BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT

BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT

Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don’t know why.

The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese

have already done their work, so there’s nothing to harvest

but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like

they have bad teeth. Pale yellow ochre ribbons of the moon

that flake like the acephalic pages of old holy books.

Something unknown is trying to be born of my emptiness.

My heart and my body strain to sustain sufficient gravity

to hold it in its orbit long enough to attain fruition

and hopefully, then, we can both let go of the labour

of trying not to let go of the climber that fell over the cliff

tied to our spinal cord like a burning box-kite

or the arrested development of a corpse past its prime.

For all the fury of their clarity in the cold air,

the stars seem more distant, aloof enough to be cruel,

almost savage like these fields returning to their own agendas,

purple loosestrife and mustard, and the hopeless green

of stunted plants trying to get their time in before the first snow.

I’ve walked these meandering dirt roads before,

but now everything’s gone inside, except for a few dogs,

and there are no lights on at the farm. I don’t care

where I’m going. I just walk. I just look. Exiled by the outside

of what’s sleeping in the hearts of the farmers

and raccoons alike, as the nights grow colder and longer

and the grave stars seem to shine brighter

the fewer there are eyes to see how radiant they are on their own.

Burridge up ahead, a gas pump, a grocery store,

a hippie who makes brooms. Think I’ll just keep on walking

until I run out of road, and after that, have to make

my own path through the woods to sit beside

a small unnamed lake with the wisdom of a sage

that’s got nothing to impart to me but what I came with.

And I can nurse the subliminal agony of a poet on the Milky Way,

bemused by the passage of all things around me

as if they too were walking the same Road of Ghosts I am.

I see the beauty. I see the bat flash across the moon.

I feel the mythically inflated sublimity

of my comparative inconsequence. I lament

the rubbish of the last flowers of the season,

the trashing of the wild irises as if they were all wrapping

with no gifts inside. I wonder what death is. What purpose,

if any, life serves, if it isn’t just here to serve itself.

PATRICK WHITE

YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS

YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS

Yes, the awful thresholds.

The taboos of lace and razorwire

that threshed our blood like kings of the waxing year,

queens that were crowned like the full moon in broken windows.

And you, dark one, hidden familiar, switchblade,

last crescent of my torment when all else had failed,

bloodsister of the same wound I’ve been dying of ever since

as if this life were the greatest affliction

that could have been visited upon either one of us

by the closed doors that drove us away

like scapegoats and pariahs, the untouchables

of an infernal caste of homeless innocents.

How could I ever forgive the boundary stones of their skulls

for what they did to you with their false prophecies

and promised lands, the hatred of your savagery

when you were mauled by the snakepits

incarnated in the hands and the glands of the toxic fathers

who brought their drunkenness like garbage barges

to the bed of a terrified girl to waste her

as they had themselves as if you’d been born to be trashed.

The deepest outrages and sorrows in life

have had their tongues cut out, and over the course

of many demented stars, the light evaporates from their eyes

like the last grey thread of smoke from a candle

dipped in flesh, and the soul, no longer a spinal cord

of serpent fire burning like a fuse toward

some apocalyptic illumination that would right

the errors of perception in the awareness of heaven

that washed you and I like motes and cinders,

the crumbs of dreams clinging to the end of an eyelash

out of its field of vision as if we were never meant to be seen.

O my lover, my salve, my muse and anti-self,

my heart still burns in the cold out here alone

in these broken starfields under these shattered chandeliers

lucid as ice-storms in the abandoned ballrooms

of the scarecrows that once used to dance here

until they broke into flames like strawdogs

at an outlawed ghost dance that promised to return

all those things to us that we had irrevocably lost.

Where have you gone? Is it warm, there?

Do they leave you alone to nurse your heart

back into feeling something remotely human again?

Even at this late date, your gesture of silence

still humbles my voice like a night bird

I haven’t heard before, as you ask for nothing

in the darkness, knowing as I know,

it would only make you more vulnerable to joy

and joy’s an arrow fletched with our own flight feathers.

And though, even now, wherever you are,

it would probably make you wince like a black rose

waiting for a pearl of blood to appear

where you pierced your eyelid on a thorn of the moon

in lieu of a tear you couldn’t show to anyone but me

without them breaking it like a mirror they didn’t want to see,

I have to say it, because you have to know,

though we’ve grown old apart, and I don’t even know

if we’re still the same astronomical catastrophe of fireflies

trying to keep each other warm in the immensity of the solitude

we once huddled in like a cold furnace of the heart,

waiting for a new world, anyone but this,

like a new universe to hatch out of a cosmic urn

though we both knew matchbooks don’t just

suddenly flare into fire-breathing dragons

out of the ashes of creatures like us

who could not forgive our childhoods

for abandoning us to the ferocity of their absence.

I have to say it, as if I were threshing arrows

like stalks of wheat in Virgo, what

an unlikely blessing of a sphinx you were

among so many obvious curses in utero.

And you must know, though I say it in broken glass

that never learned to cry, that I really did love you

even if I never said it at the time for fear you’d mistake me

for the others who did to excuse what they took from you

and never returned. Thousands of miles away

and more light years than the journey could keep up with,

in this open field, leftover for the birds and the worms

and the homeless weeds that are turning it into a refugee camp,

I stand like a hypocrite under a harvest moon in silence

and think of all the empty silos I’ve tried to be grateful for

as if I’d broken bread with them in order to learn

how to live on less than nothing but this vengeance

that still burns inside of me like the vow of a vacuum

that has yet to be fulfilled whether nature abhors it or not.

PATRICK WHITE