GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

GARBAGE BAGS ON THE STREET AT DAWN

Garbage bags on the street at dawn

as great fronds of light unfold.

Venus washed out of the Hyades in Taurus

near Aldebaran, but Jupiter the first to go,

first casualties of the new day,

somnambulists outwalking their dreams.

The honking of Canada geese overhead

like ninety-twenties cars. Rites of passage,

thoroughfares of destinal traffic.

Me here, the sleepless witness

to the untimely birth of the morning,

ashes in the urn of the new day

I scatter like pigeons and doves

from the roofs of the unearthly buildings,

a wraith late for the grave, and the rest,

the unlabelled waste of a good beginning.

Bad spiritual protocol for a ghost

to haunt the cradle, to outlive the candles

of the night before, writing suicide notes

to the cults of the stars that don’t really care

I’ve lived for eras alone with the estranged insights

of a native exile longing for a home,

hovel, habitation, palace of space

that doesn’t rest on the cornerstone of a planet.

A changeling on the stairs of the abyss,

I address the indifferent windows

cloaked in their chronic transparency

and ask whose child is this

that no one claims as their own?

Not unmindful of how the world shrugs

the stars off like eyes of dew in the grass,

I am born into this emptiness without a lifeboat

and it’s a long way to swim from here to the moon,

a long way to fall like a feather cut loose on its own.

PATRICK WHITE