EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING
Even when the road is missing
like the absence of God, or a woman I
love,
I praise that emptiness for the freedom
it accords me
to create a way of my own like a river
of stars
and for the universe it’s left me
like a travelling companion I couldn’t
improve upon.
The gate shut, the door closed, the
window locked,
I slip a key to a poem under the
welcome mat
and say my house is your house anytime
you call
and then go get drunk with the moon
down by the lake.
And after awhile we’re laughing at
ourselves,
rolling in the leaves like the
groundswell
of two happy vagrants with homeless
hearts
making off with our lives for free as
if
we’d just pulled off some cosmic B
and E.
without leaving any sign of culpability
behind,
except for the joy of our felicitous
crime.
And when my moonboat’s in port for
repairs
like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of
laundry on the line,
I don’t mind being land locked for
awhile.
I just take a walk along the shore of
the lake
and gather moonlit feathers
from the scales of the waves
that have evolved from raptors into
swans,
and binding them together
like Daedalus did for Icarus,
take a joy ride into the sun at
midnight
not really caring too much about
whether
I’m at zenith or nadir as long
as I’m transiting something akin to a
threshold.
The sun can hold Venus on a short
leash,
and me on the chain of my spine
like a barnyard dog barking at wolves
trying to tempt it deeper into the
night
but the last crescent of the moon
will cut right through them both
like the umbilical cords of a new life
where we can both roam free
like rogue planets from star to star.
Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by
day
to a low place looking for fire
from the daylilies with a bucket and an
urn,
because I’m so tired of what I’ve
had to do
to stay alive for the past fifty years
as a serf of poetry
to keep it a calling, instead of a
career,
and suffer the consequences of not
attending to it
as a business that makes a profit off
the stars,
but by night I’m a starling of
creosote in a chimney
singing my heart out as if I wanted to
eat it
because it has all the virtues of a
noble enemy
and there’s no poetry or protein in
the junkfood of fame,
though I think that might be a trifle
ingenuous.
Impoverished Druid, you lean on a
crutch for a tree,
as a flying buttress to your sacred
folly,
and running out of time to avoid
a head-on collision with eternity
all your devotions the ghosts of
yesterday,
you kick the stool from out under your
feet
and garotte yourself from the bough of
an oak,
like the berry of a single moon of
mistletoe
and the last crescent of a golden
sickle just out of reach
of the harvest season of the King of
the Waxing Year.
Poor heart, what a battered shoe
of a vital organ you’ve become, a
bone box
for the sacred skeletons of
hummingbirds and elephants,
a Burgess Shale for the creative
fossils and footprints
we both had to evolve through to come
to this
inconceivable moment without a time
scale
to measure how far it is from then to
now
like the last leap of faith of the
waterclock of life
into the abyss without a bucket for a
safety net
or any deep assurance of even having a
bottom anymore
to fall out of the ongoing over the
edge of a precipice
as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes
had to seek release from it all and
fall
even without a parachute to candle
like an exclamation mark all the way
down,
a descent into hell creatively much to
be preferred
than stagnating in paradise with
nothing but apples to eat.
But still you know you won’t do it,
given
the number of times now I’ve come
running
with a chair and a rope to let you down
out of the window of a burning building
not knowing whether we were committing
suicide
or I was running to your rescue as I
always have.
Your daring has always said feathers
and falling
has always taken wing like Pegasus
before,
and what a wild strange radiant white
water ride it’s been
across the high unbounded starfields of
the shining
with Vega and Deneb goading us on
ever further like spurs of Spanish
silver
just you and me, my blood brother,
together
in the vastness of a mutual solitude.
My God, when I think of the flights
we’ve taken.
When I think of the things we’ve
seen,
and the orchards of sorrow that found
more bliss
in the fruit than they did in the
blossom.
And what did we ever write about all
those stars
that didn’t declare how impossibly
illiterate we are
compared to the lyrics of light and
time and wonder
they’ve been singing all these
lightyears
since I first opened my eyes to why I’m
conceivably here,
though here can be anywhere by now like
a bird
that loses its bearing under the stars
everytime
it tries to get a fix on where it’s
going like a photon
jumping orbitals like tree rings in a
flash of insight.
When you’re light, when you’re
foolhardily alive
you don’t need to pay heed to where
you’re going
because there isn’t a single stage,
place, or phase
that isn’t the destination of what
you’re shining up at.
And I never thought the day would ever
come
when sadness would sweeten into wisdom
enough
to take pity on the mirrors like the
eyes under our lifemasks
when we went down to the river to drink
our own reflections like faces from the
lifeboat of our hands,
like a rain of mercy far out at sea far
from the sight of land,
when we first began to understand how
clarity like unity
can be broken down into little pieces
of sand
that reflect the whole universe as
readily
in their mystic particularity
as the stars and the sun and the moon
do
when they lay their swords and feathers
and flying carpets like wavelengths of
light
down in tribute to our third eye
weeping its way to the sea.
And you were surprised, admit it,
weren’t you,
to find so many white horses like you
running ashore,
mustangs from the waves, to check out
the new guy’s wings.
And me standing there like an avalanche
of winged heels
wondering why I didn’t make as big a
splash
and if all we walked away with was a
detailed starmap
who could say the journey really wasn’t
worth it?
Let the shore-huggers do what they want
with it
to find their way around in the dark
like fireflies.
Leave it to them. We were ever
explorers
from the beginningless beginning to the
endless end,
and we’ll rise up again on a gust of
stars
caught up like a dust-devil at the
crossroads of earth
and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the
stairwell
of a star-studded chromosome that could
take a coil of flypaper and turn it
into a poem.
PATRICK WHITE
