QUARTER MOON IN SAGITTARIUS AT THE AUTUMN EQUINOX

QUARTER MOON IN SAGITTARIUS AT THE AUTUMN EQUINOX

Quarter moon in Sagittarius at the autumn equinox.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure. Sagitta. Arrow in Latin.

Toxos. In classical Greek. Attic dialect. As in

toxin. Or toxologist. Archaic word for archer.

I’m a little teapot short and stout. Here

is my handle. Here is my spout. Tip me over

and pour me out. Zen is the taste of tea.

And maybe those aren’t stars, but flower arrangements

at a Chanoyu ceremony with raku tea bowls,

where even the cracks where the stars leaked out

are cherished like scars on the moon. The porous face

of someone pitted by smallpox. One stone

in a sand garden of stars raked into wavelengths.

If Zen is the taste of tea, then Islam must be

the flavour of coffee. The Christians have

their blood and wine. And the Jews drink deep

of the fountainmouths of their tears by the rivers of Babylon.

Suspiciously symmetrical thought for a heretic like me,

More that of an engineer than a seer watching stars.

A dog barks at sly shadows farms and forms away.

The leaves are brittle and tense. They scratch cold runes

like glacial striations on the wind in passing.

All the waterlilies have candled like parachutes.

The willows are using a lot more hairspray than they used to

and their supple tresses now sway like arthritic rivers

that stiffen up in the damp weather. But soon

you’ll see the stars shining through the veils

of their branches, and the pathos of their ruined beauty

will be renewed by the mystery of a high priestess

that taught Medusa how to dance gracefully

like Algol in the hand of Perseus, in a radiant ballet

of whips and wavelengths. The river seems

more hermetically aloof, withdrawn, removed

from itself as if some deep insight preoccupied it

and even the longing of the nightbird’s lyrics

seem coarsened by hunger in the predatory air.

As for me and my house, I come here alone

where I can turn a hovel of solitude into a palace

of water and wonder and sit until the silence

grows inhuman, and nothing of me remains

but the impersonality of the universe

that’s traded its feathers in for sequins and scales again.

Warm ostrich boas of pampas grass

for sleeker gowns of snakeskin.

Revelation of the burlesque for something

more alluring and dangerous. And the darkness

a northern siren calling me to the rocks like a muse

to the occult grammar of her body language.

I am Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice-Blessed.

I am Thoth who brought the alphabet.

Who only a moment ago as old as the universe

was wholly unmanifest. A fountain asleep in its watershed.

A bird with its head under its wing. Not anything.

Not one. Not two. A wide-eyed, gaping, open-mouthed

zero of an awareness that had burned my identity away

by reaching out to the stars like a thief

torching his fingerprints off like like tiny labyrinths

with search warrants effaced like moths and maple leaves in a candle.

I was out of here like the constellation of the swan

going down over the eyelashes of the western treeline.

After defaulting to the sensuality of the dark all night

who wants to wake up beside the dawn, wincing in the light?

I was out of here like Auriga, the Charioteer.

I always reveled more in the role of guide to the dead

and messenger of the mystery and its eloquence,

master of the occult visionary sciences expressing themselves

as a physics of metaphors, not numbers, the intuitive logic

of synchronized happenings in a charged particle field,

not syntactically linear paradigms that strive fruitlessly

to make things perfectly clear, as if they’d rinsed

all the nectar of life out of them and the light that was left

were the direct result and residue of spiritual erosion.

The sun can boast of the number of sunflowers

it’s got for followers all it wants.

When she appears, a thousand mirrors open

like the third eyes of observatories capstoned

on cold, lonely mountain tops with only one road down or up

and all the reflecting telescopes on clock drives turn their heads her way,

affixed to the mysterious trajectory of a new moon rising in the north

in the thirteenth house of a zodiac that baffles the starmaps

with a darkness that’s brighter than any of their high hopes.

PATRICK WHITE