BLEAK, GREY DAY

BLEAK, GREY DAY

Bleak, grey day. Dolorous green of the disheartened trees.

Amiable enough, but troubled. More empty awake

than I am asleep. My imagination barely habitable,

as the houseflies cluster between the walls

of an abandoned house of life somewhere to winter

like little nuggets of coal in a coma of black dwarfs,

the negative of a starmap in a galactic dark room.

Big sigh. As if I were weary of understanding why

I keep being exhumed from my garden of earthly delights

like the collective unconscious of flower bulbs

to bloom in this cemetery of archetypes as if

I just came out of sedation in a morgue without a night light.

This is the nadir of my insight into the other side of the mirror.

A heavy bell to bear instead of the feather of light

I hoped to keep aloft on my breath like some semblance

of a songbird that hadn’t had its spirit crushed yet

by airing its innocence out in traffic to the beat

of the speedbumps of roadkill that thump like the pulse

of something momentous it can add a melody to.

Slow motion evanescence of things in the room

and me among them, viscous as the windows

on the verge of glacial tears, glass blown chandeliers,

beaded veils on a widowed lamp’s bronze umbrage.

True Briton’s Lodge, Prince of Wales Chapter across the street,

in a third floor forest of cheap wood panelling,

makes me feel colonially false to my imperial origins

and then I remember how much I prefer

the perishing of wildflowers at this time of year

to that of flags that mythically inflate their lifespan

in inverse proportion to the diminishing echo

of their booming voices fading into the Lanark Hills

like the kind-hearted consent of an eccentric to the pace of doom.

Shabby mystic of a day, a mendicant fakir slumped

in the doorway of a bank holiday that’s done away

with the benches of the moneylenders in the temple

where you could buy sacrificial doves for next to nothing

that meant about as much in the great scheme of deception

as the cries of your children mean in the maws

of Mammon and Moloch. Why go looking

for the key to anything before you’ve discovered the lock?

One moment you’re spurred on by Altair and Deneb

to break a wild, white-winged horse bareback,

and the next you’re a bicycle tethered to a parking meter

with a fire hydrant for a water trough. And you

have to conclude you were bucked off without a parachute.

But, hey, I’m making the best of it. I’m rubbing

my firesticks like the antennae, if they have them,

of fireflies in a firepit of the draconian ashes of Chernobyl.

Things are beginning to glow in the dark like comets and stars

flypapered on a boy’s ceiling sixty years later as the light

catches up to his ageing eyes that left home a long time ago

as if there were something more to know about suffering

than the charnel house that was under my nose at the time.

O Mummy! O Daddy! It’s dark in here and I can’t

see my way out by the ashes of the starmaps you left me

in this cold furnace of a heart kindled by the coffins

of old books on the occult you told me not to read by myself

I haven’t opened yet like nocturnal flowers whose time

hasn’t come to bloom in fire, whether I force the issue or not.

If April is the cruellest month, September’s got to be

the most foolish as the maples set fire to their leaves

like poems they never want to read again to the wind

blowing on the dead branches of their sky burials

as if there were red-winged blackbirds still singing somewhere

on a green bough apprenticed to a honey locust tree

that whispers like a wounded voice coach it’s time

to forget your thorns like the hands of a clock and blossom

among the bees that will marrow your bones

like the motherlode in the pods of edible pulp fiction

with flat twisted smiles in the hives starclustering

into bee balls for warmth against the weather

when the new moon of the black queen stops laying her eggs

and the sweet things in life are as inconceivable

as the plagues of tainted pollen in the candle soot

of a black mass sacrificing virgins at the autumnal equinox.

PATRICK WHITE