THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

This far from shore, the night an oceanic emotion

I’m bobbing in like an empty lifeboat,

a message in a bottle among the stars

as if I had nothing to lose, nothing to rescue,

no voice on the hill calling out in the fog

to see if I’m still here or salvage by now.

I’m a runner of the woods, a courier de bois,

portaging across the moon to shoot

the black water rapids on the far side

of a wilderness with ten thousand shattered mirrors

as if every lake wanted a little piece

of the big reflection as a keepsake

of what they see in themselves when they look.

I light a fire like the memory of daylilies

that used to bloom beside my mindstream

and I’m humanly at peace with the immense

impersonal intimacy of the solitude it inspires.

Everyone’s journey might be no more

than the history of a wavelength woven

into the fabric of a vast intelligence

pervasive as space in which everything is created

like the flash of a firefly out of the void

to ride around on the flying carpets

of the sky or the water like a fish or a bird

or the nucleating bubble of a membrane in hyperspace

as if the multiverse were a playful idea

that got out of hand in the elaboration of it,

an inspiration that hasn’t burnt itself out

like a fire in the starfields, at least here,

for billions of years, the godhead run amok

with appearing in its own imagination

like a stranger in the doorway of its homelessness.

It would be unkind to say nothing about it

except to say there’s nothing you can say about it,

but compassion demands you offer the gaping silence

of a wounded mouth a little lunar scar tissue

now and again, and not deny the nightbird

the lyrics to its longing, and even

in this desert of stars when it get’s cold at night

let your mirages dress up in your hand me down delusions

if it keeps them warm for awhile. Truth

can walk naked if it wants, but love’s all

silk in the summer and flannel in the winter,

and come the spring, a ball gown of apple orchards.

In autumn it trails a robe of smoke

like an era of pageantry magnificently adorned

like a dead muse on a pyre of bird bone flutes

and unpublished manuscripts brought to you

by the fruition of the letter apple, if the Druids are right.

Mellow sorrows ripen into expansive sunsets somehow

as you age, and the barriers of the self-contained

come down of their own accord like cedar rail fences

wearing lichens like tattoos of the moon not to forget

the redwing blackbirds that sang from its green boughs

and how it all changes if you take your mind off it

even for a moment to dream of writing a loveletter

to the eyes of some beauty who never promised to understand.

The arms of the old moon may be empty,

and the new too late for the future of yesterday,

but to plague yourself with disappointment

is an eclipse of black mould eating away at the rafters

that uphold this house of life like the rootless tree

of a human doing their time standing up as

they look time straight in its one good eye

and say to themselves under their breath, bring it on.

I am a peer of eternity as much as you are

in your labyrinth of mirrors, as I am by my fire

looking up at the stars shining down on me

with tears in their eyes for the way I feel their light

ripening in me like a brandy of the spirit

I warm in my hands and breathe deeply in,

the bouquet of a heart that’s been tempered

like an alloy of joy and grief. The hour keeps an edge

on my blood as soft as rain that can’t be blunted

by the pain of knowing one day, soon, I’ll

fall upon it like the shadow of a sundial,

the petal of a flower that denied it loved me,

the paling of a gate I lived my way through

like the flightfeather of a waterbird in passing.

No stranger to the garden, no foe of the mystery,

my prophetic skull will go on singing

long after the snakes and ladders of my flesh and bones,

my arteries, my chromosomes, have taken down

the scaffolding I climbed up on like a boy

the highest tree in an abandoned orchard

to paint a myth of creation in the hues

of my heart and voice, listening to the wind

in the apple bloom whispering evanescently

as I prick out the cartoons of my fresco

like new constellations of an enlightened imagination

on the roof of a private chapel of a tent

I cart around with me like the skin of a serpent

I once shed, but will leave like a blossom

on a green bough awhile to remind the leaves

and the nightbirds what the wind meant about love and life.

I’ll spread my wings like a starmap to everywhere

and nowhere in particular like a river

that flows through a small town at night

and I’ll let the fire that burns within me decide

as the ghosts of many springs past gather around me

and the winter stars blaze in the still clarity

of their savage distances like messages

from an eleventh dimension that don’t

ever seem get to me on time, whether this life

I let live me out of respect for its crazy wisdom

were a dream, a poem, or the picture-music

of an unfinished lyric about a firefly of insight

that caught its breath, as I did, like a thief of fire

on the run, pausing a moment in a midnight garden

I didn’t feel wholly estranged from like an exile

seeking shelter in the shadows of its trees

somewhere between a seance and an exorcism.

PATRICK WHITE