I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I have seen the stiff, brittle leaf that clung

to the tree of life throughout the unforgiving winter

like the flagging page of a gnostic gospel at half mast

drop off in the spring to make room for the green underneath.

Strange timing, as the stars give up the nightshift

for the graveyard, Virgo complementing Pisces

on a colour wheel, but maybe its poem

were meant for the snow as it lingers in the doorway

of a long farewell, a faithful flame of the burning bush

in the annals of fire, one last testament to love

as if a silver tongue in the moonlight couldn’t say as much

about the mystery of life as the sacred syllable

of one old woman dying in an albino hospital could

as if time itself would be uprooted by her death.

The saying and the said. The coming and going

of stars and waterbirds, the searching tendrils

of words from the heart that reach out to touch

the grieving world like grapevines reading Braille,

like the promise of chandeliers of new planets

growing like wine under the wings of their leaves.

Sometimes best just to sit at the edge of a death bed

like a Buddhist monk and say nothing about

where the ghosts of those we love go uncoiling

like the smoke of a candle as if the nightwatchman

of a passing wind had just blown all the stars out

as the exhausted pain in the eyes of the morning

comes on like the numb grey of a hollow dawn

too early in the spring for the shepherd moon of the heart

to wholly thaw, for the exile and the orphan to weep beside

the rivers of Babylon like glacial windowpanes

calving into a sea of awareness like an ice-age giving way.

The mind peeks like a skeleton through a keyhole

into an abyss into the green room of an oracle

that’s taken off her wig of snakes offstage to remember

in the black mirror of her ambivalent prophecy

that doesn’t lie about such things, who she is

under the deathmask of the moon that falls

like the crone phase of a blossom from the dead branch.

Unborn it’s been said. Unperishing. No more

waxing and waning of a pulse, no more sunsets

and nightfalls under her eyelids, no more dreams

of waking up in the morning exhilarated by starlings

nesting in the calderas and chimneys of the old crematoria

that made ashes of her passions, and sowed seeds

in the starfields of the wildflowers in the wake of the fire

that consumed her evergreens like heretics at the stake of themselves.

Are we awarded wings by the wind for enduring

a lifetime of the transitory like a rock in the river of time?

The deathshead of the Hell’s Angels patched like colours

to our back, or the flightfeathers of mourning doves

returning to the green bough of a black walnut tree,

our coffins smothered like underground guitar cases in the decals

and leaves of the places we’ve been to sing ouR hearts out

in one station of life to the next along the road

that always leads us like the voices of nightcreeks

through the woods to clearings we’ve never stood

and looked up at the stars as if we’d never seen them before.

Like faces in the audience waiting for us to open our mouths,

like willows tuning the strings of our battered guitars

as if they wanted to know what it was like to weep from the heart

like a human growing soft, blue shades of stargrass

on our graves, or the flowing jewels of the sad, sad, eyes

that kill us back into life with the beauty of the melancholy

we’ve conjured out of the ore of our scars, as if our tears

were water-gilding the treble clefs and kells at the beginning

of every lyric we sing, leafed in gold sprouting

from the sacred letters of the alphas and omegas

running in the rain like an alphabet of blood freaked with light

not even death can wash out of the sheets like the music of life

burning its face like a moondog into the shrouds of our cloud cover.

As if it were nothing for us to leave our fingerprints on the air

like our names written in our breath disappearing on cold windows

like the last word of the moon’s lost atmosphere leaving home,

like the pollen of auroral roses dancing in delight

for the midnight sun like the undulant veils of the wind

that reveal us to ourselves like the sea to a widow walk,

parting the constellations, spider webs and fishing nets

in the unfathomable depths of our eyes we’re entangled in

like Delphinus rising over the fossilized remains of the cedar trees

standing like burning ladders up to heaven in the rootfires of earth.

Our gravestones can’t say but a whisper of it all.

They don’t speak for what lies under them.

Their rumours of life don’t travel very far compared

to the myth of origin of the dandelions that grow

all around them, scattering their seeds like stars with parachutes,

letting the light fall gently like down from a nest

or Leo in the west just after sunset or east of the dawn

when the cock crows at midnight and the owl wakes at noon.

PATRICK WHITE