I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I can hear the silence screaming. Space shriek

like a red-tailed hawk that’s just caught something

in midflight in a dark, starless, eyeless terrible night.

Talons. And a strawberry heart. How the stars

and the water eat themselves alive to stay alive

as long as they can, an urgent life boat with a plan

to make a sail out of a starmap and make port somehow

or even the coast of an island galaxy of consciousness

somewhere you can watch the smoke rise

from a fire too far away to answer like the snake road

of a melody line you’re teaching to dance

for your solitary amusement to counter act

your loneliness by imagining it doesn’t exist

by making everything take hands and dance, dance, dance

for rain in a dragon ghost dance in a pageant

of poetic calendars with scenic views of the moon

that scare you half to death they’re so eternally brief

and beautiful. Breathless, if the timing’s right.

And though I’ve argued with the clock my whole life long,

it’s never been wrong. Things happen when they should.

Don’t doubt it, the timing is immaculate. The planet

makes its transit, the stars break through the clouds

like seed germinating in the farrows of newly

ploughed starfields and the water birds come and go

like poets without reason on a waterclock of lakes.

I got to see that, and once like everything else

in existence is good for a lifetime of encores should

you ever want one like a postcard from the edge of nowhere

featuring the local flora and fauna. Beaver teeth and maple leaves

and wolves, wolves, wolves, forever to reassure the moon

somebody’s listening, and the valley has a voice coach

that’s going to help keep this all night one night one man

bandstand on the road to scare the ghosts away

with frying pans and kettle drums and prayer bowls

dialling a phone for an ambulance when the vigil ends.

If it ever really does. But that’s unconfirmable

at this subjunctive cross roads of what if what if what if

and the Sufis and the sundials have got their fingers

crossed behind their backs. Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu.

Love is nothing. Love is everything. Love is a beautiful

illusion that isn’t trying to get a point across as if

it ever had one to make in the first place. A scalpel of the heart,

with the heart of a jew’s harp cheese grater keyed out of old

unboiled, uncoiled guitar strings trying very hard

to be in tune with God, and the stars, and the music

of the celestial spheres weeping in the kilns of time

for the beauty in the tears of the tree rings of the rippling willows.

Eternal happenings. I remember the first time I saw

a pair of cardinals show up at my bird feeders in the snow

like two tubes of cadmium red outside my studio window

that could fly. And they did. Eventually fly away as

all things must. But they left me feeling I’d just had a visit

from the Vatican and it didn’t rust for once. And hasn’t since

or I wouldn’t have found a place for it like this in a deathsong

or more precisely, in a silo of a measure beside

in this medicine bag that hangs around my neck

all the way from Silver Lake to Smokin’ Eagles

in a labyrinth of backroads beyond the train tracks

on the high trestle bridge that looks like a hybrid

of a ladder and an aqueduct and a good place

to smash beer bottles on the rocks below as if

you were throwing fledglings and unwanted embryoes

off a peripetein ledge for genetic edification

and because you’re drunk and blundering and bored

and there are no more genies with train lanterns

swaying like bells at the side of the tracks

to wish upon anymore like falling stars and burning guitars

singing everybody’s national anthem in words

that were writ in lighter fluid by a phoenix with a broken heart.

Live up to any one of your poems just for once for one day

and a night in a patch of birches you like because

the way they let go of their leaves as if they were losing

their minds, but in a gentle shedding way

so every little waterguilding paddle of modest gold leaf

were enough for the moment, way more than enough

to squander yourself lavishly on the same budget

as life itself and live cooly and blissfully

like a blue moon in October among the locals

who know exactly when it’s time for the windfalls

to drop their heavy loads and take some time off

the graveyard midnight shift. What diff? As long

as the stars come out, and there’s always something

flying across the moon, whether it’s the urnbirds

of the Canada geese, or a passenger plane heading west

or an owl, or a bat, something you can’t identify, or a witch

as if you’ve ever come to understand what that word properly means

that makes you wonder if people up there

ever wonder if the people down here look up

as I have so often out in the woods, and wondered

who they are and where they’re going and where

we all come from and who gets left behind

to return back to the solitude of being

a human creature in the woods alone at night

wondering what it’s doing alive under the stars

and who moves on and on and on to the other side

of their eyelids to find it was nothing more nor less

than a return journey to their original perpetually

irretrievable innocence only with awareness this time

as if you’d finally found a way of watching the watchers

build their spider webs in space between two blades of stargrass

without anybody minding too much. As I haven’t minded

letting all the animals in the woods watch me paint

whatever they make of the way I work to celebrate them

over my shoulder as I’m walking away after a good day

of doing what I’m not still clear about, but do anyway

because it’s good to hand a flower to a star once in a while

in your mind. Make it a waterlily, deadly nightshade, or the black rose

of a burnt out galaxy that’s about to go supernova in symphony

with everyone with tintinnabulistic triangular enquiries

and say do you know what this is. Good heart health.

Even when you can hear the silence sceaming and space shriek.

Two birds and a lyre we’re all heading towards.

An arsenal of dreams toward a terminal cancer clinic ward.

A sword forged of silver Russian olives and moonlight,

an hour hand, not in surrender, but in tribute to the waters

that blooded it in the pulse of your heart for life and forever.

PATRICK WHITE