with shaking cattails

and snapping branches, shedding and falling,

the occult hunting magic of the lake

that keeps everything eerie, wary, and estranged

as they take what they need from each other

with a yelp, a howl, a shriek, a squeal to sustain

the lives they’re meant to be living at life’s expense.

You come to mind as the reason why I’m here.

Just a fragrance, the auroral cachet of your image

on the temperate night air. The great blue heron

might embody the silence and the stillness,

spearfishing among the nocturnal water lilies

but me, I’m catching these glimpses of you

like a seance of fireflies among the birch

as if happenstance had a hidden theme up its sleeve.

A resonance, a nuance, as if I blew on a dandelion

and it scattered like a gust of stars out of an urn

into a constellation waiting for me to adorn it

with a myth of origins that might explain it to us both.

The old ashes of the fire pit strewing

dragons of passion again, and it’s ok to speculate

but I keep a bridle in their mouths. I’m not riding

bareback yet. I’m not rescinding my last immolation.

Though there’s something ingenuously thrilling about

the creative commotion of the approach of another galaxy

and the way the fireflies keep stoking my devotion

as if my intensities were about to go supernova

after so many years of emotional implosion, I’ve been

singing lullabies in braille to black stars

just to get to sleep at night without anyone noticing.

I’ve been wearing a halo of X-rays around

the omnidirectional event horizon of a black hole

I thought I’d given myself up to by acclamation

like the incommensurable solitude of a singularity

that had escaped itself into an alternative universe

every bit as absurd as I was, with equanimity.

I’m sick of pain. Too many squalls arising

out of nothing, too many red dawns, too many

shipwrecks turning into coral reefs that rip the hull

out of the moon like Caesarians, hearts bashed

like pinatas at the birthday parties of the sacred cartels

and everyone’s simple, quiet dream of everlasting love

and all its attendant protocols, observed with genuine feeling,

lovers mesmerized by the shadows of the things they want

but can’t quite be. Unconditional love, if its abstractions

are blooded by experience, crueller than

the sado-masochistic discipline of a saint.

Never abandoned love, just somehow came to feel

erosively disqualified, as if my starmud,

though it bore other fruits, yielded harvests

and danced under a blue moon like a scarecrow

left out to face the winter alone, would never bring forth

those flowers again. As they faded

like Confederate money into a more perfect union

of absurdity at peace with itself. Approximately.

Everything being the interpretation of an interpretation.

PATRICK WHITE