EVEN BEFORE THE DAYLILIES HAVE RE-OPENED

EVEN BEFORE THE DAYLILIES HAVE RE-OPENED

Even before the daylilies have re-opened,

walking home in the early morning air,

admiring the blue-green petal

of the new apple of the dawn,

Venus ferociously beautiful, and Jupiter

unusually shy by comparison as Aldebaran

fades faster in Taurus than either of them

in the onrush of light, the town immaculately quiet,

and the traffic light feeling robotically unheeded

and the bloom off the streetlamps

in the parking lot of the new hotel,

the cars immobilized in a coma of stillness,

how clean and eternal the silence seems,

how uncannily pure the bliss of life in the air,

as the birds hidden like celebrants in the trees

planted along the sidewalks, and in the black walnuts

of neglected backyards, sing as if they couldn’t

contain themselves like old guitars in the corner,

or books upon a shelf, that have heard it all before.

Awake at five alone in the morning,

a new solitude surrounds the singularity of my sentience

and it doesn’t really matter what I think

anymore than the content of what the birds are singing

in a language of their own, I am estranged

by the renewal of my own presence

in the midst of all this as if in some kind

of intimately aloof way, I, too, inexplicably belonged.

As did the deserted shops along the street

forlornly awaiting the return of people,

like abandoned pets or lonely barns.

Everything natural and man-made

included in the same embrace

as if space were mysteriously happy

and time gave everything another chance

just to feel how sacred it is to exist here at all.

The ghosts on the night shift return

to their graves with the coffins

of their empty lunch pails clutched in their hands,

having punched in the same hours as the fireflies and stars

and in the rising splendour of the unsayable presence

of wholly being here to experience it, denuded

of the uses and functions we will assign ourselves

later in the day like the smog of insatiable dreams,

achieve as much at this intersection of time and the timeless,

Foster and the universe, where it doesn’t matter

if you waited for the light to change

before you crossed the street or not

because the unseekable waywardness of the moment

will do as much to find and renew you spontaneously

as you do to be lost and exhausted deliberately

as if you always walked in the presence of the dawn

even when you let go of its hand or closed your eyes.

PATRICK WHITE