THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

THE SILENCE OVERTAKES ME

The silence overtakes me, I had almost forgotten,

and I am disembodied again, awareness

with no fixed abode, and it’s sweet and sad

this passage of the mindstream through the darkness.

Memories of childhood, collecting bruised potatoes

fallen off the conveyor belt of the vegetable factory,

thousands of muddy spuds like asteroids in orbit,

being rinsed off by fans of sharp-edged water

spread out like the wings of translucent birds,

smell of wet burlap bags and how proud

I was as a kid of seven to be a good hunter for my mother

and haul a bag of potatoes home as if

I’d killed and skinned the carcass myself.

When you’re seven you’re still a wolf-pup

and the game isn’t quite as dangerous as it will be.

The faces of past lovers bloom on a midnight lake

and then the wind scatters their petals. Or they glow

by the light of a fire lotus burning in the window

of a Napoleon airtight on a snowed-in winter night,

musing and caressing the cats dozing under it soporifically

as the flames dance in their dark eyes like the corona of the sun

at full eclipse, and you realize how lyrically vivid

images you glimpsed out of the corner of your eye

at the time, written indelibly upon your heart,

but barely noticed, are when they move front and center

like a star into the iris of eternity. Lachrymose and beautiful

as if a deeper union than the one we thought for awhile

was ultimate, had come of its own accord spontaneously

as if separation and solitude had become the cornerstone

of a palace of water that had gone on flowing on its own

and had made the sea, and once and awhile,

a heart made big by sorrow and the silence that holds it out

like some strange kind of lantern, is there to witness it,

not outside the moment, looking in, but from within

where it lives forever unfolding like ripples in a jewel.

There’s a soft elfin frequency in the air, and an unforced smile

on the spirits of wounded things resigned as scars

to the phases of the moon that first tasted their blood.

I don’t know who they are, but I throw another log on the fire

like a threshold or a burning bridge if they want to

step out of their shadows and cross one for the homeless alone

and say with my eyes let’s all live around this for awhile

as if it were the last house of the zodiac with its lights on,

or that rusty oildrum where we used to roast the potatoes

on the branches of young maple saplings bubbling in the heat.

A riverine intermingling of vagrant hearts

addressing my mind like a star chart of fireflies

buffeted about like the Brownian motion of a playful breeze

gusting the constellations like dust before the witchbrooms

of the black walnut trees exorcising their leaves

to get on with the next chapter of their manuscripts,

ghost writing their own immolations, heretics

trued by the fires they burned in like sumac

on the pyres of their boughs, sky burials in lyrics of smoke.

Time, the sacred clown, reliving the ashes

of its own tragic-comedy as if the encore

were more profoundly sad and absurdly beautiful

than the first aspirations of opening night.

Everything in commotion then that now

moves me more deeply with the stillness of its passage

as if all the eras of my life presaged this one moment

with no birth or death in it, this farewell that never ages.

PATRICK WHITE