HOUSE FULL OF SPIRITS
House full of spirits,
suffering ones, dead flies
punctuate the way
your lives have settled
on the windowsills of an
indifferent eternity;
as foretold, the wind
has raked up your
footprints like leaves,
and your smile no longer
denudes the rose,
not even a rag of flesh
to sop up your exquisite
tears.
And still, no one
understands your pain,
no one sits around your
heart,
the raging blue fire of
your fragrant grief
trying to water your eyes
like gardens.
And the brides move like
waves
without a sea, the
shadows of young horses,
and love that promised so
much
down on its knees at the
end of a wharf
that never led anywhere,
thistled into hatred and
smouldering suicide,
and blood that rattled
its chains at the moon,
and the years passed
without remark
as if the measure of a
life
were a butter knife and a
French carnation.
Late at night, when the
town sleeps,
when every thought
falls
like the feather of a passing bird
or a
pellet of bitter rain against the weeping glass,
as if the unrighteous were
being stoned
by those without sin, I
feel you
looking for your passage
back through me,
as if you would adorn my
voice
with the phantom bells of
a forgotten joy
you never told anyone
about,
as if you would add the
ghost down
of
your aimless autumn
to
the warmth and moisture of my breath,
and flavour the air
with the subtle auroras,
the secret dawns
of your quiet
dispersals,
the petal of a blind
candle
shedding its light
with every exhalation.
Take what you need,
the sorry cargo
of what you are able to
carry;
and even if I don’t know
what room
I am the door to,
what window I look
through,
use me as your small
hunger suggests,
the feast and silo of
your unknown needs,
the penumbral gardens of
the world next door
that never turns the music
up loud.
I will leave myself out
like a portion of the
garden
after harvest
for the birds who must
winter forever
on a dead branch stiff
with time.
And I will not ask about
you;
I will not look into your
eyes
as if I leaned over the
wall of a well
to listen for how far the
pebble I wished on
more out of habit than
faith
had to fall before it
drowned
in the shapeshifting
starmaps of your watershed.
Be what you are, the
fragrance
of the lingering rose in
stale lace,
the hesitation in the
shadows of intenser forms,
I ask nothing of you
and expect even less.
I have my own solitudes to
cultivate,
the business of being
human to get on with,
and beasts at the gate
who stutter like hinges,
energies darker and older
than coal,
begging me to be the
one
to carry my corpse the
rest of this journey
that lies still in its
coils
waiting for the last
breath,
the last murmurous pulse
to quit my poor body.
Even among faces and
hands,
even on the abandoned
street
nodding disarmingly
at the suspicious
outcasts
ostracized by plaster
rooms
and hooded for hanging
in the doorways that I
pass,
I am driftwood on a remote
and lonely beach,
the bone of a thousand
island storms,
each a transfiguration
of my heart
rounded out in the brutal
tides
and undertows of sorrow.
And the hands of the
clock
don’t point at numbers
anymore
but shine radiantly in
all directions
as if the hour were a
vivid gypsy
trying to dance the truth
away.
And no one knows more
than the old, wooden
office chair
I’m sitting in
as if I were enthroned by
the life
of my own mind,
what it is I’ve been
doing all these years
stuffing symbols like
fortune cookies,
the vulva and wombs
of chromosomatic destinies
every one of which I’ve
had to eat and live
before I could read the
whisper of blood
that it was written in.
I could have made chairs,
I could have fixed
shoes,
nailing on new heels with
tacks and stars,
buffing the night with a
spin of a brush,
I could have proposed
propositions
about propositions,
and been a teacher, I
suppose,
toiled at something
simple
and recognizably
purposeful;
nibbled nocturnally at a
salad of money
when the garden was left
until the morning
to the shy and the
discrete.
But I was a rage
of arrogance, lies, and
delusion,
I was black lightning that
sneered at repose,
and any notion of the
heart was justified
that stoked the furnace
with the dead.
And I had to know what
love was
and the damp star under
the leaf
of a woman’s body,
and oblivions that tasted
of honey and chalk,
and the suggestive
familiars of a darkness
rich with the ores of a
stranger’s voice
feathered with the light
of unknown constellations
extinct as the dice of a
crucial gamble.
Enamoured of the eloquence
of the rarest paradoxes
and absurdities,
considering the nature
of the sea
I lived beside, and the
moon
that edged her crescents
on the anvil of my heart,
and the agony of being
alive
that I could not overcome,
the unanswerable emptiness
that always stands like
the last syllable
at the deltas of the
silence,
before I enter the
unimpeachable abyss of its wisdom
like a falling tower
trying to bridge the
infinite
by skipping mystic stones
out over the sea,
and the way I always
splinter into tears
like the eyes of a
message in a glass bottle
that bobs at my feet to
tell me I am lost and cast away,
what else could I be,
born
with this talent for
autumn, but a poet?
PATRICK WHITE
