THE NIGHT'S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

THE NIGHT’S A BLACK HOLE OF A BEGGING BOWL

The night’s a black hole of a begging bowl

that doesn’t know what to ask for anymore.

Shall I throw the new moon of another beginning in

like good coin of the realm, in passing,

or bite the bullet of a counterfeit eclipse

in the silver silo of the dark abundance

I’m trying to trigger into stars again

like apocalyptic insights going off in my brain?

The heavens roll like an old thirty-eight

I raise to my temple for old times’ sake.

But the gate I used to close behind me

in the high starfields to keep nothing in

is hanging on like a lapwing by one rusty hinge

to the wing and the prayer it’s dragging on the ground.

It’s getting a little late for suicide. The timing’s

overtaken the importance of the content.

And this close to the end, it would be a shame

not to see yourself out like friend in the doorway

saying farewell to yourself as you say in return

I’m glad you came to the stranger whose threshold

you crossed like a star in transit at zenith.

My pulse is still hammering swords of light out

on the anvil of my heart for me to fall upon,

but lately I’ve been bending them like horseshoes

to put them out of use and return them in tribute

to the water sylphs in the sacred pools of my mindstream.

Inspiration ages into crazy wisdom that still

doesn’t take its own advice but never fails to sing

in a voice worthy of a wolf or hermit thrush at moonrise.

I’ve been firewalking my way through this

long, dark, strange, radiant dream since I first

opened my eyes and the stars began to shine

but I’ve never lived the same thing twice.

Though the morning star falls like Lucifer

in the false dawn of enlightenment, the abyss

cannot be bridged by anyone’s trajectories

however high we ascend, how ever deep we plunge,

until we’re burning like maple leaves and shooting stars

in the second innocence of our return journey back to earth.

Fletched arrowheads of the sky, even the birds

falling short of the unattainable miss the mark

and return to the green boughs of their beginnings

just like the flight of these words in the sunset

as the night overwhelms us all unspeakably

with the proto-nostratic of the stars

like a mother-tongue of light that leaves nothing unsaid

in the autumn darkness fragrant with the decaying dream grammars

of the dead slipping their shadows like secret messages

under the door of the book we’re writing between us,

the beginningless prelude of the endless epilogue

of the memoir of the love life we had with Venus in Virgo

when the new moon was in the claws of sensuous Scorpio.

Big, red-hearted, archaic Antares

threshing the green wheat of Spica

as if the harvest had been achieved before the seed was planted.

Just because we die doesn’t mean that life

is finished with us like the draft of a manuscript

we threw into the bonfires of the maple trees

to inspire our ashes to rise out of the open urns of our firepits

like the feathers of a dragon enflamed by the wind

so our spirits could ride their own legends a breath

higher and closer to the stars every time we open our wings

to re-read the lyrics it took a lifetime to write in scars

like thorns in defence of the mystery of the black rose

we were happy to bleed for as if our blood had no other use

than the ink in the pens of these leafless woods

dreaming of new foliage in the spring returning

like the plumage of eagles to the lonely flight feathers

of their skeletal quills. Fossil constellations

in the darkness that whisper between the lines

of the alpha and omega of the life themes that once ran

like purple passages of the mindstream

that can still shed light on our afterlives in a book of shale

long before we had eyes to read what we were writing

like loveletters to ourselves on intimate terms

with the inconceivable solitude of this distant future

we’re all living now in celebration of yesterdays yet to come.

PATRICK WHITE