ON A BARREN HILLTOP IN THE MOONLIGHT

ON A BARREN HILLTOP IN THE MOONLIGHT

On a barren hilltop in the moonlight,

as if the soul of the rock it’s rooted in

had been torn out of it by the nape of the neck

the broken pine bears its agony alone

in violent supplication to the wind and the stars.

A ladder of fractured limbs, horns. Fireseeds

under the eyelids of its windfall pinecones,

a brutalized will to live indomitably

as it clings like the claws of a dragon

to the earth, thrashing the air to soar away,

Perseus on Pegasus or Draco around the axis mundi.

Not a thing, but the history of an event

in the making. I will endure. I will endure.

And I shall be beautiful in the way I am broken.

The gash of lightning that scorches my heartwood

and blisters the resin of my long, slow tears.

The torch of pitch I put out in the stars

like the hasty fire of a zodiacal heretic

that refused to shine by a reflected light.

Live by a creation myth not of its own telling.

Blue green chalked by the moon through

the crags of its needles, its wings all quills

without feathers, it drops its fruit

like sticky bullets as if it were emptying itself

like a revolver it might have held to its head

at one time to protest its own dying like the shriek

of a deermouse in the talons of a snow owl

or a madman in a safe sane house for anarchists

who delegitimize chaos at the expense

of the abyss that engendered it out of nothing

as surely as starfish and galaxies share the same blueprint.

Not a tree, but the tormented first letter

of a shakey alphabet that had its fingers broken

for striving to write its full name in pain

across the sky like surgical scars on its heart

and eyes, a mantra of struggle and suffering

like a knot in the rough going of all living things.

A dynamic paradigm of the commotion of space

and time winging it on the fly from the start

as if life didn’t so much evolve as improvise

on the unlikeliest of beginnings backlit

by the same arcane radiation that houses the stars

each to their own mode of shelter and solitude

like the strong rafter, flying buttress, crooked crutch

of a broken pine tree holding up the sky

with nothing but the shoulder of the moon

to lay its head against when the weight becomes

unbearable as the excruciating faith it has

in risking it all like its mutilated will to live

in making the attempt to fail nobly standing its own ground.

PATRICK WHITE