ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.

I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day

after the sun went down like a shipwreck

with all hands on board. A train whistle

mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known

since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.

And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown

to keep from shining as if it had

a sense of direction all of its own

even if its just a momentary flashback

of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.

I bleed like deadly nightshade

and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,

the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes

like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.

Trying to express the silence through the afterlife

of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine

of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon

who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile

like a scapegoat for things I might have done

if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious

to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil

like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.

But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise

and the windows across the street, dirty

as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated

to be used like a lake or a drop of water

when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty

with a moondog for the iris of a third eye

that’s always urging the mindstream

to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing

from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs

something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs

like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains

to keep from running the deer to death at night.

Strange place, this earth. This starmud

that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind

trying to second-guess where its presence comes from

as if everything had to be derived from something else

to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins

and to understand that originality’s most unique feature

is that it shares its characteristics with everything else

so the more a human embodies what he perceives,

in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,

that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,

that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way

life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next

without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever

grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go

like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,

its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily

rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned

as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.

PATRICK WHITE