FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

Fireflies flashing like a seance of memories

out of the low-lying fog of the past,

extemporal images that took me to heart

a long time ago, friends, lovers, children,

faces I cherished and could not live without,

gone from the bough like birds and blossoms.

I still feel this dark serpent energy coiled

in the marrow of my bones like the spring

of a ball point pen miscarrying in my pocket,

but the wavelengths are getting longer,

red-shifting toward the west into more

compliant sunsets than the youthful Armageddons

that confirmed my faith in looking for panaceas

and cure-alls in the heart of self-destruction

like particles of God in fissionable visions of creation.

Is this my half-life, uranium 239 stabilizing

into lead like a child’s sparkler returning

to the burnt out ores of some radiant conception

of what life and love, poetry and mind were,

meanings that elude me now in the vastness

under my homing wings, a crow in the dusk,

the crumb of a dream in the corner of a third eye

that sits atop my prophetic skull like the cupola

of an empty observatory half-closed in sleep like a cat?

I didn’t abandon the oceanic cosmologies

I shed along the way like skin so much as outgrow them

like rivers I’d floated down before all the way to the sea

where things get blurred and vaporous as desperate terminologies

trying to give a name to the nameless. The time

I wasted in the world’s eyes like a waterclock

of wishing wells trying to saddle-stitch my insights

like starmaps of the constellations of my age

that stare at me now like a blank page of silence and light

into the mindstream of what I am flowing through alive

urgent as an empty lifeboat drifting on a nightsea to know

where I come from and where I’m going

before I’m gone where I come from as if

in the depths of my eyeless seeing, I’d find a being

as blissful and sweet as the man I second-guessed my way

into wanting to be, writing in the shadows of the apple bloom

that crept across the morning grass like a beatific farewell

to things that can’t last longer than a specious moment before they pass.

I watch the stars that used to follow me through the woods

settle on my windowsill like dust and and the cinders

of exhausted houseflies. And even in this, there’s

something intriguing and strange like hidden jewels

in the slag of mined-out starmaps, that it should be this way

and not another, that it should be at all, and I be here

in the presence of my metaphoric awareness seeking

what can’t be sought like the sign of a flawless mind

in what befalls us from the inside out like chaos

embodied in the creative potential of time in the unlikeliness of us.

Nothing to weep over. No reason to indulge the heart

in a silence it can’t afford. Or sublimate your eyes

like dry ice in an isolated Martian mindscape alone at night

watching Deimos and Phobos, fear and terror,

eclipse your field of view with the cybernetic optics

of an Arctic labcoat looking for signs of life in a dustpan

of fossilized pollen. Like the queen’s clothes,

the sartorial flowers of life never bloom twice in a lifetime.

PATRICK WHITE