LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

LUCID BLUE HOUR OF LEAVES ON THE RIVER

Lucid blue hour of leaves on the river

drifting by like constellations on a starmap at last.

Falling, they sank to the heights of the unattainable.

Life, for all we try to order it, no less random

than death. Does the becoming ever stop?

Too nice a day to argue ethics with my skeleton.

No end term. But let my bones have the final say

on whether I lived as I had to, not should,

or covertly fulfilled a spiritual vacuum

when I entered my grave like a guest in the doorway.

Lucid blue, but a chill in the air, and everywhere,

the going and the gone, the perishing in the name

of a good cause, same time, same place,

come the spring when the seed dies into

its own flowering gesture of longevity.

I can still hear the birds singing long after

they’ve flown. I’ve got their voice boxes

like empty heron’s nests in the female crucifixes

of the dead trees in a breeding swamp

of runic trinities. Saint Hillary was a Druid at heart.

I was an impoverished golden boy with a Mongolian will

to transcend my uneager beginnings as a fatherless khan.

I brought a new level of reality to the word, mirage,

but now it doesn’t even matter why I’m alive

as I grow like a beard on the wind, cedar smoke

from these pyres I keep starting like root fires

I sit around with my hands apart to the flames

like the wings of a bird rising from its own ashes

in a strange emblem of prayer to a god

I’ve never even heard of before riding

its own updraft like the soul of a man trying

to warm his solitude up a bit with a conversational fire.

The river’s babbling somnambulistically on and on

about how effortless the dreamers think flowing is.

It’s noon, but I see the moon flashing

its sabres of light on the redshifting waves

of the mindstream as it labours like a calendar

to keep up with life. Divide and conquer

and the house falls like Tarot cards unmindful

of their own fault lines. Sequestered in

this hovel of starmud, outside the walls

of a palace of water, I watch the cattails explode

like the stuffing of old couches, the royal thistle

suffering a fluffy kind of senescent dementia.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s got something

to do with me or not, whether I’m the protagonist

of the ghost stories I keep telling about myself

to the eyes gleaming in the dark like first magnitude stars

taking it all in like absorption spectra, or

they’re making me up on the fly to appease the shadows

that keep protesting why such darkness should

be born of the light as if there were a G-spot

on a single-petalled wild rose you could touch

like a bee that would make it all right as rain and honey.

Take the pain, the darkness, the despair, the struggle

to live inside yourself wholly alive

like a bed and breakfast for suspicious boarders.

Let a little danger ransom you from your ennui

as you grow more homesick, looking at the stars

you left like a pilgrim going off to a war

it was holy to lose, victory to die in the midst of

deluded by the rumours of virgin belly dancers

who said they were more in love with the carnal

than the nuances of the latest eclipses of an enlightened mind.

Pick any night you’ve ever lived as if

you couldn’t live anymore without spilling

out of the moment like tears of bliss

from a housewell deeper than the watershed that fed it.

One life. One encounter with yourself

like a stranger without fingerprints to say

you ever existed, as all those torments

that blasted you like clay brick in the deserts

of an hourglass settle like pyramidal dust on a windowsill.

Look at the leaves blowing down

the abandoned broadways of life like feral playbills

that barked like a dog outside a tent

you had to pay to get a seat in like a first row of teeth.

Sleep on a bed of nails if you have to

and have religious wet dreams of

the linghams and the yonis, the jewel

in the lotus, the yin, the yang, the coincidence

of the contradictories in quantumly entangled

oxymorons who never swore on the light sword

between them to keep a vow the optical illusion

of a bifurcated consciousness made for them.

Don’t give your word like a mighty oak

and then break it like a twig. Even if you regret it

later. The grander the entrance, the cheaper the exit.

It gives the story of your life a chance

to be true to you like an exception to the rule.

But don’t force yourself. Integrity’s the preference

of an aristocratic taste for the excellence

of a blue-blooded wine over a mouthwash of ditch water.

Don’t disappoint the scars of your younger heroics.

When you see the way people suffer as you suffer

and you need a word beyond righteous absurdity

to express how you feel about the mindless agony of life

or die in a futile attempt to shriek it at the stars

as if you were a magnificent bird of prey

with an arrow in your wing, don’t reject

the folly of love you’ve been chosen to die in the name of.

Even the moon’s a maggot that can sometimes

disinfect the trough of the wound

by ennobling the foodchain with a coat of arms

that honours the housefly with a set of wings

for not reviling the running sore of the earth as corrupt.

Waterlilies rot like skunkweed. It’s clear enough.

And it’s true there aren’t many who want

to turn over the occult skull in the prophetic duff

to see what’s going on underneath the impressionist table cloth

they’re picnicking on with courtesans in the grass

as if the waters of life had never heard of autumn

as the nightbirds pine for paramours beyond

the stations of their voices like troubadours in vain,

longing and desire, the ghost in the flame

ignoring the storms that will blow its candle out

like a lighthouse that disobeyed its own warnings

and, at the very least, deepened the madness of being alive.

PATRICK WHITE