FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

FACELESS THIS TIME OF NIGHT

Faceless this time of night, my skin evaporates like dry ice

into a deepening sense of containment

by a dark space with distant cities of light

trying to colonize the Pythagorean fireflies of Cretona,

or the shimmering mirage of Port Angeles

dancing like a seance at the foot of the mountains

across a hundred miles of the Georgia Strait at night,

the immensity of the freedom that dwarfs the stars

with the sheer magnitude of the labour before them.

The fragility of a spinal cord traversing the abyss

of a one-stringed box guitar made of cardboard

when you were a kid, the mere filament

of an anachronistic light bulb with the lifespan

of the wick of an apostate candle at a black mass,

disappointed it wasn’t born a flower,

but a weed more at home among the stars

that uprooted it from its intimacy with the earth

like a kindred spirit of light

that must wander through its own solitude

like music at night from an open window

in the life of the mind to reach out to them

like a tendril of smoke from the embering nugget

of the heart nesting in a private crown of fire

that abdicated its empire of ashes for a single note

of the night bird’s longing to sing back up

like a bell for a sad universe that’s always on the road.

I hear crying in the distance, the dark lament of the hills.

The night creek weeping unseen through hidden valleys.

I can taste the deaths and sorrows, the broken promises

of the rain, drifting like the fragrance of a waterlily

like a star reflected on the undivined watershed of its tears

saturating the air. Matter a condensation of the light,

I can feel life moving through this body, this flesh,

this scrap of starmud, a rush of water, a gust of stars,

a purple passage of blood, a breath of fire and wind,

and the earth, not solid, but real, animating all my limbs,

my vital organs like the ripening fruit of a rootless tree

as if time wept like a bell in me as well, and its tears,

heavy with the weight of too many separations,

yet wise in the ways of the sky, sweetened the fall to come.

PATRICK WHITE