TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

PATRICK WHITE