THE SILENCE BEGUILING

THE SILENCE BEGUILING

The silence beguiling. The solitude almost perfect.

The stillness of the silver Russian olives almost

a warning suspended in the air, but nothing to fear

issued as a threat if I don’t move from here

where I’m squatting on the outskirts of the cities

of the dead, for a night, just a night, passing through.

I don’t know where. As if that mattered anymore.

The trees shedding their leaves like travel brochures.

Sixty-five. Getting on. Root-fires still burning

underground. Never wanted to be one of the grey mages

of poetry. Bringing gifts fit for heaven or hell

to the firepits of the mangers in ashes. A mediocre

harvest moon, but the heart of the dragon is heavy

with low hanging fruit the darkness and the moon made sweet.

O, let it fall back to earth if it wants to. Any star

will do to start a journey. Not far to go. Not far at all.

Ingathered within me the sorrows of a lifetime.

And the small joys I take in life I cling to in protest.

Lust a delusion I’m all too familiar with

still gets a rise out of me, and love, the elusive collusion

of the stars and mud I’m made of, manifest

flesh and blood, these eyes, these fingertips,

this voice that sings of supernovas and fireflies

in the same breath and the pause that is neither

life nor death in between, where nothing exists

but, once and awhile, love writes a name

in the mist on the ineffable windowpanes

in a symbolic attempt to spiritualize the abyss.

Love the wise, the beautiful, the true. Love

the ignorant, the unlovely, and the false.

Union and separation, the pulse of the mystery

that appalls us into seeking what cannot fail

to find us once we stop looking for redemption

from the fools we make of ourselves in the name

of an absurdity higher than the flames of the flowers

that bloom in fire, and the stars above our pyres

can reach, though the gesture’s not lost upon

the unattainable. We fall in love with the unsustainable

as we do with our own perishing. Lovers fail,

like poets, dying into the mystery they most excel at

as if they had a painful talent for compassionate death.

It’s the loss of love that makes love indelibly mortal.

Not to have failed at love is to have lived your life

worthlessly as a hungry ghost who thought death

was less of a risk than losing more than you had to give.

The moth didn’t come close enough to the fire

to burn its wing like a love poem going up in flames.

Immolated in flames or cremated by shadows

in the cold furnace of a heart that refused to burn.

You can see it in the soft eyes of an old man

on an autumn afternoon sitting like a scarecrow

on a park bench feeding the birds the crumbs of his dreams

as if they were both gleaning the same garden.

Love is sustained by the grains of starwheat

it’s already lavishly spent on a harvest of sorrows

sweeter than a silo full of promising tomorrows

as if love, not death, were the only way of being

successfully defeated by life with a smile on your face

as deep as any wound you’ve ever been graced by.

PATRICK WHITE