ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

Only the loneliest of ghosts gone mad

don’t fret their abstractions with facts.

The wind is pure and seedless and the moon

without weeds. Like old windows,

they weep tears of glass for what they’ve seen

like glaciers in an ice age slowly thawing out.

My voice is the tragic black box of many

panicked conversations trying to act professionally

just before things went deeply south. Orphic descents

into the underworld of the dead and the songs

I sang from the heartwood of my lyre, still resonate

like the shadows that flitted through the sacred groves,

the occult feathers of a coven of crows

that taught me posthumous dream grammars

have no verbs because everything’s already been achieved.

Strange, strange, and inexplicably human, how

the imagination is as easily seized upon

at this time of night by the dead and gone

as by the living, mysteriously animate and near.

I don’t deny there are demonic spirits

that can freeze my eyes with fear, lords

of the abyss that know how to clear a stage real fast

as all my dream figures sublimate like dry ice

into more habitable atmospheres, but I stay centred

at the nave of this prayerwheel of birth and death

and let whatever wants to emanate through me

fan out from there like the spokes of a sea star.

Together we make a zodiac of anathemas and benedictions.

The dead can bestow blessings and lift your spirits

like a curse if the timing’s right and you don’t

waste your trust on quoting chapter and verse.

Ghosts are the last inspiration of the air

the living breathe out as if they were returning

the waters of life to the river they drank from.

The moon passes on, but its reflection makes

an indelible impression upon the mind like a woman

grieving in a cemetery late at night for a baby

she held in her arms like the death of the dawn

and even the black dog of the autumn wind

is at a loss to know how to keen as deeply as that.

Voices out of nowhere, commanding no, don’t go in there

and others, gentle as fireflies that summon me

to follow bracken covered trails through the woods

to a plaque in the ground with a toppled Mason jar

of dried chicory and cornflowers that can still move me to tears

a hundred and fifty years after they died at twelve

of some garish pioneer fever with the name of their favourite colour.

I don’t shut the windows. I don’t close the doors.

I don’t smudge the air with sage or cedar boughs

to drive them out of the attic like bats. I let the dead

come and go as they please. I let their sorrows touch me

and my spirit bleed with empathy for the windfall

of wounded bells that haunt the grass like an eerie carillon

of death knells for the music of the past they once bloomed for

like new moons in a calendar of waning skulls. My house

is their house. They cling to me like an hospitable threshold

for homeless atmospheres very few among the living

know how to breathe in and out anymore without resorting

to a seance or an exorcism conducted like a bus stop for runaways

and vagrants common wisdom says it isn’t wise to trust.

Why shouldn’t the unsheltered dead take their place

at the round table in me like the shadow of a sundial

in a garden abandoned by time where dry-mouthed fountains of salt

still long for a taste of the rain in the tears of their dark watersheds

deep underground like wells that have yet to be divined?

The memory of the waters of life is the muse of the wine

they bring to the table like an echo of blood that’s gone on

ripening in them like uncultivated grapevines in the wild.

One drop on your tongue and you’re drunk

in the doorways of life for the rest of time like a dream

you can’t die in like an imperilled heart without

being grateful there’s as much to celebrate at the end

as there is a new start, that living and dying are the same event.

And as often as the dead have come to me in joy

though that might surprise the uninitiated who still divide

the hellbound from the heaven-sent, the fire from the light it sheds,

so the living have approached me like a perennial lament

for everything that’s missing in their lives like a bright vacancy

out of touch with the dark abundance that thrives

in their uprooted shadows like midnight at noon.

What sea do the Styx, Lethe, and Phlegathon flow into

that isn’t the same for the four mindstreams of awareness

that poured out of Eden, or the gardens and underground rivers

among the fountains of Salsabil in Jana or the waters of Babylon

Zion sat down and wept by? Or the dead leaves

of the burning maples I watch floating by on the Tay

like experienced fires inspired by the starmaps of autumn?

PATRICK WHITE