COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

Comet in the west just after sunset

between the Great Square of Pegasus and Pisces,

breath on a windowpane, a smudge of light

as a warning, a blessing, a curse, the Ides of March,

a flightfeather releasing as many doves of meaning

as anyone cares to give it walking into the woods

along the packed-down wolf paths to see,

while there was still light, resolve in my legs,

if the red-winged blackbirds had returned yet.

What the river had been doing in my absence

that would help me take my mind off the world awhile

and forget there’s more pain in my laughter these days

than the joy of freedom from being me that used to

efface me with a smile that had travelled lightyears

from where it was born, a message to a man

who was still a child at heart, who could read

comets and smiles like keys to the indecipherable art

of bridging the gap between them like a unified field theory

of metaphors that could sing to the stars

as if there were a patina of meaning and beauty

that made everything glow with radiant significance

in the mystery of being alive in love with a muse

who traded the moccasins she’d walked a mile in

to know me, for a pair of winged heels, easier on her feet

than the long firewalks of thorns and stars in an ice storm

she used to have to take to follow me into exile barefoot.

Gone like a loveletter I once received in a dream

and set fire to like a poem I meant to keep

in the urn of my heart forever like a dragon

in a deep sleep of oblivion it never wanted

to wake up from disenchanted by the awareness

of what haunted it like the ghost of a lotus

at a seance of the sun. Gone those nights and days

that ran their course like the draconian serpent fire

of scarlet runners entwined around my spine

as if the axes of the earth were three poles in a garden.

Gone the long soporific nights with the cats and the dogs

brought in from the cold beside a woodstove you could trust

like a habitable planet orbiting Aldebaran in Taurus

before I had a vision in high definition of the Burgess Shale

in colour that made everything seem as vital

as the aspirations of Opabinia with its five eyes

and vacuum hose with claws in the brine seeps

of the Middle Cambrian taking the high, hard road

up the mountain that below might be as above.

Comets, smiles, the metaphors that unite them,

Pikaia gracilens at Pika Peak in Pisces, chordates

into backbones, fragile filaments, the spinal cords

of life, light and love, the hair of a star on the shoulders of night

like the sign of an ongoing love affair

with the depths and the heights of who we are to each other

highlights of the downtimes plunging

like angels and heretics, new moonrises

into the ageing dawns of the setting sun

between the eyelashes of the treelines beginning to sing

like red winged blackbirds on the dead branches

of seasoned guitars leafing into spring.

PATRICK WHITE