GONE SOON ENOUGH

GONE SOON ENOUGH

Gone soon enough. To who knows where,

though I suspect the question answers itself

if there’s a there to get to at all. Deal with this now

and maybe that, given opposites engender

one another out of their procreative union,

will be tended to as well in every mystic detail.

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Do unto one of these and you do unto me.

And maybe this is the belief of every leaf in the fall,

but with me when I’m trying on ghosts

to go with my death mask, it’s merely one

of a myriad passing thoughts and scenarios

impassioned by the inspired absurdity

of trying to conceptualize the inconceivable.

Not void bound, though I’m free, I still hope,

more love and loyalty than clinging to mirages,

to take all the stars with me, and the moon and the sun,

the wind, the stone, the flower and all the sorrows

I’ve venerated over the years as shrines

to unknown lovers who suffered as anonymously as I did

to accord their solitude the dignity of a sword

and their silence the clarity of a window into the soul

transfigured like space by the nature of its contents

into the bodymind of a human who’s given up

looking for signs of greater things to come

since he followed the breadcrumbs out of a dark wood

into a clearing where he realized, looking up at the stars

for paradigms of light he might be able to recognize

to get his bearings, the whole of his awareness

from the beginningless beginning was revelation

out of nothing, rootless blossoms on the wind,

emptiness with a thousand stamps on it

like a loveletter he wanted to be sure got there.

No message. No medium. However you parse

the expression into a million punctuation marks

like traffic lights of the silence, and the stillness

irremediable, and the stars not the measure of their light.

The many return to the one and the one returns to transcendence,

as the doge of Zen once said, out of everyone’s mouth at once

as he did in twelfth century Tokugawa Japan.

When the Japanese plum tree blossoms,

it’s not speaking for itself, it’s an expression

with as many voices as the universe has atoms to say it,

solo or in chorus, acapella or accompanied by the wind

lamenting the ashes of the blue guitar of the moon,

neither an urn, nor a womb, or the rain improvising

Scarlatti on a harpsichord of plectral thorns attuned

to our tears and spinal cords. If the painting, the poem,

the life doesn’t lead you to the unattainable within yourself,

if you try to contain the feeling, the image, the insight

in the Mason jar of the brain like the spooky green lights

of the fireflies riding their own eyebeams like Einstein

the clock on the town hall tower, until time stops

and space becomes infinite, and nothing outweighs

the feather or the flower, you won’t be struck down

by your own light. Things are retaliatory and petty like that.

But it will be awhile before the Canada geese leaving now

bearing the souls of the dead south and west,

return for you bereft in this realm of arrival and departure.

Death, too, has its muses, its nightbirds,

and none of them are widows at the window or the well.

None of them part the curtains or the veils like a death shroud.

They’re not the screening myths for what

we dare not say out loud lest the silence is listening

in a deathcart parked across the street. You are

the corpse telling you your own life story

and you’re the green fire of the living bough

that lights the funeral pyres of its own ancestral stumps

to burn them out with the intensity of your life

paying homage to your own transformations.

Though everything I’ve just said is smoke on the wind

to the living, that isn’t a sign of its evanescence,

because to the dead, it’s an imperishable lyric

sung by a ghost of picture-music so free and unconstrained

they can hear their hearts still beating like the echo

of distant thunder or wild moonlit horses

running through the high fields like Pegasus

flying with eagles and swans among the stars,

albino periods shining at the beginning of endless things

the middle extremes of every moment of the mindstream

rising like a waterbird with unborn life

and imperishable death for wings, and in its voice

all the silence, sacred syllables, and wavelengths

of everything that sings a child to sleep in its dreams

like a new violin safe in the arms of the mystery

that seasons it like the heartwood of a broad-leafed maple,

spruce, or the willow with lyrical eyes down by the river

trying to write a song for the waters of life

in the shadows of birds in passage across the moon

as if she’d just taken the words right out of my mouth.

PATRICK WHITE