IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY
CRUCIFIXION WINDOW
In the left front parietal lobe of my
crucifixion window,
beatifically blue sky letting the slow
motion clouds pass as if
they were too white and puffy to be
solemn about things,
chilly sunshine casting a neatly cut
geometry
of occult hieroglyphs on red brick
heritage walls.
Sunday. Free. Blesses its own bells
like the left-handed virtue
of a secular day to celebrate a
shopping mall.
No mail. No bills. No threatening phone
calls.
No answering machine that talks
robotically
in the tone of a guillotine in the
Reign of Terror.
Good day to write if you’re summoned
by other voices
beyond the range of the usual crows who
talk
about the dawn of another encore more
like roosters than moonbirds
whose feathers turned from white to
black
for going as they were told, but never
coming back.
Words aren’t a medium for
fortune-telling your afterlife.
They’re vital organs of the trees who
have no other way
of singing about what they feel from
the bottom
of their heartwood up. All lightning
and root fires
flashing on the waters of life rippling
like tree rings
when a fish jumps like the mind at a
low flying insight.
Twenty first century siege mind, brain
meat,
soft walnut in a scorched black skull.
I’m dragon-spotting forest fires from
a long way off.
I’ve got a computer for a watchtower
and a moat
and if I can see any folly in your
madness
that passes for the grailquest of a
loyal clown
I’ll lower the drawbridge of my lap
top
and show you where to stable your
horse.
It’s freedom itself to drift like the
sport chute
of a dandelion with a flightpath of
smoke
away from the thermals of the canyon
walls
of an abyss that’s as open and closed
as
a tight-lipped door with no
expectations of
greeting my alienation like a threshold
that means well
and even the silence doesn’t care if
you’re listening or not
to every thought that crosses the moon
like a Canada goose that empties the
urns of the dead
at midnight, the echo of an ancient
pathos in its voice
even on its return journey to pick up
another payload of solitude like a
hearse.
There’s no doubt daylight’s kinder
to love
than most nights are because there’s
less magic
in its prosaic approach to metaphors
that only
glow in the dark like the shadows of
strangers
in the niches of sacred doorways
slightly left ajar
like a black star saving its last ray
of enlightenment
before it goes out nirvanically to see
better
in the eclipse of the mirror that
nothing can be recognized
for what it is until it’s looking
through your eyes
as if you didn’t have an identity of
your own
but you were still willing to share
your absence with them
like a well-thumbed starmap and a
telescope
that occasionally weeps to wash the
accumulation of stardust
off its lens for clarity’s sake on a
seeing-eye night.
Down by the broken phalanxes of the
cattails,
their pale ochre almost a shade of
moonlight
on the broken lances of an old war gone
long in the tooth
like the shell holes of biopic
cannoneers sighting their guns
on the British fleet in the harbour of
Toulon
and a sea of lunar tranquillity nothing
disturbs for long
except the odd wolf nosing around for
muskrat,
the willows waltzing with the wind like
ladies in waiting
in the most vernal of their ballroom
gowns
under the chandeliers of the stars to
the music
of a river in passing like a mindstream
retreating through time.
Funny what comes to you when you’re
dreaming awake
on a late Sunday afternoon in a small
town
that’s going on around you like
circuitous ants
in the pheromonic labyrinths of the
water-logged grass
greening their prospects of pillaging
the larvae
of dragonflies that spend most of their
lives as nymphs,
hand-picked by the sparrows like krill
from the grills
of parked cars beached like baleen
whales on hot asphalt.
PATRICK WHITE
