ALWAYS IT SEEMS A SOLITUDE AWAY

ALWAYS IT SEEMS A SOLITUDE AWAY

Always it seems a solitude away

from what I think I’m looking for.

Every step along the path, a precipice.

Another black hole in the middle of a third eye.

Call me Icarus. Even at sixty four

breaking out of one cosmic egg after another,

only to fall like a fledgling from the nest

at my own rootless standing in the world

or be swallowed whole by some reptile

like the moon and be regurgitated,

a used condom, a candling parachute,

a lunar phase of a snake shedding its skin.

At one point in his life he was so intense

he was the mainspring of a wind-up waterclock

or a pulse, now he’s hanging on

like a single wavelength to a mindstream

that’s flattened out into a perma-press abyss,

no crests, no troughs. The gas furnace

shudders when it dry coughs, a cold engine

trying to make a new start like a nightbird

in a dead tree in a frozen swamp. Shhhh

don’t wake the mosquitoes up. I’m still

trying to get over the welts of my last exposure

to the literary scene. I don’t want my blood thinned

at either end of the food chain. Doomed to drown,

let it be in something deep, not shallow.

Let my shipwreck lie in peace on seafloors of starmud

not tidal pools or puddles. I want to give God

a good scare for once because love doesn’t have

an accumulative effect. Too much beginning

not enough death. You can’t learn to breathe

by holding your breath. Here comes the dawn

like a janitor to a school for remedial living.

But what more does an ageing red-tailed hawk

have to say to the seagulls and pigeons,

aeronautical opportunists who can’t help

flapping and hovering the way they do

over the rooftops and fire hydrants

of a garbage dump that takes pride in its waste,

than a switchblade’s got to relate to a drawer full of cutlery?

What do the butter knives know about clawing

their way through life with the talons of eagles?

Or being so clear-eyed since you first broke

into this house of life, you leave so little evidence behind,

investigators arrest a mirror in a case of mistaken identity?

Or asked to give witness from your upstairs apartment window,

about what you saw on the night of the wolf moon,

you speak like the cloud cover of a screening myth

because the stars weren’t out and you spent the night

by yourself looking eyelessly down on the street

where nothing ever, ever, ever happens

and the streetlamps only quarrel among themselves

in the summer when the fireflies get away with everything

like freelance constellations on a starmap, and they get the blame

though they’ve gone straight all their lives?

Nights like this, things get so weird

I can hear the future calling to me like a seance.

And Cassiopoeia had she appeared would have

looked like an electric chair in a brown out of shining

that must have come like Jupiter

as a big disappointment to the sun.

PATRICK WHITE