HAVEN'T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

HAVEN’T SEEN A STAR IN FOUR NIGHTS

Haven’t seen a star in four nights

and the windows are pining for more than lamplight.

It’s darker in than it is out, but suddenly

through the breaking clouds, hey, there’s one

and I’m momentarily thrilled by the delight of a child

spotting her first firefly rising like a chimney-spark

above this ashen town on a cold, autumn night.

Small pleasures in the aftermath of great intensities,

the immaculate focus that burned eyeholes

in the sockets of my crystal deathmask

that left me feeling like wounded glass

thawing into the long slow tears I carried back

from the wishing well like the empty buckets

of a waterclock that acts like a volunteer fire brigade

that never put anything out before it was too late.

Wouldn’t be the first house of the zodiac to burn down

and probably not the last, but, at least,

it’s not a plague door to the past facing east.

It’s not blood leaking out of the nostril of a bell,

but who knows? You can never really tell.

Anyone here ever go through a transformation,

emerged from a chrysalis of solitary despair

like a dragonfly with a retroactive message of hope

shining like Venus in the false dawn

of a real enlightenment experience? Do you see

how the light breathes on the darkness

and it’s morning everywhere at midnight?

I’m off to the woods to listen to the laughter

of the falling leaves abandoning their dissertations

on the nature of perishing as if the answer

had always been a breeze of effortless effort.

Truth is just the sound we make for something

we’re never going to stop looking for.

In the company of birches and the ghosts

of lake mist Druids it’s easier to sit still long enough

to recognize it. Let the starmud settle in the puddle

as if a vapour of metal were silvering a mirror

like dew in the night, a silk cloak of auroral insight,

without trading your eyes in for a Zen telescope.

To a dead man, is it folly to hope?

To a live one, is it wisdom to despair?

PATRICK WHITE