EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE