AND THIS NIGHT

And this night that is ending,

bruising into the blue of an impossible rose,

and the windows opening their eyes to the light

that pales the stars from the sky like dreams;

and a man trying to keep the starving candle in his skull

from going out, the emptiness of the dark from demanding

oblivion from the day, the mouth of the morning

no beginning, but the start of a busy grave;

how can he tell his heart what his eyes already see

in the mirrors that mourn like hired grief,

some distant galaxy expanding into space,

some island of light in the forsaken depths of time,

that he’s already the ghost of a future memory,

that a silo of ashes isn’t enough to feed the flame

of the fire he’s cherished in the boat of his hands

like a wounded bird he taught to sing for years,

and how to fly higher than the world is kind

like a hawk with broken wings, or an injured mind?

I see eyes in the dark soaked up like rain,

wildflowers in a field, the keys of unbound clocks,

and they’re staring at me on a rocky precipice alone,

the lip of a vast abyss where even the winds don’t go,

and they seem to know who I am, and why I must suffer

more deeply than the words of an eloquent man

who no longer answers his pain in silver tongues

but stands voiceless in the gulf of the silence before him,

mute, broken, baffled, a ladder stripped of rungs.

PATRICK WHITE