NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

NOW NOTHING. THE DREAM FIGURES HAVE GONE TO BED

Now nothing. The dream figures have gone to bed.

The painters have have entered their dreams as if

everything were better said in the morning and they’ve

left their half-finished paintings of muscular women

into Tae Kwon Do sex on their easels, and they come

and they come and they come to nothing with

a pretty little idea of the flower in their head

blooming like ball lightning in the rear view of the night.

Peace. Relief. Poof. And it’s gone as the mirages

come on for more. Something settles. Is it dark?

Is it dust? Is it light? Are there stars on the tarpaper roofs?

Quiet. You can hear the silence breathe. Me wheeze

softly with death and ashes on my breath. God

I wish there were stars on the tarpaper roofs.

But that’s the way of it. Does anybody need any proof?

There are memories that recoup the moment.

Birch trees and gardens shaped like icons of a woman

I knew once I was trying to please. Elecampane

and eglantine, and always, always, always

the wild grape vine. Locust and apple trees. The moon.

When it’s up. The way I’m edging this like a fluid

jeweller with my tongue to make it run. So nicely

it almost seems like compensation for taking

my breath away. Ting. Ting. But it’s lower than that.

The hospital ward is absorbed in it on the nightshift.

Soft-shoed silence. And the musings of the dead

in a hospital bed on what they’ve lived, what they’ve loved,

what they died for. My turn. I’ll try to be their equal

not peer of anything. Maybe a fun companion at the end

to help relieve my suffering with their laughter. It’ll work out.

I’m almost sure. I can bumble my way through this

black out with a kiss on the forehead for good luck.

Full stop. No more birch trees. No more gardens.

No more full stops. Isn’t that ridiculous? No socks.

Is it brutal as a snowflake? Does the soul leave

the body when it dies? Have I got one. Do you?

Is it bearable, durable and wise? Does it lie to you?

Mine does sometimes. I wonder about that. Not much.

But some. This is creation. Who knows what to come?

Court jesters in a heavenly kingdom? Or sunflower angels

with deadly nightshade in their eyes to make up for it?

See? It lies in the way it tries to make me feel better.

It doesn’t have to try so hard. I’m mellow as a bride

of the lamp posts outside. I’m wise as a blade saw

that knows how to cut its own umbilical cord. Midwife.

Not trapline I’ve got to eat my way out of. Or be eaten alive.

But that’s another matter. What’s everything for now

is looking into this while the night surrounds me

as if I were a gold fish in the submarine pens of my aquarium.

Digits of time. Thumbnail sketches immersed in it.

Should I say the waters of life? The evanescent

exit and entrance. You breathe it in you breathe it out.

And then you die. No trick to it if that’s all there is to it.

I’ll try. Take a good run at it and fly like a waterbird

with nothing on my mind but taking off on time to go blind

or enter another space, maybe a lot like this place

where I’m fine for the moment unlocking the sky

like a diary of stars way back in the woods of my mind.

PATRICK WHITE