THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

The long, dark night, more anthracite

than bituminous. And one star, alone,

fierce above the town, burning, as a jetliner

blinks its way down to landing in Ottawa.

Pythagoras’ transmigration of souls

in the body of birds, Iranian angels

with lives like messages for loved ones

and strangers. But I’m deep in the valley

where the Algonquin and Ojibway

got here first, and the Canada geese, though

they’ve flown away, bear the deceased

after their bones are dust to the south

and the west of the dawn they watched

lest they forget where things rise again

and set, through the eastern doors of

their burial huts as if death were a kind of love.

Samhain, soon, Festival of the Dead, witches’

New Year, All Hallowed Eve, where the dead

are allowed yard time free of their isolation cells,

or wherever the waterbirds took them,

ventriloquists behind the mesh of their

electric veils, the hand of the living

pressed against the hand of the dead,

let the witches jump naked through

the sun at midnight, half way between

fall and winter. Let the prophetic skulls

whisper something old on the nape of poetry.

Aldebaran and Capella to the north, one week

until the Pleiades breaks the horizon,

the moon and Jupiter rising in the east

after midnight through the denuded trees

in the park. Perfectly still out, not

a human in sight if I don’t put the emphasis

on myself. Just me and the streetlamps

and the last of the flowers wondering

what’s happening to them as their dyes

are charred by the frost like a bonnet of warpaint.

The more I study things as I get older,

common things, obvious details, the more

I am estranged by my own knowledge.

The leaves are making silkscreens

on the sidewalk. And what I thought

I knew, I’ve shed like the last skin

of the moon’s original totem before

I go into hibernation like a wavelength

with cold blood. A red shift and then oblivion.

More calm than morose, there’s not much

left to lose. The flames of the daylilies

have all been snuffed and they’re up

to their candleholders in the leaves

of yesterday’s fires like a brown out

of a dragon in a crematorium, a pyre

trying to make its bones disappear

in perfect combustion, not a scale

left unincinerated, dust to dust, ashes

to ashes in the subliminal holocaust of the heart.

Things pass, things perish, things die away

like a woman back lit by a window

more than once. I carry on to nowhere

I know I am, not in the mood to stare back.

I’ve made this town the nave of my spoked wheel

of birth and death for the last thirty-five years

writing and painting the mindscapes

of the tourist traps that think they’re here to fish.

I’ve hot waxed and laid my life out

like a glossy brochure without a computer app.

More the picture music of the way things are

than a photograph or an advertisement

to sell you terra firma in the winter

than starmud that will flood you out

in the spring when real estate begins to thaw.

I haven’t exaggerated the longing

of the nightingales or hermit thrushes

that sing unseen in the woods at night

with more hope than I have that something

will answer them back out of the pitch-black abyss,

for reasons of its own. The La Brea tarpit,

or a nest egg quilted in goose down like

moonlight, or hobby farm wives cutting

patches out of a working starmap gone

at the knees, with too many black holes in it

to mend anymore, the sail of the pirate

fired upon like a mailbox at the side of the road,

commemorated as the death shroud

of a colourful bedspread empowered

like a mandala to lead you astray

by following your dreams wherever

they may lead, a heritage cemetery or buried at sea.

Or maybe, if you’re nocturnal and rustic enough,

just roadkill somebody put a blanket over

so you didn’t have to see their face

or the shock in their eyes this isn’t such

a petty place. It compares with a tole-painted urn

from anywhere and the fire masters

scry by the rings and the cracks in your heartwood.

Things heat up in the winter, in the summer

they chill out by the doe-eyed lake caught

in the highbeams of the moon looking for

a blue number they can relay to the ambulance

on its way to pick the corpse of another workhorse up.

“Gonna die less than a hundred feet

from where I was born. How many can say that?”

Buried deep enough in his own starmud

the bush dogs don’t dig him up again

like grave robbers to see what a pharaoh

wasted his life on thinking it would distract

from the pain to build in stone what

he rocked from the starfields and tongue depressors

of the graveyard to see what he died of

without ploughing his body up like a tractor

gone crazy on the moon he seeds with cattle corn.

Or the mad farmer they found sowing the woods

holding onto the tail of a huge black bull that led the way.

What do you think? Is there as much moisture

in the soil at the new as there is at the full moon

because gravity pulls the tides one way and then the other

under the influence of the dreams of a sleeping child?

Is it a boustrophedon or a labyrinth? Is it a good time

to plant new ideas like stars in the dark matter

that clings to our rubber boots like the heart

of something that has remained stubbornly true to us

without making a big fuss about it? Or not?

PATRICK WHITE