THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child

to the sounds of its own silence

when it thinks no one is watching.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,

poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,

a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,

caught in the updraft of a momentary insight

of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,

and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,

red shift through red, orange, yellow, green

from the outside in toward the trunk, same

as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.

Same as the fires of life returning to the root.

Same as the starmaps of the visionaries

flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.

Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,

or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,

the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver

slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,

a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot

and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping

of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord

at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence

of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins

of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.

But to judge from the windfalls of green planets

shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream

that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse

waking up in a place like here, and a time like now

with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself

as if appearance weren’t just the rind

that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell

of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds

the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions

that have naturally outgrown themselves,

the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky

leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock

tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns

like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream

like a circular waterclock making linear time

take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence

that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life

into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought

and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,

the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap

between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection

on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing

its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream

you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,

though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling

like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead

of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow

by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo

like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light

for the dark abundance of the new insight

into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming

when everything is burning like the sumac

with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.

Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.

And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring

as this new day dances as readily with the old woman

watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,

than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean

swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing

with its river reeds like a lonely child

in the embrace of her imagination,

like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom

flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness

without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses

bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore

being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen

and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring

like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead

taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,

and the lowest of earthbound snakes

are dreaming of feathering their scales

into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars

around the wobbling axis of the earth

on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud

that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE