FLIES SLOWING DOWN ON THE WINDOWS

FLIES SLOWING DOWN ON THE WINDOWS

Flies slowing down on the windows like the minutes

of a clock as it gets colder out. Signs of rain. But for all

the billions of circles the rain has made

over as many lightyears, ripples and tree rings,

they all remain unbroken however aberrant

their orbits get. Same way with thought and emotion.

Drop one little tear on the earth any time of the year

the way you did yesterday, and after tomorrow

puts some mileage on the light, come back

to the shadow you once cast like your lot in

with the night, and see for yourself how it’s either

grown into an ice age or a biophilic ocean of awareness.

The windows shake with Sunday traffic. Church

and then a restaurant. How many cows does it take

to outfit a bunch of middle-aged bikers and their women

in black leather? Overaged spectacles of fear. Still

it’s wise to keep your distance until they don’t.

God bless the bare-legged girls in cowboy boots

and tank tops like the last of the summer flowers to wither.

For something to look at that isn’t a parking meter

stuck in cement like a daffodil that isn’t going to bloom.

Geese last night passing through Aquarius, running

the spearhead of their farewell through my heart

as they called out in a gesture of courageous melancholy

to the empty heavens like heralds of our recurrent departures

as we enter into one exit after another like a waterclock.

Call it a pulse. At least you know you’re alive.

As the flies are slowing down on the windows.

Life thrives on its own destruction. Why be upset

the rose is a hag of a baglady and the daylilies

are rotten curtains at the abandoned windows

of eyes that turn to glass and pass by their ruination?

Wasn’t it clear from the start? Never trust a telescope

to stay near to the heart. Their clarity is cold.

Stars jitterbugging on the dance floor of a lens

grow small and remote as a spider mount

when you turn a telescope around and look it in the eye.

A poultice of wet leaves on the forest floor

drawing the infection out of the fever autumn is.

Clingy starmud soiling the wings on my hiking boots.

The wind rasps through the stiff leaves on

the silver Russian olives like a broom on the front stairs.

Poetry dredges the dregs of what it’s drinking.

Eternity’s just an abyss dressed up as time

and ageing’s nothing but a cold-eyed witness

to the re-runs of the dreams it once starred in.

Glorious delusions that now seem out to lunch

with brown paper bags over their heads

like dunces in the corners of future executioners.

I’ve never been so happy or thrilled to be alive

as when I was deluded like a desert by my own mirages.

Since then I’ve learned not to take myself so literally

and I touch life more warily like a monarch butterfly

the toxic pollens of wildflowers with no natural enemies.

Beauty, like power, can go to your head like a deathbed.

Mordant dragons smouldering in their unrequited desires

like heaps of scaley leaves raked up into pyres

to taste fire in their mouths again. Better to burn

than rust, but the rain has the final say whether you

go up or out like a wet matchbook of reincarnations in bud.

PATRICK WHITE