THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

THINGS FREEZE IN TIME AND AWARENESS

Things freeze in time and awareness

more often than they used to. I stare

blankly at the candle-holder and the easel

and there’s no waiting, no space

for conscious intervention of any kind.

No comfort from love affairs I’ve mined

for jewels in the ashes. Halos reforged

from horns as ploughshares are from swords.

An existentialist would call this lack

of mystery, bleakness, and there’s no doubt

only a few flowers remain to the fall,

but I’m alone with things as if

they weren’t trying to hold back the universe

from anyone who wants in on the secret.

Five a.m. It’s still dark out. There’s

a red glow in the sky. Until her boyfriend

with decorative cab lights on his truck

drops the young waitress off to open

The Hideaway across the street. He leaves

and she walks right into the darkness

unafraid not giving a second thought

to what might be lurking inside at this hour

as if she’d been making serious love

all night. She’s the first bird to come back

in the spring, though winter’s coming on,

and death lets go of Foster Street like a spell

I’ve been observing, stillness through

the window, the imperturbability of things

at rest while the town dreams beyond

its explanations for how life is for those

who watch without memory or preconception.

To be alive simply and cleanly, sixty-five,

watching the heritage lamp-posts cast

static shadows on the parking meters

that never move like sundials or bloom

like galaxies flaring up from wooden matches,

(I’m writing this after the fact, so this

is the history before it gets to you

like the light of star, or the pictogram

of the Pleiades, Perseus holding the Medusa’s

ghoulish head in red Algol) and know

like a leaf whenever there’s this much shedding

something is revealed even the darkness

couldn’t anticipate after all these lightyears

this dead end, the gateway to an unspeakable freedom.

Cut free, somehow, of many things that

gave up on me. Disproportionate to my humanity.

The overworked apprentice free to play

hookey for the rest of his life as if no one

cared whether he showed up for work or not,

to explore the world as it comes to him

and not be looking for anything in particular

in the blue boxes stuffed with startled cardboard

that doesn’t contain anything anymore

it can’t throw out at aeons and eras of notice.

To see the dawn in the dingy blue ripening

over the rooftops and greet the day like a ghost

that’s beat death to the grave like a bet I intend to collect.

PATRICK WHITE