PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

Putting a little finesse in my solitude

I befriended a river as the intimate familiar

of my mindstream flowing under three bridges

of my vertebrae where I can stop where I’m going

once and awhile and look down, just look down,

look down a long time into the rippling

reflection of the sky’s third eye looking up at me

as if we shared the same tears in common.

The swallows nest in heritage stone along the canal.

And the moon, the willows, the lime-green water tower

trying to look colossally spaced out among the trees

plunge their images into consciousness like a telescope

without an inverting mirror to reorient them.

As above so below. Twenty stars at the most

due to light pollution, I walk past a Brink’s truck

emptying the vaults of the bank, looking

suspiciously unsuspicious as I step into a crossfire

of overenthusiastic hellos from the flaps unbottoned

on their guns trying to pass for one of the locals.

Back door out of town, upstream half a mile

where things aren’t quite as dangerously trivial

and the stars aren’t cosmetically occluded by make-up

and I can hear the river walking on its own waters

like moonlight writing wave functions in chalk on a blackboard.

Everything feels closer to eternity out here

in plain view of what there is to cherish, perishing

as I remember a woman I’ve remembered for so long

without ever stepping into the same recollection twice

like the eye of a jeweller swimming through star sapphires

as if the patina of time hadn’t found a way

to dull their shining yet, cling to their translucency

like a snakepit of oil, breathe on their clarity

like a milky cataract mistaking a window for a crystal skull.

Here, I can say she was beautiful and it doesn’t

echo across the waters like the night call

of a distant bird always saying farewell to the music

of some hidden tree the wind’s been playing

like a flute for the last twenty years. It’s crucial

to give your past a future to look forward to

so it can go on growing in your absence

like the painting of a garden you planted and abandoned

like a constellation of crocuses breaking through the snow

to get the rest of the way there according

to their own starmaps. Follow their own shining

wherever it leads, as mine keeps leading me here

where I can tend the beauty of the wound she left me

without listening to all kinds of scar tissue

offer me well-meaning worldly unasked-for advice

like scalpels of the moon that wanted to cut

my heart out of my chest like an ice-age arrowhead

congealed out of my blood like flint-knapped rose petals

long before the rock doves discovered

the invention of the bow like the shadow

of the wingspan of a ferruginous hawk.

Even if you were to uproot all your sorrows

like weeds from your solitude, what have you done

but exhume the lightning from your own grave,

defang the crescents of the moon from the serpent fire

at the base of your spine? Shame your passion

with a fire escape, burn out like the root-fire

of a candle into an echo of smoke that smudges

the bats from the house of the zodiac you were born under

like sage and smouldering cedar boughs that never

break into flame? No. She was beautiful

and as much as it hurts to remember that

clear-eyed as winter water worthy of the moon,

because she’s gone like the fork of a river

that’s moved on like the other half of a wishbone

from this our secret meeting place,

and the sadness and the beauty of the fireflies

that are missing among the paradigms of the stars

that once echoed their earth bound radiance

sometimes leave an abyss in my heart

a thousand deaths wide I’ll never be able to fill,

still, like the ghost of a phoenix unfeathered

like the staghorn sumac in the fall by the wind,

though space burn as hard and cold as glass,

I will spread my wings and rise like a fire

equal to the moment in passing that shines

through my tears like the arcing flightpath

of an arrow of light dipped in the waters of life.

I will celebrate my wounds as a measure

of how deeply I was seized

by what was irrevocable about her eyes.

PATRICK WHITE