NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

Nameless tonight, not me, immensities

beyond my reach. The windows

thawing in the heat. Blue moon

above a junkyard of farm machinery.

The pioneers’ bones have been exhumed

from the land they settled. Empty

the graves of those who slept in these hills,

lunar lichens plastered like playbills

over the closing night of their names.

Echoes we all disappear into like waterbirds

soon enough, skipping out over the lake

like gravestones in the hands of those

who effaced us from our own history.

I can’t place myself anywhere,

alive or dead, no homestead of my own,

where I can watch the raspberry bushes

flourish year after year and listen to the rain

drumming the tin toolshed roof into a trance.

I’m unselfishly disciplined when it comes

to rendering the unsayable communicable

through events of form that shape-shift

to the counter-intuitive logic of metaphor

that transcends physics in post cosmological realms,

but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the will of a socket wrench

to go on tightening loose bolts the rest of my life.

Rocking fields they won’t let me die in.

I like knowing the pioneers used wildflowers

for soap, Bouncing Bet, Pride of London,

Lady at the Gate, and if I were ever

to survive a nuclear war, I’d put this knowledge

to good use like a lantern in a housewell

to keep the hand pump from freezing,

potato peels in the fire to desiccate the creosote.

I’d eat staghorn sumac and briney frogs for breakfast.

My mind would be an assortment

of different size nails and screws

I’ve saved for years to meet any occasion

I might have to keep things together anti-dramatically.

In the meantime I explore these old farms

the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,

listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes

fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales

of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.

After the original occupants die

and the last born son has left the farm for good,

we’re all strangers in a used solitude.

The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.

Names on gravestones. Names carved in barn beams.

A scripture of old curtains hanging from the windows

like the priestcraft of spiders that haven’t been disturbed in years.

Prewar magazines espousing the miracles of magnetism

in relieving the agonies of rheumatism

and hairline fractures of cracked vertebrae

that took the load upon themselves out of pride

one too many times without thinking

of their own cornerstones and rotting floor sills.

A roof collapsing. A door on one hinge like a drunk

trying to hold on to something upright and final.

Schools and churches, pews, desks, and woodsheds,

everything as functional as the hives and houseflies

that cluster in the walls like those born to follow

the tried and trued, straight and narrow road

through the winding woods reweaving it

like a loose thread that unravelled the labyrinth

of the spiritual lost and found that dug up their bones

for hygienic reasons that had nothing to do

with how deep they were buried in the land

before their corpses were washed away from the soil

that clung to them like faithful hunting dogs

that slept on their graves for weeks after they died,

not knowing, how the city would come to them,

even in their homegrown deaths, like roadkill and erosion.

I’ve seen crucified barn boards warped by the sun and rain,

pull their old fashioned square-headed nails out

with their own teeth like dogs extracting porcupine quills

from the voodoo dolls they’ve made of themselves

like a self-fulfilling hex of hunting magic gone wrong.

And I admire all that the way I admire the palatial virtues

of the strong who live like glacial hills among

the heaped tels of Sisyphean rocks beside

the valleys they dug for themselves and their children

expiring in moats of scarlet fever, to lie down in

like time capsules without a table of contents

that could have anticipated that all they laboured for

would cast them away like strawdogs after a moribund ritual

that would not let them rest their heads on the rock of the world

and dream they were returning to the wild

like their gardens that have gone on blooming without them.

Salt of the earth with bedrock hearts, I come

like the deus ex machina, as you would have seen me

in terms you could have understood, late in the day

like a ghost to a morality play on tour in the country,

looking for a clearing among the trees to view the stars

long after the applause has died away. And the longer

I stand here surveying six thousand photogenic stars

burning without fire permits in the summer dark,

mourning your exorcism, the more I feel crowded

by your absence as if the Summer Triangle

were missing an eagle and the Seven Sisters

in the orchards of the Pleiades, carried away by the wind,

like Sabine maidens, had pruned the horns of Taurus

by deboning the land of the humans

they’ve torn out of it like the stumps of the locust trees

that used to sing here at night, bright with blossoming stars

and the occasional night bird like me

on its way to somewhere else,

and in the morning, was backed-up

by the ecstatic choirs of the born again honey-bees.

PATRICK WHITE