OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

OBLITERATIONS OF BEAUTY AND WE WEEP

Obliterations of beauty and we weep

for what cannot long abide in us

because we, not the rose, are the ones

who are passing so irrevocably away

into an abyss that doesn’t

take the measure of anything.

The lake knows the time

by the wingspan of its waterbirds.

I note the location of the stars

in the rotation of the Big Dipper.

And there are crickets

that will yield the time as well.

Time, too, like human solitude

is embodied in the things of this world.

Time perishes when we do,

is born with us, matures,

and embraces our ends as its own nature.

Time sets its pace to the passage of us.

We are the muse, the motivator, the demi-urge

of its passion for shedding

the leaves and flowers and moon like skin.

And we’re the ones who grow infinite

at the speed of light so that everything stops

immeasurably from there on everafter.

All things returning to the one, and the one,

returning to transcendence. Which is why

I come here this late at night when the stars

are as far from people as they can be

and yet they’re still as intimate to me

as my eyes are. A mutually creative continuum.

The star makes the eye I need to see it by.

I am the fragrance of the wildflowers

and the adamantine insights of the rocks.

The singing master of the nightbirds.

The oracle in the leprous skull of the raccoon.

And my heart is one long, continuous moonrise

when I think of how the dead still animate me.

How they cling to my heart like ants to a peony

to let me know when it’s time to bloom.

The dead trees house the mosquitoes and the herons.

The fallen pine cones, the seed koans of Zen masters

under their brittle eyelids waiting for the fire

to crack them deciduously open into evergreens.

I don’t lament the passivity of the dead in my life

because I put them to good use in their capacity

as enlightened mentors who urge me

to live splendidly whatever I encounter in the world

for all our sakes. I can be the blossom and the fruit

on the dead branch, as easily as a red-winged blackbird

sings from the green and leafless alike.

Not a bush wolf raises its voice up to the moon

that I don’t feel its distant longing in my own throat

like a sacred syllable half way to blossoming among the dead

who always hear it like an auspicious beginning

to the summons of their leave-taking in the fall,

to the deeper greeting in the meaning of farewell.

PATRICK WHITE