ALCOHOL, SEX, AND THIS COLD SPRING NIGHT IN THEIR BLOOD

ALCOHOL, SEX, AND THIS COLD SPRING NIGHT IN THEIR BLOOD

Alcohol, sex, and this cold spring night in their blood,

the rowdies outside the Crown and Thistle have taken

their chilly elations home. Past midnight, the town quiescent,

the moon, Venus and Jupiter set, the silence of the stars

through the window, mercifully voluble, and an underworld

of new insects are being pawed by cats, crawling across

living room floors like robotic space explorers as

foggy threads of miasmic lyrics are beginning to unfold

like leaves that have never given a poetry reading before.

Who knows? The blossoms on the municipal trees

could be the beginning of fame. You write enough words

you get paid back with a name you don’t quite know

what to do with as if someone had just discovered your skull

like an unknown element on an alien planet. Trick is

to let people hear themselves in your persona the way

a cave returns everybody’s voices to their own silence,

or water returns the moon to its own penumbral seas.

My old familiar, the train whistle howls

at this witching hour of the night like an honorary bush wolf

and I can feel the roots of strange flowers probing my starmud

as if the bulb of my lilaceous heart were about

to break into light again like a poem that’s lain

prophetically dormant through a long winter knowing

timing is as important as content, like the rent,

but spring comes and the frogs and the trout lilies,

the blue hyacinth and the apple trees bloom

like supernovas in distant galaxies, or drunks outside a bar.

So you can’t miss them like a sign of who you might be

when your eyes are open to the mystery of being here at all.

I save the history of the tree rings in my heartwood for the fall,

old orbitals I’ve jumped like an electron with a negative spin

to release a photonic discharge of light frozen like ripples

in a dark time as if I lit a match to see why the stars had gone blind

or the lantern of a nightwatchman looking for the light

with the light, his mind with his mind, his heart

in the ashes of the rootfires of his blood. Right now

I focus on the green growing edge of what I’m becoming

as if all the cells of my cambium were stars accelerating

like a universe driven by dark energy into the realms

of an unilluminated space that’s ready to receive them

like a new myth of origins that isn’t defamed by where I came from

and even less by this road that doesn’t know where I’m going.

PATRICK WHITE