SILENCE, MOST ELOQUENT GHOST OF MY OCEANIC EMOTIONS

SILENCE, MOST ELOQUENT GHOST OF MY OCEANIC EMOTIONS

Silence, most eloquent ghost of my oceanic emotions.

Solitude, irrevocable seance of a summoned heart,

linger with me awhile like a night fog sweeping

off the sea on a deserted island beach, softening

the air and the edges of things, saturating time

with an iconic awareness of advanced evanescence,

cloud of unknowing, feather on the mountain,

down of the Orion nebula in last year’s leftover herons’ nests.

Birth and death in the same breath, are you the shroud

or the cocoon? The aftermath of a vision in a distant fire

that went out a long time ago like a candle in a lighthouse

trying to signal to an empty lifeboat on the coast

where shipwrecked men could talk to the sea like a woman

who could answer them with her eyes and they knew

without doubt, she understood more deeply than they did

how to love the world like a rose that was given to everyone

thrown from the stern of a journey into the wake

of a star that was always moving on to stay ahead of its shining

so that it would have a future to look back upon

when everything came full circle like a tide

of providential highs and lows, widow walks

and wedding aisles, rowing roads, and the seeps of the drowned?

It’s taken me Russias of suffering to discover

the most enduring wisdom comes of joy, not pain,

though there’s precious little of it to communicate,

no more than salt in a tear from the eye of a life

with a leak in it that can’t be engineered into restraining itself.

I rejoice in the stability of my flowing as if

there were more to the going than just passing beyond

another gate into the open wide-eyed with fear and wonder.

A gate can’t tell you anything on either side

of the sweep of a lapwing hanging by a hinge

like the wing bone of a broken windshield washer

or an insight lingering in the doorway of enlightenment

as if the longest journey it’s ever taken were a threshold wide.

I’ve seen the ballerina scrubbing floors for a cash cow.

I’ve seen the rich boy maltreated by jackals like a lunch-bucket.

The stars don’t think the fireflies are pretentious

for trying to shine a light on themselves, but there are frauds

who vy like Coca Cola and poets for prime time on the shelves

like clerks in the emporia of their ghost towns

long after their fool’s gold didn’t pan out

like scar tissue in a volcanic rift where the viciousness

of their mediocrity hisses and evaporates

like spirits of hydrogen sulphide from rotten cosmic eggs.

A splinter under their fingernails, and they swear

they’ve been crucified to elevate the elect

to vertiginous altitudes that give them sacrificial nose-bleeds.

Such horrid self-esteem in the middle of so much to celebrate

they settle for reputations they calibrate like dung beetles

by the Milky Way that rolls their world up into a ball

in an exhausted bingo hall for arts and letters. It’s a drawing

of the awards lottery for the improvement of middling chromosomes.

Tomes and tomes of it like an anthology of gravestones

where all the epitaphs read like approximate haiku

that had their body parts compacted like a wrecking yard

and sent to Japan to rust in a recalled vehicle on salted roads

to keep the bluebirds and chicory from singing like Carthage

on the soft shoulders of their marginal attempts

to nest in the rafters of a world that’s too heavy a lift

for a bubble in a hurricane that thinks it’s the third eye of Eden

relieving the Hubble on the nightshift. Evil never sleeps

in the naked city, but it’s the darkness that keeps

the details honest, not flashlights peering into the eyes

of a morgue like graverobbers that keep the night lights on

in their own tombs for fear of seeing anything other than themselves

out of the unusual like the Standard Model of the Universe.

O let the gripe of our green spirits ripen in the sun and the rain

so the dusk doesn’t need to explain why it’s worth looking at.

So the apple the moon bites into is sweeter than a mentor

that says nothing about what you want to know

about tasting life for yourself through long exposure

to the emerging elements in a dark room urgent with stars.

Forget the orgiastic corruption of emperor penguins

that didn’t get laid enough in highschool to stop

interrogating their sex lives in the House of Commons

as if they were giving a drunken address to the Press Club

across the street from the safety nets around the tower of suicides

where the fledglings fling themselves from the Peripeteian Rock

as undesirables. The providential tide turns around

like a messenger reversing the intent of what he meant.

Though once you’re falling, you can’t be held responsible

for your descent into hell or who looks back and who doesn’t

whether it’s Gommorah or Hades you’re running from.

Out here in the country, O Canada, there are red-winged blackbirds

singing like quarter notes on the staves of cedar rail fences

plastered with lichens like decals on the guitar-case of the moon

hitching down the 401 for a gig in Toronto it’s trying to sober up for.

The snowmen aren’t weeping in self-pity at the approach of the spring.

Blackflies soon, to be sure, but two days of intense heat

at the end of May when the temples are cleaned, and they’re fried.

The triune identity of the silence, stillness and solitude,

three faces of the same Druidic deity whose eyes follow you

like phases of the moon in the crowns of the black walnut trees

swimming upstream against themselves through the xylem and phloem

of Pisces coming into leaf like fingerlings of catfish

in the exuberant nightcreeks running their luck

like couriers de bois trying to paddle faster than the whitewater

of the current in a commotion of dangerous glee

as if the deepest cheap thrills of all were still free for the taking.

The lake exorcises its crystal ball like cataracts and fog

and the wraiths are on the move like a smudge on a mirror

trying to make things clearer than waterbirds to itself

or sunspots behind the veils of their beautiful auroras

hanging in the air like music to disguise the complexion of their voice.

And the fireflies aren’t organized like clips in a machine gun.

They snipe at you one by one from the bushes like bad shots

playing paint ball with your eyes. But let’s not track

our starmaps into the house of life like the slime of morning snails

trying to resilver the mirrors of last night’s telescopes

in their own image. Let’s acknowledge how unreal

everything is the more familiar you become

with your own stranger who isn’t interested

in standing at the gate waiting for you to look up

from the cemeteries you’re planting like secret gardens

in preparation for spring. Just because you

take the lead in the dance doesn’t turn your partner

into a lost follower anymore than the brown star of Jupiter

is a disappointment to the sun, or the bone-box of the moon

is any less of a sacred reliquary releasing the wind

to sweep the oceans off their feet with the breath

of God waltzing in three four time with the brides of life

like apple bloom in orchards of moonlight opening their eyes

like whitecaps stepping like Venus out of their own surf.

PATRICK WHITE