FREE
Free. Not falling, not wounding the
herb I’m healed by,
as the stars change, as the nuts and
the berries and the acorns
come to the trees, mast for the bears
and the boars and the birds,
time, is it time that does this,
enlarging the nightsky of my mind,
until eternity burns invisibly a point
above the spearhead
of the candle flame thrust into my
eyes, tears not enough
to put it out, fire on the water, hot
sorrows, and the beauty
and bliss thereof, as the stars change,
and I am a stranger
to myself over and over and over again,
come to the same gate
and the flowers bedraggled by what
they’ve accomplished,
knowing no one lives there anymore who
knows me.
Realms, states of mind, bells of the
soul, mundane conditions
of poetic visions, broken arrows and
eyeless snakes of the heart,
maybe a dream with a nightwatchman---is
it conceivable?---
allegorizing the emotional life of a
window he’s peering through
from the outside, anybody there, come
out and show yourself
as the shadows of the light he sees by
dodge the lamp,
thieves in the dark, tight-lipped as
flowers in an eclipse.
Images, symbols, glimpses, insights,
musical riffs
of the picture-music carried on the
night air like the fragrance
of a voice blooming late in the year up
the street out of sight,
and autumn drinking my blood like wine
out of a prophetic skull
and the torches of the tall elms, every
tree, reeking
of sacrificial guitars like burning
bridges I’ve yet to cross.
The beatific ambiguities of perishing.
When
do the blessings end? The housewells of
the mirages run dry?
The root fires of inconsolable passions
burn themselves out,
kin at last to their own humanity, urns
of ashes,
smoke and vapours in the spiritual
starfields we people
with our deaths? Our dreams smudged of
us
by cedar boughs like bats in the attic,
by sweetgrass
to drive us off like unwanted spirits
into deserted places
where the curses are creative, and the
graces, severe?
Purple thistle and the galactic curds
of Queen Ann’s Lace,
loosestrife and golden rod along the
roadside, whose
paradise was this? The lame duck fields
lie fallow.
Someone’s harvested the abyss and
taken it in.
A dog barks in the distance. The
moonrise gilds the stubble.
Aimless, the hour. Free. Unharassing.
The witness
untroubled by the silence that follows
the unanswered question,
the imagination unattached to what it
creates as if
it articulates the world as less of a
statement, than suggestion.
Is this solid? Is this real? The wind
intimates less than it feels.
The husks of the milkweed whisper
immaculate conceptions
into their own ears, oceans in a
seashell that never
come to fruition, embodiments of love
born of deception
to help make things clear by blooding
their abstractions.
Needing everything, wanting nothing
from anyone,
a poem grows like a tree in the
abandoned silo of my heart.
Saturn, Venus, Spica and the moon at
dusk, Mercury and Jupiter
just before dawn, I thresh the
emptiness for starwheat,
for habitable planets where life is as
wise as a loaf of bread
fresh from the oven of the sun, shared
like a granary
with everyone who eats. The farmhouses
stare back
as if their windows have gone insane
threading
the third eye of a needle like a
blackhole
that doesn’t mend anything but
expands
your field of view into an infinite
pointlessness
where everything you do is lyrical,
absurd, free.
Poetry’s a deepening spell you get
caught up in
the more you cast it like moonlight
struggling
with its reflection on a tarpit of
watersnakes
that swim like oilslicks on the waters
of life.
Nor is the quality of darkness
diminished
by those who can’t taste the
difference between
a new moon and an eclipse, but, still,
they try the hardest,
to no avail to mean what they haven’t
seen or been
touched by like eyewitnesses at a mock
trial,
and the dissolution of forms on the
cold night air
weren’t the style of brevity with the
staying power
to disappear like a star or a
wildflower or a poet
knowing there’s only so much time,
and then there is forever.
PATRICK WHITE
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