COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

COLD SUNSHINE IN THE CHILLY ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE DAWN

Cold sunshine in the chilly enlightenment of the dawn.

A paint rag of dreams I’m working on. I study

the grime on the window like the gnostic gospel

of a dead docetist I’m trying to decipher.

I expected to be happier than this when I woke up

but when have I never? As my bones have stiffened

I’ve grown more mentally supple over the years

like a sapling flaring out of a stump, green fire

shooting out of the ashes of the eyes of a dragon

on its pyre like the second innocence

of a surrealistic fairytale after the myth

didn’t keep the crops from failing from lack of rain

and the temples were burned by those who built them.

I’m an oracle in an observatory abandoned on Mars.

Night after night, I make the rounds of an unknown zodiac,

checking the doors in a ghost town like a solitude

people will come back to if you give them

enough time alone with the stars. I love

the creative energy of the morning like a tree

loves its cambium, but there are signs deeper

in the heartwood of the night that speak like the arcana

of an older magic that keep the lights turned down low

like a subliminal house of life with mysterious windows

into a past they’re looking forward to

like a prodigal afterlife they don’t have to break again

like the waters of life to get into because

death doesn’t stand at the gates of renewal

to bar the path of the returning exile and the morning birds

aren’t the urns of last night’s sky burial.

On the easel, red dragon breathing fire over Chernobyl.

On the computer screen, a mosquito having

a mystic revelation that snowblinds it in the light.

Bad omen to start a poem by killing the first

punctuation mark in sight, but Zen or no Zen,

I’ve got a right to sacrifice a bloodbank

like a medium to the message now and again.

Give the horse I bought with his purse

back to the Buddha because I don’t need wings

to fly anymore. And I don’t mind a little grime

on the eyes of my vision of life. It makes

the windows feel more at home, and even the sun

occasionally sullies its own light beams waking up

to scry its own sunspots like a maculate birth

or if Venus caught up to it sometime in the night

like the transit of a waterbird in a wet dream.

If perception is reality then things are the way they seem

for you and you alone, your eyes only, like a big secret

hidden from all the others out in the open

where you’re least likely to look for it in retrospect.

I’m a prophetic skull in orbit around an ancestral planet

of foundational hearthstones where I burnt the starmaps

of a nightsky so many have lost like the use of their mother-tongue

they’ve forgotten the names of the constellations

they were first born under like the archetypes

of an ancient dream grammar with strong aorist verbs

that don’t sweep their tracks after them like stars in a false dawn

that makes things seem more insane in the morning light

than the madness of the clairvoyant measure

your eyes make of the night when Virgo rises to her feet

and knights the black walnut trees with a stalk of wheat.

PATRICK WHITE