THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I'VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

THESE MEMORIES, SHOES I’VE WALKED IN TOO LONG

These memories, shoes I’ve walked in too long

and worn out, holes in the bottom of my universe,

watercolours fading in the glare of my mind,

the ghosts of vivid sunsets overshadowed

by the mystique of the stars like New England asters

caught by surprise in a shock of blonde hay

or pawn shop poppies selling their dreams cheap.

Cool bliss. More joy in the dark watersheds of my heart

than these abandoned housewells I keep swimming in

like a garter snake lapping the rain with the tines

of its lightning tongue, not sure, like the fireflies

and the moon, I can rise, smoke from a chimney,

the same way I got in, a wavelength of the sun

that shines at midnight in the depths of a nocturnal mirage.

I don’t know much about success. My life has been

a rear guard guerilla action against the odds

of even achieving an orderly retreat from

the invasive armies of inanity I’m surrounded by

like drones fighting a holy war without caring

whose side they’re on like a retinal response to reality.

I can’t count the times I’ve been collaterally killed

by hungry blue whales in the sky screening for krill

like a food chain with its tail in its mouth.

My flesh gets passed around like a torn loaf of bread

though my aspirations are more galactic

than messianic, it all comes down to atoms in the end.

The small things you remember, the enigma

of a distant star winking intimately at you

through the boughs of the black walnut trees in the fall

as if there were more to the encounter than you can second-guess.

The crumb of a dream some lover rubbed from the corners

of her eyes as she woke in the morning, her hair

flowing like night rivers down into the bays of her eyes

washing the stars out from the evening before.

The thorns of the rose that nicked your heart

like scalpels of cuneiform that baked your starmud

in the kiln of a book fired like a clay urn.

Is it sacrilege to pour the ashes out on the wind

that scatters you like a narrative theme on the roots

of a dragon that doesn’t want to be burned alive again

on the pyres of the sumac and daylilies expiring

by a river of sorrows that tastes of a thousand

self-immolations in the cold furnaces of love

we all stand prophetically in like heretics

who could see their fate painted on the lenses

of the telescopes of the orthodox who insist

the moon isn’t pitted like rings that have lost

the initial sparkle of their jewels and the the sun

isn’t maculated by dark spots. What use now

these gnostic starmaps I sited through an astrolabe

of fireflies, if it isn’t to start a fire in the morning

to take the chill off these desert nights

and warm up the leftovers of my daily bread?

Memory is the mother of the muses but she recalls

visions, not photographs trapped in their own image

like the Burgess Shale. The absence of so many

people and things is still a transformative event

that keeps on growing within me like an expanding universe

where every star is a diaspora of one driven

by the dark energy of some occluded insight

into the oblivion of lovers who have become

so interspatially out of touch with each other’s

lightning and fireflies their eyes atrophy

because of a lack of light and the company

of strangers, and you, no less of a stranger

to the intimate distances of the dusky solitude

you disappear into like a crow or a mourning dove

into a sky with an infinite wingspan whenever you open

the gate on the aviary of your hooded heart

and every love letter you write after that

sounds like the silence of a flightfeather in an envelope

cresting like a wave breaking on the shore

of some island galaxy you’ve been washed up on

like a sea star with a new way of shining

that doesn’t throw a light on anything but is

blazing with life that reveals a lot more than can be seen.

Things don’t die like gravegoods around you.

They take the same journey you’re on

like a ka gun pointing at Osiris, the dog-star, in Orion.

Whether your embalmed or dismembered

all the parts are assembled once more as if death

were only a bad joke no ever catches onto

until they can hear laughter on the other side

of the black mirror you’re peering into

that doesn’t recognize the new identity

you’re dreaming in your sleep as if you were

awake again, and none of this had happened yet,

great joy, great pain, and the freedom to forget creatively

even when you walk alone by your own light

you cast thousands of shadows.

PATRICK WHITE