STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

Stars tonight and the train whistles just passing through,

not dying like some wounded animal, a mammoth in a tarpit

beset by dire wolves just as the ice-age is taking its hand

off the throats of the rivers and returning the world to trees,

no drunks or teenagers lying across the tracks, no accidents

or suicides with loved ones leaving flowers and photographs

on the spot where it happened too late, too late, and no one

in a small town really able to relate to such a universal absence

like the death of the larger mammals when spring is at the gate.

I listen for the music of fate, and I’m almost always ready to dance,

but sometimes when I consider the erosively random indifference of chance

I speak as if I had to keep a tight grip on my molecules

or dissipate into space myself with no nebular aspirations

of ever becoming a star to shine a little light

on what I’m doing here as if I just bought drinks for the house,

though I’m never quite sure what I’m trying to celebrate,

but it’s enough to start a riot of sacred clowns

laughing on a winter night as they put each other down

as if the only way they could bluff themselves into having a little fun

were to put callouses on their smiles, and talk tougher than they are.

And over the course of time, the scars prove as hurtful as the wounds.

Atrocities turn into local stories and the asylums are abandoned

to the ghosts of the mad who murdered the nurse

in the moonlit flash of an axe you can still see ninety years later

if you’re driving by alone on a starless night in late February.

It’s the commonality of it all that makes it chronically appalling.

It’s the sententious acceptance of death as if it had already

been achieved sooner than later, and sooner waste your last breath

on the ashes of a dying fire than wonder why

intimately specific human beings turbulent with life

are forgotten as carbon copies of us as they’re fossilized

and remembered, if at all, as the narrative themes of morbid legends,

or nacreously glazed in mother of pearl as if the dawn were never false.

I can’t see the bright side of a black hole through the temple

of a universe that’s playing Russian roulette with itself,

but I can hear the tumblers of a solar system falling into place

on a safe full of secrets for my eyes only as if some things

came to light like undertakers chalking the faces of the cosmetically dead.

Lifemasks and strawdogs and scarecrows thrown

on the ritual fires of the crematorium after the sacrifice is said

to make the living feel better about having their hearts cut out.

Whatever gets you through the night. Aquatic Byron

reaching into the pyre to pull Shelley’s drowned heart out of the flames.

The way I seek a deeper solitude than death out in the nearby woods

where I always feel like an exile with a homeless heart

looking up at the stars like a handful of sacred dirt in a medicine bag

I’ve been saving for years to throw on my own grave

I’m holding up to the abysmal impersonality of the nightsky,

not to have it blessed by a consolation prize, but to give

the unresponsive silence of the alphas and omegas of the mystery

a taste of my humanity even if they spit me out as a bitter kind of light.

I will shine. Without a lantern. Without a firefly. Without

a guiding star. Without a radiant familiar in a desolate place.

If nothing else, I’ll keep adding my paint rag to the big picture

of the dark until I grow eyes to look beyond the obvious mirrors,

part the curtains, lift the veils, kiss the eyelids of the new moon

until the dead wake up like an eclipse of black roses

blooming in their blood, turn the trilithons of Stonehenge

until it’s aligned with the vernal equinox and the dead return

like migrating birds to the innocence of their childhoods

and the coffins they were buried are disinterred like toyboxes.

PATRICK WHITE