WARM SEPTEMBER MORNING

WARM SEPTEMBER MORNING

Warm September morning. Autumn

preps the heart with the sweetness of death

there is in perishing, in the great shedding

as the wind stirs a flurry of leaves and I watch

the elm across the street turn yellow.

Blue soporific oblivion of Indian summer,

like the dust on grapes that haven’t

hemorrhaged yet or withered like the dugs

on a nursing dog trying to wean the winoes.

The aura of a beautiful sorrow, the pathos

of an ancient longing to follow the geese

the stars, the leaves, the wildflowers,

into a dreamless sleep at peace with its own

creative potential to wake up like a waterlily

in a sacred pool of its own tears, not far from here,

to the fact that all that has passed was just

a sad window we were looking at the world through.

Perennial farewells, the pulse of a backbeat

to the rhythm of life, the waterclock of the rose

flowing like a bloodstream over the rock of the heart

like a prophetic skull foreshadowing its own extinction.

The labour of a lifetime to live fruitively

cannot be appeased by the mere relief

of letting go of the heaviness of the windfall

like a bell in a steeple or a needle

on a long playing new moon on the gramophone

of the stars going round and round, white noise

in the ears of the darkness that thought it could hear

the surf of the ocean for a moment there but maybe not.

It’s the unconditional embrace of the earth

unjudgementally accepting the cradles and coffins

of our starmud like a black hole back into its shining

that makes you want to lay your head down

like a planet on the breast of the dark mother

and still the racket that bruises the silence

not just of your ears but your eyes as well,

the struggling and surviving to wonder

like a sceptic with a mystic doubt if it wasn’t

absurd in the first place to go looking for an insight

into the nature and tenure of life as if there were

some kind of spiritual lost and found

for the unclaimed unitive life of a blissful orphan.

Can you still your questions long enough

to hear the answer? The abyss roars with stars

and the doorbells sound like a carillon of wild columbine

on a mammoth bone from the last ice age

as if they were about to be killed off

like the first frost on the paisley windowpanes

Ophelia drowned in like a blue water hyacinth.

Come the bestial orgies in the nunneries of winter

trying to fight off the boredom and the curfew

of living under house arrest at the whim

of the indifferent inclemency of the weather.

Sweetness on the face of a day on earth that senses

the agon of the summer to live beyond its means

as a fundamental of growth is coming to an end

in a solar flare of sumac immolating itself

like the shamanistic death of a dragon sage,

the ashes of the dream wiser than the flames

of the daylilies it lets overwhelm it like a cremation

that goes on blossoming long after the fire’s past.

PATRICK WHITE