DARK SHEDDING

DARK SHEDDING

Dark shedding. Translucent shadows of the leaves

on a lake without a name you once made famous for nothing

because you saw it dance in your awareness of enough

and touched it with your eyes like a secret that was meant

to be kept like the silence in the roots of the bracken.

Regrets? What was there to cry about that didn’t bloom

in retrospect? Did you miss the moon? Did you run

to the window in time? Have you seen it yet

through the rain and the smoke? Do you see a woman

or do you see a ghost in the garden that reminds you

of someone you knew when were young among

the sunflowers you grew? And the moon and the locust tree

you hung from like someone pendulous and blue

as time on the air of the unweaving hills? Is that

still true as a road that goes nowhere without you

like the sumac in the fall when it fails? Do the gates

still open as if they recognized you by the grace

and the colour of the bouquets you made of your skelton keys?

Gardens of scars in your eyes. Did you leave the stars

to the sage when you wept like smoke at the feet

of everything it didn’t say but you could foretell

by the silence that befell you before and after that you

heard it anyway like the flight of a homing heron

to the shrines of its sacred syllable in the heart of time,

in the eye of the light, in the mouth of the wind,

in the crowns of the fire, in the flowers weeping

on the dark waters within as if you’d been their only friend

to understand their solitude as a gift from their wayward ends?

PATRICK WHITE