SOFT LIBERATION

SOFT LIBERATION

Soft liberation going on underground

as if someone left the gate to my heart open

and the horses are grazing in sidereal pastures

and there’s no turmoil in the wind blowing

the leaves around burning off their idle energy.

Don’t know what it is. The stump of the candle

shedding the spirit of its flame, the way life

dreams at this station of my eyes like a firetower

on an autumn night, or just the stars celebrating

something that has ended well without my knowing.

Bliss in the freedom of this night to keep

its secrets to itself as the mystery deepens

in my blood like wine that’s been sleeping

a long time in a cool, dark place that smells

as if it’s been smothered in moss and now

it’s time to breathe easy under the stars

and marvel at all a human has to go through

to ripen into the second innocence of the return journey

when exile turns around, and almost without noticing

you’re no longer bound by the prodigality

of your homelessness firewalking the thresholds

of the burning ladder that let you down

from paradise, unscathed like the eye-witness

of a window you had to break to see out of.

New England asters blooming among

the apples in the hair-braided grass in a shaft

of morning light that shocked the beatitudes

out of you, as if something inconceivably remote

had just expressed itself in the intimate beauty

of the moment and you understood something

profound about life without knowing what it was,

but it didn’t matter because it would be with you

for the rest of your life and further if there’s

an eternity with wildflowers in it that can

fix your gaze on the radiance of being possessed

by your eyes like dark angels that arose

out your starmud, cloaked in light, hidden secrets

that let it be known to each of us in silence

they’re manifest in every breath they take away

in an ambush of wonder that’s less like prayer than play.

Maybe it’s perishing that mends our estranged childhoods

as a concession to the abyss at the end

of the passage up ahead that roars like a waterclock

plunging over a precipice, but for the moment,

I’m clear again as a boy in the Indian summer of my soul

and I’m appreciatively intrigued by my fascination

for the way all things are the way they are as if

I’d wholly forgotten what it is I used to compare them to,

long ago, do you remember, when our shadows

didn’t come forward like undertakers measuring us up

for our graves and we broke curfew under the moonrise

and all death ever meant to us was all it would ever mean?

PATRICK WHITE