DEATH UNDOING WHAT LIFE CREATES AS QUICKLY

DEATH UNDOING WHAT LIFE CREATES AS QUICKLY

Death undoing what life creates as quickly

to transcend its own dismantling, the windfall flesh

perishing into the seeds time will disclose

like eyes on one last roll of the dice

it had up its sleeve to play for all or nothing.

The same bell that celebrates the wedding

mourns the funeral. Like the human heart,

don’t you think, systole, diastole, the pace

of our walking on tear-soaked leaves alone

through the early October woods, this house of life

the tenants haven’t finished moving out of yet

like a homeless zodiac that’s decided it’s cheaper

to live in snake skin tents the moon sheds

like a calendar of doom with the date circled

in red, faceless among ghosts of unravelling mists

that move to a mysterious music of their own

than be overwhelmed by events heaped up

by ants digging a grave for somebody they’ve

built a tel for that reeks of formic acid,

the breath of an undertaker on a blind date

with death. Is this a killing zone, or

an emergency room at the hospital on a full moon

at harvest time when things come undone, ritually?

Cold mystery. Physics is psychology. Writing poems

is a kind of eloquent pathology that parses

the dream grammar of the art it took to see such things

in the fall of a leaf your blood shuddered

at the ease of the razorblade of the breeze

that slashed your heart with the myriad nuances

of that terrible word, once. Eyeless insights

into the draconian cruelty of empathizing

with our own mortal remains in the dissolution

of the mirages we pleaded with to drink

the waters of life from the begging bowls

of our own cupped hands held out like a lifeboat

when please didn’t mean a thing and thank-you

was unheard of. Shipwrecked in our insular solitude

like the echo of an unanswered prayer

by the things we were most in search of,

be it love, or power over life and death

as if you could turn the wheel and irrigate

the fields at will. Market your excess

like a gift you sold for next to nothing

that left you with nothing to give when

the spirit moved you to the next chakra

like a bead on an abacus that found you wanting.

Processional danse macabre of the Byzantine

silver Russian olives bidding their mechanical birds

good-bye in a turmoil of failed diplomacy

shredding its leaves like the papers

of a persecuted embassy on a tinker’s moon

heading south with the hearses and urns of Canada geese.

A reckless green mood of moss covers the rocks

and the north side of second growth senescence

like a thick carpet in a plush funeral parlour

where everybody talks as if the dead were listening

to what they chose to ignore or couldn’t

bring themselves to say about their own fates.

Sometimes, it’s rare but it happens, you want

the dead to shout right out loud in your face

it’s ok, it’s ok, don’t disgrace the darkness with your fear

of what’s foreshadowed with the sun behind you all the way.

But they never do. They just maintain the grim silence

of prophetic skulls in a cemetery of hearthstones

ghost dancing around the firepits and middens

the mysterious mundanities of the days and nights

we made a racket of our soft-spoken clay, a riot

of insight into the constellations that flashed over head

like exquisitely jewelled insects frenzied

by the madness of the lives we carried to extremes

like a sunset in a lantern to the cremation of our starmud.

Prodigies of the unanswerable interrogations

we confess to, nevertheless, for form’s sake,

to back up the alibis that rolled over on us

like the stone of a planet over the tomb

of the dark mother the moment we were born.

All the exuberant flowers I loved basking among

like swimmers on the shore of the lake

when my heart needed to be vastly distracted

from the abyss my emptiness was adapting to

like a trap door spider without any safety nets.

Something simple and profound as

the extraordinary ordinariness of life going on

all around me in the bliss of the moment

as evanescently evident as a reason to despair,

mindlessly exhilarated watching the moon shooting

the rapids of the willows going over the edge

of their own waterfalls like maidens of the mist

in a nebular love affair with the early death of the rain.

Life’s the first draft of a shabby loveletter

that goes on revising itself forever autumn

after autumn like the long riverine sentences

of our periodic tears washing the dust of our starmud

out of our eyes and ears, the mouths that shape space

like emptiness into a cup that runs out and runs over

like a skull with a crack in it mended by gold

from the deepest motherlodes of dark abundance

as if to say even in the fall when the lakes

are left to themselves, and no one reads

the journals of the leaves on the theme

of a mindstream wandering in the woods at night alone

even now, there’s a broken beauty to the way

the heart aches to made more than whole again,

less without fault than the innocence of death

healing its own imperfections by falling away

from itself like the veils of the willows from

the waters of life concealed by the flowing

arcana of change as this old, strange rendition of death

casts no shadow on the unmarred face of its own refection.

PATRICK WHITE