IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

It took me light years to trust my voice

to say things my thoughts had to catch up to

like the unrehearsed understudies of hidden harmonies

making their presence manifest in the way

their dark matter bent space and made the words move

into place like water finding its own equilibrium.

The discipline, then, was not to interfere,

but listen when the wind turns the Byzantine green

of the Russian olives silver in the turmoil of its passage.

To pour yourself out of the mirror like the tear

of a weeping telescope when the Milky Way

gets in your eyes like the smoke of a hundred billion stars.

Or the ghost of a summer radiance

summoned to a seance of mediumistic fireflies

trying to fill in the gaps on their spiritual starmaps.

Last night’s full moon has sliced off

part of its waning earlobe shrinking

as it ascends from cantaloupe orange

to a pitted plum of cadmium yellow value eight.

I’m standing in a gravel driveway outside a storage shed

in the industrial part of town, my back turned

to a floodlight in a riot of insights that act like

frenzied insects, and I’m looking for stars

through the feathered ribs and scales of clouds,

toned by a copper moon rise in a cool acetylene sky.

The moon is rising over the roofs of a parking lot

full of transport trucks, and the contrast

makes the view even more surrealistically poignant.

Intensely so when I spot Arcturus burning

solely on its own in an immensity of peacock blue sky

turning Prussian blue and indigo

over a garishly lit garage that specializes in transmissions

and smells like an abattoir of oily orchids

sacrificed like sacred bulls in garlands

on the altar of a pneumatic car lift

where eternity intersects time as history.

Twenty feet from the driveway

to the perfectly latticed wire fence

sequestered on a reservation of useless land,

a pharmacopeia of every weed that grows wild

in southern Ontario, huddled on the crest

of a bull-dozed hill fort in self-defence.

And in one quick swathe of the bush-hog,

stunted runt versions of the same plants

blooming like symbols of underground resistance,

common mullein, tansy, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch,

viper’s bugloss gone out like pilot lights on a gas stove,

and the sabre cuts and slashes of the tall grasses

waving green banners from their slender masts

and unbroken aerials as fragile as a heron’s legs.

Beauty and utility in a coincidence of contradictories

where abstractions haven’t been multiplied

beyond necessity. The earth turns as it always has

and the moon and Arcturus move accordingly

as the Summer Triangle emerges from the cloud-cover

like the brain child of a birdwatcher

with a taste for myth and mathematics.

Perennializing events in a trivial frame of reference.

And just as the bugs have their communal rapture

in the light, I stand here alone gazing at the stars

trying to see my way into other worlds

by closing the distance with the intensity

of my overwhelming wonder and longing to know

if there might be some poet out there tonight like me

watching the moon rise over bucolic machines

and the space needed to sustain them

at the expense of the trees and weeds and wildflowers

as he’s mystically weirded out by the relative parity

of disparate elements in an impersonally unified field.

And he like me, Arcturus, the trucks, the weeds

and the moon among them, living the ambivalent beauty

of an eternity that breaks its truce with time

once and awhile, to adorn what’s been defiled,

and let unity come forth by itself to forsake the difference

in a voice of its own the storage units trust

like the sacred syllable of a lock on mundane things

alloyed like haloes and horseshoes of stardust and rust.

PATRICK WHITE