I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE

I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE

I have befriended my solitude

and even the luster of the empty stone

I wing side-arm skipping out over the lake

like a waterbird trying to take off

is enough of a moon for me, though it sink.

Dead, wet leaves, flat as maps, almost

the scales of a fish or a snake,

or the slicked backed fur of an otter

plastered like a poultice of leeches

matting the pages of a damp book

over a glacial crack in a granite skull.

Sedimented histories of dead rivers

raised from the bottom by disjointed cliff sides.

Love lyrics of lichen and mildew.

Scalps of moss torn from the rock

by a thousand tiny root nerves

that sound like velcro being ripped apart.

Decay. Rot. Duff. Detritus. Amputated limbs

pulped into soft rungs of arboreal gangrene,

there are no burning ladders to heaven

around here, but the stars, so purely unattainable,

Orion in the leafless alders, the red spider

constellation of the Sioux, brave mother,

blazes down through its abysmal patinas of time,

like alchemists at the putrefaction and suppuration

of this earthly matrix of mortal disaster,

the air saturate with the lingering pungency

of something tragic that once happened here.

Ages of gold degenerating into base matter.

I am growing old. My thoughts walk

among notable eternities discussing my succession.

I will be driven out like a deposed wolf.

Already I wander these woods alone.

Everything says what it pretends it does not know.

Yet something whole and of its own accord

like sweetness come to the apple

still blooms within me like a moonrise

partially obscured like a pearl glowing

in a bed of clouds. Suffusions

of a pale lunar glare tempered by compassion

for the foolishness of having lived immensely

without taking down sail running before the stars

for the sheer infernal joy in the thrill

of daring the nightwatchmen

not to let me get away with it.

I stole fire, blood, love and light.

I stole my freedom back as my own birthright.

Always a star ahead of myself

I weathered the firestorms out

and lived vividly under siege in the doldrums.

I flint knapped the new moon

of my heart like obsidian

and phalanged my anger like a Clovis point

into an art of arrowheads shaped to fit the prey.

With the effortless effort of a mastered discipline,

I hit the mark like a hawk of the feathers

I was fletched in like the war bonnet of a comet

in a raid off the reservation for wild game

worthy of a warrior with the courage of a lost cause.

PATRICK WHITE