SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence

can grow so profoundly intense

it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life

burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost

as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.

And when you see things whole in and of themselves

it’s always as if you were looking through a broken window.

Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you’re missing.

The more you explore the mystery of what you’re doing

just walking around on the earth, aware

of your awareness, the more of a stranger

you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight

and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards

and the leaves are falling and the river’s flowing

and the Canada geese are sowing themselves

in the wake of the plough of the moon

like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again

and my heart is saturated with autumn’s sad sugars

like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage

as if time had abandoned everything and all

the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human

with a romantic sense of irony as we dance

on the graves of the dead to celebrate

the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud

occluding and enlightening our solitude

until you’re enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,

the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive

to those who haven’t broken on through to

the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen

over a virgin black hole that’s all iris with no pupil

so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion

that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I’ll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,

but while I’m alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies

that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths

of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself

watching the spiders of time stringing contellations

like bird nets between the sacred upper branches

of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I

wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar

in the corner jamming with the silence of itself

like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,

if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,

seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles

you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals

of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.

But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate

your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths

of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember

the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling

to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?

Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?

Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost

of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse

to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew

without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive

was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that’s why I’m out here alone in the woods,

still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline

by taking my mind off things by letting go

of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat

like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps

of the habitable planets of the past bobbing

like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down

the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos

where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself

back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments

like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher

casting spells like a widow’s veils on the water

to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE