DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

Dying young in autumn,

the ideal death of a flower or a star

whose beauty’s still as obvious

as a door that’s been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties

out looking for someone

who’s made an escape through the woods,

or they’re lamp lighting deer

out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance

works its ghost to death

Doppler-shifting its lament

into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes

of the recurring storm of the trees,

flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons

to burn for the sheer delight of it.

I make my way through a labyrinth

of foliage and moonlit shadows

to nowhere in particular

with a rocky slope glacially graded

down to what the locals say

is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods

were ever deep enough to plumb.

I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth

and I can feel it drawing

all the fever out of me like the effluvium

of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams

I’ve become osmotically enculturated to

like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.

The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.

I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird

on a limb that’s healing like the rafter of a house

that broke under the weight of what it upheld

when a three alarm fire in the heart

sought sanctuary from an ice storm

and it was nobody’s fault but my own

that I didn’t let it go out like a flagging comet

with the rest of the daylilies

that died in harness like parachutes.

I’ve kept it alive for lightyears

like a book of the occult in an industrial library.

I’ve cupped its light in my hands

like an ancestral offering

to the enlightenment of my peers

and though the clouds have raved

and the wind turned vicious

it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,

a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,

a genie in an old lamp, a female demon

that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily

with nothing to fear from the new moon.

Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.

PATRICK WHITE