EVERYTHING DACTYLIC, A MOIST PAUSE

EVERYTHING DACTYLIC, A MOIST PAUSE

Everything dactylic, a moist pause, life lingering

in the doorway a little longer than it usually does.

Melancholic vagary of blue smoke from smouldering fires.

Leeches of wet leaves applied like a poultice of duff

to bleed the fever from the flames. Season

of unrivalled farewells that diminish the insignificance

of our names as if they were just broken windows

in an abandoned farmhouse we were looking through

for clues of who used to live here, and discovered,

by the signatures on the paintings of shattered glass on the floor

no one had ever tried to sweep up, it was us, ice-sheets ago.

I’m waiting for a line of poetry to appear out of the air

like a waterbird that changed its mind and came back

to the third eye of the lake it’s been swimming in all year.

As you get older you realize you’ve been leaking

out of your life like a waterclock of weeping urns

for as long as you’ve been breathing on the earth.

Time is the way life cries over its death in the abyss

of another day under its eyelid beginning to rise

to the surface like the new moon of a northern pike

about to bite down hard on the allure of its snakey light.

Provisionally empty as I imagine the objects in a room

I just left feel when I’m not there to derive

an identity from them, I wait like a seance

without a ghost or a medium for the void,

without asking, to summon the silence without seeking,

a stray hair on the shoulder of someone you once loved

when your arms were still strong enough to hold her,

and in that one hair alone, read her like scripture.

Maple fires from deep in the heartwood

on the waters of life, tears that burn with the agony

of departures we gave our reluctant assent to

that wounded us for the rest of our lives

because love never heals the toys it grew up with

like a childhood cemetery of voodoo dolls

that served their purpose and were left as they were

in some out of the way corner of our eyes

to go on working their spells long after

there’s more twilight than dawn in the call for it.

God, I miss you sometimes on days like this

in the autumn. What a bell of hurt the circus cannon

of the heart can turn into without a foghorn of warning,

when I remember how I used to wake up every morning

and eat a spoonful of ashes at my own cremation,

as if someone had just thrown the first draft of a manuscript

into the flames of my funeral pyre, like the soul of a man

tormented by the dark mystery of a woman he loved

that lasciviously enlightened his eyes like stars

at the Luciferian beauty of Venus casting his shadow

on a moonless night just before dawn on the snow.

Gone like the geese and the leaves and the wildflowers,

derelict orchards left to their own resources,

overgrown with bitter ivy and skeins of morning glory,

gone like a windfall of gravestones and apples,

I remember mourning you like foxfire in the wake

of a great conflagration that had passed over me,

the shadow of the wing of the great goddess of desire

rubbing her firesticks together like the lightning rods

of the fireflies that filled the valley after the storm

you buried me in with that first handful of starmud

as you were leaving in a squall of blackholes for good.

Space turned into a gravitational glass eye

and I finally understood what the watchers were looking at

like a nightwatchman who’d lost the master keys

to the locks on the houses of a repossessed zodiac.

I lived like a squatter on the crown lands of paradise

for awhile, condemning the folly of my oceanic,

emotional convictions, when the fact of the matter was

my lifeboat went down like a lead plumb bob

with every tear I shed like a witch ball in a kiln.

Windows can weep. And so can mirrors. Mirages

have feelings that don’t escape the attention of frauds.

But there was a sadness and a silence and a solitude

that returned to me tenderly bruised like a prodigal

celebrating his homecoming to nothing he recognized anymore

as the place he set out from to experience someone like you

who could draw an indelible line like a sword between me and you

like a crosswalk through my name, and mean it

like the threshold of a taboo that wasn’t going to wait

for the lights to change like the eyes of mythic peacocks.

A sadness. A silence. Solitude. In your absence.

A spontaneous shrine I make of the moment.

I see you laughing when you were infernally happy

and I was so enamoured of the creature you were

I could hardly believe it was me who was in love with you,

that you breathed like good luck on the dice

I played with the shepherd moons of my prophetic skull

and win, lose, or draw, you at my side, I took the table

as if I’d been printing my own money to buy into

a love affair I could ill afford resisting for the sake

of playing it safe against the odds of it ever happening again.

As it hasn’t. I know now what a perennial event

in my life it will always continue to be as I recall

wisely, despite myself, the elemental ferocity of the dragon

behind your shyness, and the compassionate duplicity

of your savage innocence only when it was necessary

to kill quickly with a sharp knife to minimize the pain,

and how, for reasons even the spring can’t explain to itself,

autumn is always more auspiciously creative in the way

it goes on sowing seeds in the wake of its own decay

like stars in the ashes of the perishing continuum

of who we were to one another when our eyes shone

o lightyears a moment ago with sorrows that ripen

the bliss of tomorrows that will blossom like full moons

on the dead branches of autumns just like this one to come.

Or here on these green boughs I’m ageing into

I’ve never stopped singing to you from like a waterclock

that flowers in death as life roots its deepest mysteries

in the windfalls of love that come to fruition through

separation and pain, the new moon in the arms of the old,

letting go, again and again, so the circle remains unbroken,

and what can’t be spoken in the sacred seed syllables

that lie dormant as dreams behind their deathmasks,

are stirred by the same longing that woke the nightbird to a song

without beginning or end, no escape from the open,

no gate on the prison, no expiry date on the coffins

extolled by the fruits of the sweetest secrets undying within.

PATRICK WHITE