LEAVE OFF LIKE THE WIND
Leave off like the wind and it’s the
beginning
of someone else you never meant to be
as the stars go round with their
firefly lanterns
burning their hearts out on nightwatch
as if there were always something to
raise an alarm about,
and the willows come down to the water
to drink from the wild irises and
there’s---
can you hear the wind howling from
here?---
an unspoken story that glows like eyes
in the shadows of the surgical birch
groves
trying on prosthetic limbs, peeling
back
the binding of a book like a plaster
cast
they’ve worn too long like a ghost
amputee.
Let’s say it’s not too late to feel
the wind
shimmering the silk of the wild rice in
the moonlight
as if it were breathing like summer on
someone’s skin
and you feel love might perish but the
moment’s indelible
as how humanly foolish it is to long to
make things last,
the forbidden beauty of the secret life
you’ve hidden
under your eyelids like a love note in
a dovecote
you’ve been dying to release into the
imageless abyss
of the emptiness you’re counting on
to fulfil you in the end
like some kind of counter-intuitive
prophecy
that kept the faith of an undertaker in
the sub-culture
it was born into like a mirage of the
sixties
pulsing like a lightshow to the
backbeat of an osmotic amoeba
as if the Burgess Shale were still
experimenting
with psychedelic forms of life that
might lead
back to us if it were possible, and it
isn’t, to step
into the same river twice if you
remember your Heracleitus.
Foolish to want to corduroy the road
you broke like trail
to get here with the corpses of the
dynastic horses
you had to saddle like a universe with
a will of its own
that didn’t leave you many
alternatives as the earth
died out from under you like the smoke
of a deathsong
in a native cemetery you didn’t
realize at the time
you were walking through like the moon
in its sleep
dreaming it’s following a starmap of
fireflies falling toward paradise.
Let’s say you don’t feel like a
antiquated license plate
nailed to the door of a castrated gas
station
in a desert pit stop, the curtains
fishing for flies
at the broken window of a sky with a
grimy third eye
reflecting the spirituality of a hermit
who abandoned
the solitude of his afterlife too late
to do him any good.
The hydra-headed deception of the
perennial paradigm.
Listen to the screen door flapping like
a lapwing
that doesn’t have anything to protect
anymore
like the wounded encore of a showgirl
in a ghost town
from the meathooks that used to keep
the scorpions out.
Auroral evanescence of oleaginous
covenants
on the wings of demonic flies with star
cluster eyes
wintering like an eclipse between the
epidermal plaster
of the punctured lungs behind the ribs
of the unmended walls.
Bleak enough for any existentialist who
wandered
off highway looking for the exit sign
he missed a ways back.
And when the night approaches like a
widow
whose nightmares all died out shortly
after her dreams,
and your devotions smell like the
incense of candling skin,
let’s forget you were ever afraid of
the dark
and go watch the Perseids plunging into
the atmosphere
like a gust of hot cinders from a comet
that once
firewalked like a dragon across the
firmament
sowing meteors on the wind that flare
and fall away
like the flowering of goldenrod and
loosestrife
in the wild starfields nature takes
back into itself
as if yesterday didn’t adumbrate the
way you see things
right now, and the nightbirds
remembered all the words
to the songs you used to sing yourself
asleep to
whenever your voice gave comfort to the
longing in the room.
Let’s imagine you’re not mystically
snowblind
in a blizzard of fireflies and there’s
still a radiance
blazing like the corona of the sun
through
the valleys of the moon in a total
eclipse
that rests like a tiara of jewels from
the underworld
lightly upon your head, and not these
endless
heron’s nests you’ve abandoned to
the predatory ospreys
like feathers hanging from the medicine
wheels they use
to raise their young in like fledglings
of the arrow
that once taught you how to fly as if
you had the sky to yourself.
Stop eating your own thoughts like
junkfood for cannibals
and all will come right, unlock the
aviary of your voicebox
and let the stars out like Cygnus and
Aquila
when Lyra’s at zenith riffing on the
wavelengths
of Vega singing the blues with the
Doppler Effect
of a shipwrecked guitar catching fire
in the crow’s nest.
And all will come right as three bells
on the bridge
of a lifeboat that’s crossed the bar
like an albatross
in the blood oaths of the Knights
Templar
who retracted their false confessions
like heresies of insight into the true
nature of things
that fed the flames of the fires that
consumed them
like the dark vow of a deepening
passion for life
when the candle goes out like the wick
of a new moon
and there are more intriguing taboos in
the shadows to burn for
than the afterlife of a scarecrow
crucified
on the dead branch of its own half
burnt heartwood
in a firepit at Stonehenge like
paleolithic music
frozen in time like a trilithonic danse
macabre
at a seance of the winter solstice when
the sun
stands still at midnight like a black
hole
on the event horizon of a sky burial as
deep as it is wide.
Let’s say the bride didn’t have to
paint her eyes
like the lens of Galileo’s telescopic
third eye
to hear the priests of the tunnel rats
in the catacombs tell it,
just to look into the eyes of your face
in the mirror
to deceive your sunspots into believing
their beauty marks.
See transparently like space into the
nature of the light
that illuminates this pageant and
progress of perceptions
wandering like a mindstream on a
habitable planet
like a purple passage of automatic
writing on the foreheads
of our fates deepening the solitude of
the woods late, late at night.
What choice were the living ever given
by this chance at life
but to cherish the ageless elation of
insight into the stars
in the eyes of the mysterious
inspiration
to create something sacred as a hidden
secret
to this wild and unholy perishing of
the light?
PATRICK WHITE
