LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

Listening to the nightsong of the silence

in a clearing in the woods that used to be

a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn,

and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations

of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood

as the cold comes on, slowing down into

long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives

the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals

who can’t afford migration, to dream half the winter away,

soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside

from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses

as if they were being whittled out of ice

or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs

into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm.

Chronic boredom of a white screen they’d

rather smear with something than look at nothing at all,

whether cadmium red on a blank canvas,

blood on the snow next to the hollyberries

the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on,

or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal

gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars

spreading the rumour around. Wonder what

the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day

when the cops were afraid to go there,

would have to say about their whiskey barrels

being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias

and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.

Or me out here on my own looking

for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark

hasn’t been distempered by the bottled light of the town.

After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes

I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place

who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness

taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound

like Huron women in the moonlight

beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds

into the bows of their spectral canoes

silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves

before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out.

And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves

just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation,

and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder

so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately

as the deepest intimacy of time you’ll ever experience

in your passage through it. And it doesn’t matter

what the message is, whether you can interpret

the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight,

or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations

for real light, you’re assured, without ambivalence

of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility

startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity

is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough

to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight

as if you’d just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon.

Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid

by denying it. Right now I’m still a seance

of living fire in the woods the shadows of those

who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved,

lived, laughed and died here competently long before me

gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts

turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell

or I were the axial blackhole at the nave

of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me

as if the black queen of the sweetness of life

were founding a new colony of natives, exiles,

and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal

to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises

all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body.

Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years

of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side

of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust

and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese

embody my migratory soul on a long journey south,

there are rituals and protocols of life and death

that must be upheld with a patience and grace

born of understanding how vital it is to adorn

what can’t be understood with osprey feathers,

cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild

in the starfields of our dream mothers

leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors

for the wind blowing through the catkins.

In the beginning was the imagination.

Imagination is the mindscape we’re all aboriginals in.

Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop

looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake.

Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace

with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it’s awake

when the elders gather to name the newborn

after the dancing waters and fire talkers

consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude

in the presence of the inexpressible events

that create the things of the world

like the sensory simulacra of a story

that always dying to be told around the fires of life

in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow

like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon

out of the leafless crowns of the trees

so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.

PATRICK WHITE