SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

SWEET SEPTEMBER FIELDS SWEEP ME AWAY

Sweet September fields sweep me away

with the stragglers among the wildflowers

when the woods are emanating the fragrance

of the collaborative solitude of life

and death smells like an old couch

that’s been left out in the rain, abandoned

like a barn. Or a coffin in no hurry

to bury itself. Scotch thistles, asters,

eggs and butter, all the chicory’s gone

and the Queen Anne’s Lace. I’m hitchhiking

out to Smokin’ Eagles as if I owned space

and time were its caretaker. Lord

of all the estates I survey in passing

from the back of a Ford pick-up truck.

My family thousands of miles away

I haven’t seen for years, my daughter

inexplicably alienated, my son, god knows

where, lovers and friends in the past

still hanging on the walls of my mind

like ashen renditions of the mystic visions

of the Neanderthals, or busty out of date calendars

with nineteen fifties sweater girl sex appeal,

or scenic autumns that never shed their leaves,

yet however culpable I might feel

because I’m shadowed by the arrogance

of thinking anything’s ever anyone’s fault,

I’m freer than I was yesterday, and I’m ageing

like a tree in an old growth forest that’s been

spiked by nails through its heartwood

to keep it from being clear cut down.

And though there’s a sense of integrity

about being alive I still feel I don’t deserve,

as the clouds speed by and everything

is imploding into a point it’s trying to make

I’m certain I’m never going to get,

but so be it, I’m not fleeing from anything

or being drawn by anything up ahead

like a siren on the rocks I was born to drown

in my attempt to rescue. Neither a vector

nor a locus. A man with an irrelevant name

and a poem in his pocket, watching the mustard

take over the fields nobody has any use for

anymore. As they return to what they were

originally dreaming before they woke up

green as wheat in an eternal recurrence of innocence.

I study the fractals of the uppermost branches

of the maples where they meet the sky

like rivers and axons flowing into a sea of light.

Fire, fire, fire, the dragons are rising from the pyres

of the aspen groves like low lying Chinese fog

intermingling with cosmically aspiring Hindu smoke.

Words burn in the heart like processional waterbirds

heading south, and then just as quickly put themselves out

like an Indian paintbrush mixing too much burnt sienna

in its cadmium orange. And though there’s a tinge,

a patina of sad blessing in the air that’s as ancient

as the earth itself, I’m borne by life like a torch

into the dark. I illuminate without leaving any sign

or indelible mark to say I was ever here that wasn’t

at least as perishable as the vetch or the cattails

in the drainage ditches alongside these sweet September fields.

Younger, you paint your life in oils, but as

you grow older you begin to realize life is

a watercolour in a backwash of tears that runs

like blood in the water under the bridge

whenever you cry with no regrets for the evanescence

of the lightyears you left still sleepwalking somewhere

where the river turns and the willows cut off all their hair

behind you, to show you the empty nests

and downy ghosts of the fledgling stars born of the dead.

PATRICK WHITE