MY GHOST IS DANCING ON THE ASHES OF MY
BONES.
My ghost is dancing on the ashes of my
bones.
My blood was always a rose in this
house of thorns
and it blooms and it blooms in a
fountain of fire
and each of its petals, a farewell in
the eye of a flame.
Ghost dancer, what do you pray for, who
do you dance for,
what do you celebrate? Are your tears
drying like paint
on the lifemask you left out in the
rain? Are we
ageing into the scared silence of
doomed children
listening in the other room to a
stranger raging in pain?
Should I bleed with the warrior or heal
the medicine man?
Whose life was this that kicks its
heels up in a gust of stars?
I remember when I used to smile at my
scars
like arrows that hadn’t been fledged
yet in their own feathers
as they hastened to taste the blood of
the mark they left on life.
Do we fly like hawks for awhile, coming
down
like a decisive answer of the gods to
what the dove
was wondering, and then as we age and
mellow
like the gourd of the moon in late
October
and the harvest’s in, and the stars
have been beaten
like wild rice into the wounded canoes
idling
like fish in the shallows, does the
lunacy of our wisdom
teach us to evaporate like a quiet
suggestion
of the grey wraith in the moonlit mist
that unravels from the lake like
another way of life
we’re going to follow like the path
of smoke
from our own fires and the calyx of
shadows they cast?
Did we heed the protocols of the magic
and the mystery
well enough to have been worthy of the
wonder?
Did we part with gifts or did we die
with our hands closed?
Does our disembodied heart resound like
the whisper
of a black snake sliding through the
grass down to the river
to drink like the ripple of a long
wavelength
from its own watershed, or does it
still boom out
like summer thunder and grasp at what’s
unattainable about life
like bolt lightning with open talons?
Does our voice
still grow silent in the aftermath of
the most beautiful absurdities
after the nightbirds have finished
singing in the black walnut trees
that taught us to forego the star
tracks we were following
like blood through the woods, for the
more powerful hunting magic
of the understanding that exceeds the
signs we go by
like a dream we had when our ancient
totems slept at the side
of this Road of Ghosts wandering like
wild geese across the sky?
I remember lifting the veils of my
tears
like curtains of rain over the distant
blue hills
and the sound it made like the plectra
of a harpsichord
playing adagios of music in
accompaniment to itself
as it fingered each clean note on the
keyboard of the leaves
with the agility of a spider seeking
shelter from a downpour
as the fireflies appeared in its wake
like the chandeliers of the Pleiades
shining in the valley fog like
constellations that weren’t yet
quite sure of themselves but had a
nebular insight
into what they wanted to be as I
watched like a shapeshifter
enthroned like a rock intrigued on a
neighbouring hill.
I can still feel the spell they cast
upon me
like the bliss of enlightenment when I
realized
how extraordinarily unnecessary it was
to be anyone
I would recognize tomorrow wearing my
own skin
coming the other way on the same path I
followed
like a mindstream on the moon that shed
me
like one of the last phases of a lost
atmosphere
it breathed out on a deathbed unmindful
of the weather.
Do you remember the name the wind
addressed
the willows in that night or have all
the words
we used to speak to one another about
the secrets of life
been taken out of our mouths and
replaced
with a whole new vocabulary of light we
have yet to master?
Or are we deaf-mutes now and the dream
grammars
we once chanted around our fire pits
like wild irises
irrevocably indecipherable to the
unborn and unperishing
who always had less to talk about than
we did
who lived among the dying like a
compassionate stranger
as one of them moored on the moon to
the same fates they were?
Old ghost, no regrets? Is that why
you’re dancing
on the ashes of my bones? Because we
didn’t sign
a truce with the starmaps that put a
lie to our shining
like a limit on the sacred mindscapes
we wandered freely in
without taking possession of even the
little we needed
without seeing it as the gift of a
magnanimous spirit
that expressed the measure of its own
creative power
by how much it could give away like the
sun or the full moon
or a light nocturnal rain on the dusty
wild flowers that needed it
to keep on blooming back at the stars
that shone down upon them
for never having put gates on their
gardens
or guarded their exits and entrances
with warning signs
that the birds and the worms and the
deer and the dragonflies
that came in the name of life to gather
the fruits of the earth
had no right trespassing here as if
they weren’t walking
on their own land beside a deed of free
waters given
with the open-handed blessings of a
habitable planet
amazed by the starclusters of New
England asters
and stamina of pale blue chicory along
the side of the road
this late into the fall like the
parting gesture of farewell
to everything that passed before them
like the moonrise
of a dream just waking up on the far
shore of a deep sleep
sweeter than any that even the love of
peace had ever known before?
PATRICK WHITE
