THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

THE GREEN BERRY RED AND ROTTEN

The green berry red and rotten,

the fledgling flown, windfall solar systems

of sun-spotted apples in the stargrass,

the white flower corrosively spoiled

by exposure to the eyes, the stars, the bees

that once doted on it but now abuse

the masterpiece of its unassuming beauty

by using it for a dish rag soaked in vinegar

to clean the windows with. It’s time

to lay your burdens down, give them up

to the earth that shall know you by them,

rose-hip, chokecherry, blackberry or blue,

black walnut, hawthorn or sunflower seed,

whatever the taste of life in your heart,

let the bell fall from the steeple, lower

the boughs of the yoke you’re bearing

like two buckets balanced by an ox

plodding back from the well and let go, let go,

as if you’d come as far as the road goes

and from hereon would have to start

making your own through deep snow

in the moonlight the wolves that follow

will pack down with their cracked

and bleeding pads like a great seal of approval

in hot wax on a night as severe as a scalpel.

Hour of birth and ruination. Fulfilment

and failure. Full moons in the pumpkin patch,

new ones shedding the skin of the most recent

eclipse of their medicine bags like black pearls

ripening in the dark like an active sexual life

that goes on blooming all winter to counteract

the effect of snow and plaster. Hour

of an old man racking black dwarfs

like prophetic skulls on an abacus

he never learned to play like starlings

on the powerlines of musical staves

that keep the snakes dancing circumpolarly

like a hermetic caduceus with the wings

of a dove copulating with the quantumly entangled

wavelengths of dragons that will burn

your eyes out until you stop crying

over spilt diamonds and start to see

your own starmud shining in the dark

like a star that’s been shadowing you for lightyears

through the shedding trees like a spark of life

you could start a galaxy with in the eye sockets

of any one of your visionary firepits.

Hour of letting go in the midst of the abundant silence

of the inarticulate garden that’s said all

it had to say as it waits for the first frost.

Let go of whatever you’re clinging to

like an umbilical cord to the rocket gantry

of the dark mother, and follow your own

circuitous flightpath like a silo on its way to the moon

and when you get there, unpack your suitcase

like a loaf of bread big-hearted enough to feed a famine.

Hour of death in life. Dream seeds under the eyelids

perishing like moonset over the denuded hills,

the maples burning their leaves like the first draft

of a novel they don’t want anybody to read

like a closing chapter in the life of an arsonist

who ends up eating his own ashes out of bird fountain

that holds a merciful spoon up to his lips

like the French kiss of a death wish in an urn

as he dies reconciled to the heresy of his life

in the eyes of the dead who thought he went too far.

Let’s hear it for the stars that made death possible

as the improbability of life that comes of it

that makes much out of the little it has to work with

like poems inspired by the fire in their lover’s eyes.

Marigolds holding out along the widow walks

of lonely souls communing with their solitude

like a family album of sacred tattoos the leaves

left like a last impression on cement gravestones

laid end to end like a road that turns back home again

with a childhood secret it shares with the crossed hearts

of the dead sworn to the perennial silence

of the memories that make life implausibly forgiving

without understanding a word of what’s said

about why it has to be this way, except

it has to be borne like distant hills ageing

under the echoes of lupine requiems mourning

the loss of one of their own as if it were the moon’s fault.

Blame it on the autumn. Blame it on the spring

that turned out to be the false dawn of everything

you’ve ever believed in like a mirage

in the third eye of a hurricane in a desert,

or what your lover said to you in bed one night

when you shared the same pillow like flesh of your flesh,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

as you both spoke of a creation myth that was already old

before you were born to mourn for it

like an apostate priest of a profligate abyss

that will swallow you whole like a dragon

the glain of the moon and disgorge it again

like the waterlily of a used condom

or a skin some lake shed like a starmap

to the wistful radiance in the eyes of the dead.

O yes, the eyes of the pervasive dead who fill space

with nuances of the light distilled from past dreams,

who look upon it all in pain and separation

and crack a smile like the scar of a stronger weld

than the original brain stem it mended

like a lighthouse on the moon where you

came to drown the sword you hammered out of fire

like a vow you made to the water sylphs

a long, long time ago before the salmon returned

to the place of their birth to continue dying

deeper and deeper into their awareness

of the mystery of life still throwing cornflowers

poppies and wheatstalks in the hands

of equinoctial virgins like cargo into the lifeboats

of our graves lowered over the side of the sinking earth,

stern up to the sun as it goes down into the underworld

like the Orphic skull of a habitable planet

dismembered by the mad muses of the autumn

for the lenience in his voice the dead

are especially susceptible to this time of year.

PATRICK WHITE