THE MILKY WAY LEAVES A TRAIL OF MIRRORS
LIKE A GARDEN SNAIL
The Milky Way leaves a trail of mirrors
like a garden snail
across the night sky. After the wounded
joy. The scar
of enlightenment on the waters of life.
A flash of insight
many years ago when a firefly emerged
from the shadows
like a mandarin of Zen after a
lightning storm and there’s been
no starmap for the creative turbulence
in the valley of my heart
ever since I graduated with thorny
laurels
from an abandoned schoolhouse of doors
that taught me to open them for myself.
Now I’m the master
of a shipwreck under full sail on the
moon.
But don’t be dazzled by all the hype.
If you die into living
more immensely, even the apricot
blossoms
when they come to the green bough with
the incredible voice
after the marrow in your bones has been
frozen
like the plasmatic slush of a winter
dusk on the road,
are mythically incomparable to the cool
bliss of the stars
that illuminated the afterlife you
lived before this that made
every spring thereafter seem a
post-mortem effect by contrast.
Meditatively I sit on a tatami mat of
rusty finishing nails
practising the suppler Yoga of pine
needles
under a broken evergreen with casts of
snow on its branches
on an outcrop of rock over a lake I
keep returning to
as if I lived here once like a
waterbird and left something behind
like a reflection of mine with eyes
that drowned in me
when I was walking on thin ice in the
dark that growled
like an unchained dog, to get to the
other side
of swimming like a hourglass with
waterwings for lungs
on the estranged side of the moon,
without hope,
when the silence forgot how to sing and
every lightyear
I sank deeper into exile with an
uncanny smile on my face.
The bush wolves howl. And everything
that is
sad, mad, wild and lonely about me
answers back
as if time were trying to express what
it’s like to be mortal
and have a past it’s sometimes hard
not to miss.
Wolf moon, snow moon, hunger moon,
waxing,
Spica in the hand of Virgo, Capella and
the kids,
Regulus, Aldebaran, Sirius, Orion and
the Lion
the Pleiades garlanding the horns of
the Bull for sacrifice
to the chthonic goddess of the island
in the bay
that’s more witch than warlock by the
way
the cedars thicken like mascara on the
treeline.
I look at stars with the same
anticipation I felt
when I used to check my flowers first
thing in the morning
to see if any had opened like
supernovas in the night
while I was dreaming about the light
being a gardener that transplanted
hydromorphic constellations into a
starmap that never uprooted its weeds.
Detached and free enough to be
emotional about the dead
I scatter the ashes of my heart like
things I’ve felt and said
swept like a gust of stars and snow off
the thresholds
of my seeing by the silver green brooms
of the moonlit junipers
that try to keep the flying carpets of
the hillsides clean
of the Arctic mirages the mind tracks
in like a zodiac
with bestial house manners, wherever I
think it might do
the undernourished roots of the
waterlilies of dark matter
the most good. I mulch my solitude with
autumnal memories
of equal nights and days at the
crossroads of my ecliptics
and celestial equators like the tree
rings of spring in my heartwood.
Though my tears keeping jumping
orbitals like ripples of rain
there always a discharge of light out
of all proportion
after a quantum release of every mystic
singularity
of a firefly at the heart of the galaxy
from a black hole of pain.
I don’t cling to my leaves in winter,
nor grieve when
the blossoms of spring let go of me
like thousands of poems
free as geishas in the gutters of my
starmud to shine where they please.
Like one old mushroom once said like
the bald head of a man,
the birds are flying in my roots, the
fish are swimming
in the crowns of my trees. And I know
as well as he
what hour it is. The midnight sun
breathes in its sleep
through the gills of Pisces. A virgin
sows
the unploughed moon with beards of
starwheat.
PATRICK WHITE
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