A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A grey music hovers over the town.

No people on the streets. Background drone

of furnaces working overtime against the cold.

Space and time on the nightshift and fossils

of bootprints like prehistoric ferns

and the beautiful arcs of tire tracks

frozen into shales of brown Pre-Cambrian snow.

Unlike the stars, there’s no twinkle in the eyes

of the streetlights who just look down and stare.

There’s a desolate window across the street,

facing south directly across from my apartment

I’ve been peering into night after night

like the eye-socket of a blue-black anthracite skull,

waiting to see some ghost or star or the first small flame

of a pilot light come on in the dragon’s lair

as if it could breathe fire out of its eyes

and tonight the last full moon of the old year

slowly appears like seeing out of the darkness

or the return of an apparitional apple blossom to a dead branch.

The air’s got an edge that plays like a switchblade

with the most exposed parts of me,

and the silence brazes my face in glacial acetylene

as my skin goes into shock electrocuted by the cold.

My breath one exorcism after another

I had no idea I had been possessed by so many.

I wander in a fog of exiles and ghosts

like a mystic cloud of unknowing, the rag

of an impoverished atmosphere that aspires

to break into stars shuddering with insight.

Orion and the dog star of Osiris, and Jupiter,

a little further down the road from the moon

than last night. Further into the frozen river groves

a strange, brittle quiet waits for something to happen to it.

I am too far from home to make it back in time.

I have made and unmade my own way through life

like this river whether my end is in my beginning or not

or if there’s a sea of shadows on the moon

I’m trying to make my way to by flowing upward

like the bridges of the trees that burned in the fall behind me

after I’d crossed over to the other side of everywhere.

Myriad stars and the unoccupied emptiness

that’s forms the quixotic inconceivability

of my shapeshifting mind takes them in like fireflies

through the open window of a lantern that embodies the light

the way a candle wraps a spinal cord in flesh like beeswax

then adds a touch of fire to enliven the flame of life within.

My heart gathers them together like tribes

around their council fires and recites from memory

such resplendent myths of origin they shine

like constellations on a bitterly cold night

to keep themselves warm on the inside

by banking the flames with last year’s lack luster starmaps.

Cosmologies come and go like the leaves,

turn brown and go flakey thinking of themselves

as retroactive prophecies in the canopic jars

of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran

led out of the darkness by a messianic goatherd

thinking of kindling his morning fires with them

as he would later burn an autumn of Gnostic Gospels

like portable cave paintings surrounded by hearthstones.

Was the smoke any holier than that of a distant farmhouse?

Was there a fragrance of burning loveletters in the air?

Did fiery doves descend like cherubim and ice-age comets

cast out like flawed jewels from their black halo

beyond Neptune or the aura of the dark Oort cloud

catching the sun out in the open like a sudden hail storm

in Sodom and Gomorrah? Pillars of Dead Sea salt,

those who looked back, weak-kneed birches

buckled by snow. Footprints in the volcanic ash

of the first man to set foot on the virgin moon

like the hymen of this trail that breaks behind me

like poetry putting its foot through a window of ice

on this shadow-stained mirror of immaculate misconception

breeding a second nature to replace the first through repetition.

My mind wanders off into transformations

that always take me by surprise and I let it

follow the deer paths down to the river

to drink from the galactic reflections of migrating stars

like elixirs of hunting magic that drive the wolves crazy.

Every step I take, the creature I am morphs

into the one I’m becoming by mere association.

I’m a bestiary of arcane symbols and totems

I’ve stacked up like stones and skulls

into a dolmen of self I’ll leave as a sign

of residential abandonment to the next traveller

to pass this way and wonder who I was

and much more engagingly who I wasn’t.

I wasn’t a man who wouldn’t take a risk

at some peril to his eyes to get a better view of the stars.

I didn’t stand at a window for the whole of my life

to wish it away until I was numb with longing

on one grimy star descending into a night sea

of tarpaper rooftops writing their memoirs in snow.

I survived by not taking shelter from the storm.

I propped my elbows like the legs of a telescope

on the windowsills and event horizons of the world

and got out of my house of the zodiac

like a wandering planet through a lens.

I never took direction from my aftermath.

I was as fierce and lucid and clear as a star

and all paths led away from me enlightened

from the beginning like a future memory of the past.

Love was a kind of nebular confusion that didn’t last

though out of it grew the wild-eyed irises of the Pleiades

and the blue fires that bloom along these banks in the summer

when I remember some transitory detail

about the spirit of a lost lover that still haunts me

like a willow that used to rinse her hair

of stars and dragonflies in a river that passed her by.

If truth was the salt of the earth, beauty

was a dangerous sugar I was always bee enough

not to resist like a golden coke junkie dealing in flowers.

Though I didn’t indulge in happy endings,

I found it improbably possible to remain grateful

for more than I could comprehend of the gifts

I was given to lay like poppies and wheat

I’d gathered from the starfields by the heartful

on the evanescent stairs of the unattainable

as I hid like a secret I couldn’t tell to anyone else

to see who came out when no one was looking to receive them.

Wisdom when it managed to achieve me

always emanated a bouquet of seasoned ignorance

with a twist of crazy that often made me want

to smash it on a dancing floor at a Greek wedding

and dance in glee at my delinquency until my feet bled

with the blood of the grapes they tread the wine from.

Some people’s heels are winged in doves’ feathers.

Mine were spurred on by the wings and talons of hawks

plunging across the full moon like nocturnal arrowheads.

And when the time came to empty the lifeboat of my likeness

like the frozen wombs of the gaping milk weed pods

gaping as if they’d just given birth to a million ghosts

that are going to take root in the hills that live after them,

I could honestly say in words that politely ignored me

like a pyramid doesn’t make an impression on a sand dune,

even in a sea of radical pearl makers and resurgent stars,

mirages of water in the waterclock of a mindstream

in flood both sides of an imagination silting the light with starmud,

I knew the mermaids. And I knew the rocks.

I was a complete sailor. I dropped anchor

like a shipwreck in the moonset of my blood.

PATRICK WHITE