DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,

maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,

the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here

but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair

even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.

I seek out this precarious granite ledge

shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat

with its thatch of moss and yellow grass

and this little patch of dirt, struggling

to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically

as if many others sat here before me

and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard

of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight

wading through the wild rice with their skirts

above their white, white knees. I come here

to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,

missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.

A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about

I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds

counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing

my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow

that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,

except for one firefly shining behind her veils

like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids

of a black velvet painting of bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike

moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines

under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,

while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh

all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took

in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds

were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes

of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells

of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense

to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can

life heals its own absence like a wound in water,

like a mouse squealing in midflight above

the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me

with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees

to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls

on the walls of a cathedral wilderness

pioneered into the empty one-roomed

wooden churches around here where the flies cluster

like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.

And the pioneers have all been ploughed under

and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery

than the earth without black iron fences and gates

trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon

around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into

when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,

nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand

that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear

so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery

of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters

as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky

with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears

and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions

dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating

honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,

or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths

wolfskins on despondent shamans with

two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes

trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon

with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed

to the heartache and longing that can suddenly

startle and blossom out of the darkness

like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through

the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation

between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,

it only takes one to sing.

PATRICK WHITE