AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

Awake as the dawn approaches, my cat

curled up on the desk beside me in her liferaft of a bed,

three goldfish sleeping at the bottom of their tank.

Ashen-blue in the urn of a sky burial wounding space

with the lament of a nocturnal bird disappearing

into the distant hills like the moon and Jupiter.

Intimate, almost hallowed, the stillness of a bell

hangs in the air, breathing through the gills

of the local steeples under the eyelids

of their half-opened air vents. Cerulean seepage,

venal blood that’s lost its way back to the heart.

Awareness quiescently strange, I’ve been listening

to the silence of solitary voices all night,

the medium of a seance I never summoned

but attend by acclamation at the urging

of natural selection. Meditations of a mutant gene

observing the red shift in the wavelengths of its blood line.

Haphazard paradigms, astigmatic mandalas

trying to take the guesswork out of being alive

as my thoughts run their numinous fingers

over the chasms and cracks that have been appearing lately

like a prophetic earthquake in the sign of my crystal skull.

My brother’s leg amputated by tree-cutters

to keep him dying from number two diabetes.

My mother, ninety-three, I’m afraid of her death

like a species fears extinction and I can’t help wondering

why I’ve wandered like a rootless tree so far from home

for so many years as if it fell to me to be the exile

in the family, so they could stay together on the island

and I could pursue the inanities of a lonely excellence

with Chaplineque holes in my tragic socks.

The rough-hewn complexion of heritage field stones

flushed by a beatific rose of the flowering light

glowing like a mood swing warming up to sunflowers

in Naples yellow. Even at the beginning of the day,

I feel displaced as a winter constellation paling

brilliantly in the west by the advent of the vernal equinox.

An epilogue of the ice age receding like a glacier

into an underground watershed on the moon

that hangs me like a polar locket around its neck.

Has there been a hidden purpose in the shining,

a gravitational eye that bent the light

of this long, dark journey way off course

the original flightplan to return back one day

along the path I made behind me, a comet

looping around the sun, a moth around a candle,

enraptured by the fire of the stars in the sails

of seagoing dragons set like blossoms on the wind

for the coasts of anywhere, warrior land namers

carving their totems on the dolmens of runic asteroids

falling like first stones without sin on the heads

of the dark glassblowers in the pellucid menageries

breaking the limbs of the evergreens like a fragile paradise

in an ice storm? Black sheep surviving on wild islands

in the desperate straits of their shipwrecked shepherd moons?

Life thaws. The mind thaws. The heart weeps

and the viscosity of the melting windows turn into rain.

The body is a medicine bag of wounded seawater

leaking out of nine stigmata. Time can walk one foot

after another geared robotically to the mainspring

of a wind-up, mechanical, alarm clock, but mostly it flows.

Even given you can’t step into the same river twice,

but wanting to clarify the ambivalence that most people feel

about the things they do in life, what are you going to do?

Run back with a monkey wrench and tighten a bolt on the river

to keep it from wobbling up ahead? Regret what you said

because you’re practising silence and sitting still?

Train the lightning to bite other people, or discipline

your emotional currents and mental whirlpools,

to accommodate themselves to your navigational charts?

You want to make a change to change, that’s ok, too,

but it won’t make a difference. Change just comes upon you

like morning to the nightshift retiring with the stars.

Everyone’s going to make the sea in time their own way

even if it isn’t to care whether they get there or not.

No river’s flowing the wrong way, every vein

is a path back to the heart, every drop of rain

is a jewel of the sea, oceans in its eyes. We’re swimming in

what we’re on our way to. You can’t pour the universe

out of the universe, and which of all the rays of light

from a star is heading off in the wrong direction? You can’t,

nor is there a need, scrub the darkness out of the light.

I remember getting up as a schoolboy in the morning

and seeing my mother’s, sisters’, grandmother’s slips,

bras, underwear hung out to dry like morning glory

blossoming on an eight foot long unplaned board

gradually being pushed through the open hole of the hot plate

with the portable teapot handle into a roaring black woodstove

with curd-coloured enamel chipped like teeth

as each of them collected their lingerie like mail.

Now I’m sixty-four years old and it’s millions of words

and thousands of miles later than I think. And my absence

accuses me like a sin of omission I wasn’t there to commit.

Like the sound of a small town waking up to what it rarely wants to do.

PATRICK WHITE