LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT

LOST AND BROKEN, LONELY HOUR OF THE NIGHT

Lost and broken, lonely hour of the night. Wounded,

but it doesn’t matter by what anymore.

Intimate estrangement with the sleeping town,

don’t know whether I’m a streetlamp or a window,

but it’s all right, all right for the moment.

Enticingly sweet, almost peace, when

I remember my exile isn’t dishonest

and how far I had to come to believe in my solitude.

Hard not to betray your imagination sometimes

by resenting what you had to lose to stay true to it.

I don’t. There’s a soft beauty like an autumn night,

though it’s spring, in the voice of the ghost

of the train whistle howling by and a distance

even space can’t conceive of that comes close

to breaking my heart like the rain acquainted through tears

overflowing with the sorrows of too many eyes

to care whether it’s a freshly dug grave

or a garden it falls upon. Things we attribute

our mortality to bloom and perish like the new moon

I can’t see through the clouds tonight, but trust is there.

This is the rose of dark abundance. This is the thorn

of bright vacancy. If I saw a star right now

I’d think it’s light were a mode of longing

for something beyond love and death it doesn’t

even know about on the neither side of its shining.

Maybe it wants to whisper something into the ears

on the towers of Pleiadic larkspur that will change their lives.

Maybe it’s just tilting at a galactic windmill

that keeps quixotically turning and turning

over and over again in its heart like a gust of time

blowing on a prayer wheel as fixed as a sundial

following its own shadow like a direction to the light.

Or maybe in some kind of indeterminate way

we’re both wavelengths in synch trying

to sprout wings for the immensities ahead,

fireflies and dragons alike, staring into the darkness,

hoping to open the eyes of wildflowers on a hillside

that have reclaimed the far fields no one’s ploughed under for lightyears,

me, for a bit of blue sky that’s never witnessed a false dawn,

and it, for a loveletter that finally wrote back

though there was nothing but solitude and silence inside,

and the fragrance of burning doves in the emptiness

that take shelter under the eaves of this house of life

that keeps rising out of its own ashes at the faint sound

of the half-familiar song of a sacred syllable

we derived an inalienable solace from once as if

the only way to respond to pain were, indelibly,

with flowers, waterlilies and wild irises down by the river,

blooming in the urns of our childhood like pyres in the rain.

PATRICK WHITE