THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS

THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS

The nuns are sleeping on graves with their pagan lovers.

The black walnut trees have shed their leaves

half way between feathers and scales

like arboreal dinosaurs that are learning to fly.

And the branches of the staghorn sumac

that went up in flames like the rest of the greenwood

now look like the ribs of a snake blanched in the ashes.

I tell the hard rocks chiselled down to the lake

as if they were animate, sapient, sentient life forms

I know just how they feel

when they’re dreaming of Carrara marble

and someone steps on them

like a skull of a common cornerstone

you can take for granted, but the birds,

why is it always the birds that are the first

to be alert to things like this, tell me

not to deprive them of their extinction.

So I’m prone to keeping my words to myself

when I’m on a backwoods pilgrimage alone

with too many death masks hiding the face of the moon.

Half the abandoned roads I’ve walked through life

have turned back in upon themselves

like an ingrown hair of a noose

in a claustrophic cul de sac,

like a thread of the mindstream

trying to close the eyelid of a needle that’s dead.

But the other half of the labyrinth

on the dark side of seeing led me into clearings

in the middle of nowhere I ever expected to be startled by stars

that set my heart racing with mystic terror as if a partridge

just exploded out of the bushes in front of me

and enlightenment came to me for an hour or two

with such force of clarity I was breathing light not air.

And I didn’t become one with everything.

How can anyone say they’re one with everything

without resorting to the past tense the moment they say it?

I stood my ground beside unity like zero

because nothingness is the only way

of comprehending one without being excluded by it

like the exception that puts the lie to the whole,

and I amplified its immensity tenfold.

Ask any silo. There’s no limit to what you can hold

when you’re empty compared to what you can

when you’re full. Even on upgraded hobby farms

where the wheat and the corn are stored

in more ample, lightning proof Euclidean storage spaces,

if you look over your shoulder in passing

at the old wooden siloes barely holding their ribs together

with rusting metal bands, cooper’s barrels

abandoned closer to the road that’s been widened since then,

their roofs blown off by the wind like the lids of garbage cans,

I’ve seen fully mature trees, rooted in the compost

at the bottom, rising up like green oil strikes toward the sky

or a clown like me being shot out of a cannon toward the stars

and landing in the safety nets of the laughing constellations

who weren’t expecting to catch anything that night

but a few eyes out swimming too far, too deep from shore.

Just because it’s a long shot, and your aim’s off,

and your not quite as profound or sublimely targeted

as the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs,

doesn’t mean you still can’t make a big impact as a meteor

holding on to the flower in your hat for dear life

like a butterfly in a firestorm of dragons

with a childlike sense of humour marrowed

in the smooth bore barrels of their dusky funny bones.

PATRICK WHITE