THESE DAYS, THIS LATE AT NIGHT

THESE DAYS, THIS LATE AT NIGHT

These days, this late at night, I’m usually a lone wolf sage

high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude

that occasionally breaks the silence

with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk

wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead

feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire

and for a few brief moments no longer

than the wingspan of a wavelength

it was shining like them and there were jewels

like a woman’s eyes cracking the rock

of a heart that’s been more of an asteroid

than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own

for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds

can move mountains to tears with the beauty

of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing

like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields

as if they were expecting someone to come

of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight

in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors

I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both

like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me

into paying tribute to her like a muse

who’s beginning to possess me like the sea does

when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft

on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.

Even from here, I can hear the song being carried

across the light years like the dove of a deep lament

she keeps like the wind in a locket the size

of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet

under her feet all that’s between her

and firewalking on stars like a burning kite

someone let go of like the umbilical cord

of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I’m just fossil hunting on the moon

I’ve been howling at all these years

over the bone pits of dark wisdom I’ve dug up

on the far side of a black mirror

that doesn’t insult your seeing with a night light.

But I swear sometimes when I think of you,

what lies like an archives in the riverbeds

of the sedimentary starmud you put back down

like a book you’ve read eras of time before,

and look out the window like a door

where you don’t have to leave your body

on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea

when you walk into your own depths up over your head

to see if your eyes can still swim

with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish

you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we’re still more strangers to each other

than intimates, that there maybe watersheds

we have in common, and maybe it’s still too early

for the fountains to come into blossom yet

as the last stars of the season become

the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next

like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.

And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise

trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice

trying to climb higher than its cloud cover

to break into light like the Pleiades

just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,

but these days, this late at night, I’ve been inhaling

a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars

like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon

pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I’m laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own

I’m trying to read like the yarrow sticks

of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings

to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark

is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt

or the soul mate of a rogue planet

that wants to ghost dance around the third eye

of a first magnitude star that doesn’t have any idea

of what I’m doing up here, nor how far

a whisper of light away can seem

to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,

writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra

of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path

like the first draft a waking dream

sleepwalking beside me like the dakini

of a star struck maniac lifting the veils

of the inconceivable like the paint rags

of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them

that even in the dark make everything seem

so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful

I’d be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium

that’s lost touch with its own translucency

if I didn’t find it wholly believable

down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy

howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon

out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking

of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around

like a traffic light for the blind compared

to the way you light me up like the Pleiades

whenever I’m trying to get a parallactic fix

on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies

on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

PATRICK WHITE