LIVING
ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF THE LUNAR WASTE
Living
on the cutting edge of the lunar waste
I
made of my last moonrise. A truce
with
underwhelming circumstances for awhile,
no
apparent pitfalls on a Saturday night in Perth,
too
cold for snakes, and the leaves playing their cards
close
to earth and the air a knife at your throat,
I
can remember when I tried harder to exist,
and
it’s still a holy war every day just to subsist
and
not let it scar your spirit into being cauterized
like
a bad tattoo of the moon you had effaced,
but
tonight I seek the ease of a solitude older than humans
down
in the wetlands of the Tay River just off
Sunset
Boulevard before you cross the first bridge.
Waist
high in the broken antennae of the brittle grass
yellow
as the fossils in a graveyard
of
green praying mantes, decultified romantics,
I
pad the skull of rock I usually sit on like a prophetic throne
with
the old manuscripts of fallen maple leaves,
recalling
lines from poems like lyrical snippets of chromosomes
I’d
written many years ago to adapt my heart
to
the changes it had to go through to recast
the
cannon it was into the life of a shapeshifting bell
with
the pulse of a nightbird lamenting the dead
instead
of a twenty-one gun salute like a firing squad
aimed
at the stars. Death is the saddest loss of discipline
the
spirit will ever be called upon to master in order to survive.
It
was sitting here one night, staring into the eye socket
bored
into the albino nugget of a crow’s skull,
the
boney harps of its wings torn off their hinges
like
gates that weren’t strong enough to keep something out,
as
the black flight feathers of a long eclipse slowly passed
across
my eyes, that I realized, dead or alive,
existence
is an interactive creative medium that doesn’t care
whether
you live it like a seance or an exorcism
and
there are untold ages of the shining left
even
in the oldest ashes of a star strewn on the path
of
these long nocturnal firewalks through the mind
and
that hello and farewell were the two wings
of
the same waterbird, beating in unison
that
empowered it to fly like a phoenix of imagination
out
of an aviary of urns of its past lives
that
might not sing for awhile but never lose their voice.
Cultivate
the kind of spirit that can sing to you in the silence
when
you’re down, about the beauty of just being here
to
live it, though you don’t want to hear it,
you
want to drown in your sorrow like a bell
but
somehow the sound of life cuts through you
like
a lunar blade with a growing edge
through
wounded water and you can’t help but wonder
what
your ghost would give just to be here again
if
only one more time, to resonate with the pain
like
a back up singer to the universe,
who
knows all the loneliest lyrics by heart
like
a waterbird out on the river late at night.
If
only to hit one perfect note of sadness, one tine
of
separation and suffering like a phantom waterlily
adding
its shining to the light like the art
of
knowing how to paint starmaps on your tears
indelibly
on water for light years to come
to
let people know you were once here,
you
listened as they will by the side
of
this river of life to the same songs, hurt and alone,
as
they must if they want to step out of the chorus
and
sing solo through their tears in their own voice
before
they’re gone to a hundred billion stars
that
are listening to the same echo
being
whispered in their ears like the fires of life
carried
away by the desire to live on
like
the empty lifeboat of a song full of moonlight
drifting
down river to an ocean of awareness
where
the gateways of the crow are refeathered
like
the exit and entrance of an eclipse of wings
still
keeping time to the picture-music that shines
like
a new moonrise in the voice of a mindstream that sings
its
way through the woods at night alone like a wild grape vine
sustaining
the tears of its spiritual high notes until they turn
into
the euphoric lunacy of a poetic wine aged in an earthly urn.
PATRICK
WHITE