REMINDING MYSELF TO KEEP IT CLEAR, KEEP IT BRIGHT AS STARMUD

REMINDING MYSELF TO KEEP IT CLEAR, KEEP IT BRIGHT AS STARMUD

Reminding myself to keep it clear, keep it bright as starmud,

keep it dangerous and liveable, creatively unimaginable,

not to fall asleep at the wheel of birth and death,

drift off the soft shoulders of a sleepwalking road in this

starless fog of unknowing tallowing my highbeams

like candles dipped in beeswax. Keep leaves on the tree

as long as I can, though yesterday’s younger than I am,

bring this sunset to fruition for the sake of the seeds

I sow in my wake on the moon as if all those dead seas

might bring forth yet. If I fill up every moment of my life

with the whole of me, no phase left out, am I not

a waterclock as young as I am old, as wise in childhood,

as I am foolish as an old man dancing in a graveyard

as if he had no more care in the world than to fall down

and get up again, laughing in elation at getting away

with the hilarious outrage of being himself. Death

shows me its birthmark and I show it mine. We

read each other like signs of things to come. It

keeps me serious about the joys that ripen my life

and I lighten it up like a skeleton with a funny bone.

Alone, I hold myself in common along with everybody else.

Together, I’m severing umbilical cords with my teeth

to show people burning on the pyres of their kites,

how easy it is to fly on your own by just letting go.

Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

I’ll meet you again on the wind. I’ll ride your bannisters

as I once did your arms, like spiral stairwells

all the way to the bottom and loop back up

like a flourish in the cursive script of my skywriting

when I sign my next love poem like a ghost of smoke

in a Joseph’s coat in a dusk scarred by the contrails

of my fly-bys as I flaunt my freedom like a swallow in the sun.

Sorrows galore, to be sure, abounding tribulations

taking their toll on my prophetic skulls like a carillon

of funeral bells, despair sticking like creosote

on all my constellations like stars to flypaper,

patinas of soot settling like the shadow of an eclipse

on all the Gothic eyelids of my rose petals

as if the paling picture-music hadn’t been exposed enough

to sunflowers to keep a smile on things like a blue jay.

So what? The blossoms are not antithetical to their roots.

I’m a Dutch elm. I’m growing up as much

as I’m growing down. I’m most out of touch

with the things I’ve always had a good grasp on

like Ophichus and Serpens, its oracular python.

I can’t name as many flowers anymore as I used to

when I wandered through the starfields

like a rogue planet with nothing on my mind

but the sound the Milky Way makes in the distance

like a white water rapid I’m approaching

on a prayer and a wing upstream of the mind

to shoot on my own, an arrow from a compound bow that can sing.

I still have an eagle’s eye and a classical supernova

for a heart Sagitta’s pointing at like a diamond cursor

frozen to a blacked out starmap in the blitz of London

and I can fly as well as I ever could aerobatically

like a phoenix through the mystic firestorms

that sweep over me when a tail wind feathers my flames,

but there are sky burials I lay wild asters on

anonymously that seem to grow deeper

than these valleys I’m passing through like a stranger

in the shadows of mountains cast like the sundials

of the dead I keep looking over my shoulder for

the longer I mourn, like a moonrise in the east

as if there would always be the midnight call of Canada geese

in the autumn farewells I make to the windfalls

of wheat and apples in the smiles of departed friends.

Yet even among all these asteroids that threaten

to strike me down like ostrakons and the first thrown stones

of the hypocrites who never learned to shine

by a light of their own, I’m still more of a rosary

than I am an abacus of the debts I owe to society

for tolerating me like a scapegoat at home in the wilderness

I was driven into like a photon for giving off light

even as I jumped from one heresy in paradise

to the next blessing of an angelic parachute in Pandemonium.

Orbitals of rain like an encyclopedia of tree rings

that resonate like the tuning forks and witching wands

of springs past and yet to come budding in my heartwood

like the fledgling flightpaths of new poems in residence

in the abandoned cockpit of the heron’s nest they wear

like laurels in the eye of the storm waxing lyrical

about the crowns in the homegrown coffins of the dead trees

as the moon blossoms like a white owl on a green bough.

PATRICK WHITE