WOLF MOON FOLLOWING IN THE TRACKS OF JUPITER

WOLF MOON FOLLOWING IN THE TRACKS OF JUPITER

Wolf moon following in the tracks of Jupiter.

A dirty window. A cold night. A lonely astronomer

gazing through the flat glass without enlargement

or diminishment, he doesn’t grind his third eye

into a lens to grow more intimate or keep things at a distance

though he’s infinitely grateful for any firefly of light

like a chimney spark above a labyrinth of rooftops

and a fully enlightened prophetic skull only a few

devoted lunatics are howling at for reasons that elude them

at this hour of the early morning in a Prussian blue abyss.

Bleak January. No harvest. The soil too hard

to bury the dead. Hungry ghosts gnawing the air.

His heart a mason jar of black dwarfs that don’t

glow in the dark anymore. No jewels, or precious metals

in the ore of a solar flare of spent match heads,

he remembers the cool sapphires of the eyes

that used to look deeply into his like the Pleiades

without pretence or embarrassment, but more said

in a single glance about light, clarity and beauty

than any starmap could ever have imagined.

Dust on the windowsill, stars strewn across the sky,

he feels like an exile but knows deeper within

he isn’t any more misplaced than they are as

he bypasses his tears like mind and form

eviscerate matter, and like a lunar ocean

without an atmosphere to back it up, evaporates

into space like the last winding road of smoke

he’ll ever take like a geni unravelling the wick

from the flame, the wish from the mirage of a dry well.

He reminds himself he isn’t getting any older

than time is, and to say time is old, doesn’t make

any sense at any moment of the day or night.

Like the light of a star, the past often makes it

to the future long before the present ever does.

Waxing isn’t any younger than waning is.

The tide going out is just the opening eyelid

of the one coming in. Blue shift, red shift.

One mile east, one mile west, valleys and mountains

of the same wavelength, a snake in the flute

of the snakecharmer, dancing like fire on water

as if it refused to turn out the lights after the music was over.

If not peace, then at least an amicable truce

with the supersymmetry of his opposites,

he spins like a galactic dervish of stars

at the crossroads of where all ways of life

meet like jinxed prayer wheels at the nave

of a black hole with an iris of spokes

like the hands of an all encompassing clock

without a sense of direction, hour after

pointless hour as far as the world’s concerned.

Why spend a life bemoaning the absurd,

when it liberates his spirit from the tyranny

of common sense, like a detached retina

clinging to its visuals when the lack

of sequential event horizons opens the gate

to a flashflood of visionary metaphors

more acquainted with his imagination

than his third eye is with errors of perception.

Less and less he asks himself if he’s lived it wrong.

If anybody has, knitting socks for centipedes

to benignly pass the time doing something useful.

He doesn’t judge the efficacy of anyone’s delusions

to get the job done as if the beauty of the scaffolding

were the real masterpiece, and the painting itself

were merely another celebrity excuse

for the flesh to adumbrate the design of the skeleton.

Ladders of bone six feet closer to heaven

than the grave for awhile longer yet,

root fires of lightning rising through the rafters

of a leafless tree burning down like the lungs

of a star-breathing house suffocating in its own nebularity,

though he’s heard it said, the eternal sky

does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

PATRICK WHITE