JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage

to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light

that shine down upon the earth awhile

whether anyone’s watching this time of night

or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse

of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods

in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast

like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic

strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder

as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because

we were born too early to walk on another planet

surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes

of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs

that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.

Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.

The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.

A curse of distances that left us spell bound

by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating

the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick

to return to the original fire wombs of our shining

instead of being marooned here burning our ships

on the beach of a circumnavigable island

as if we could do nothing but under reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster

in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light

and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things

and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.

That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance

of their emphatic absence in my life was to

humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors

that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals

like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts

of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could

from the brevity of our unbearable passage through

the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,

I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels

of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes

aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage

from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star

through the heart, and the childhood fever

of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist

with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies

for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space

you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude

and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me

and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals

in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,

fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,

in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist

with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since

like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.

Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,

and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark

where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not

the insights that are revealed along the roadsides

of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers

that our divining aspires to, not the lamps

of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure

the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,

light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes

and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds

and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces

at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened

by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,

burning in the window on the grave yard shift

long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.

PATRICK WHITE