THE SUMS OF AUTUMN

THE SUMS OF AUTUMN

The sums of autumn, the dark abundance of windfalls

on the ageing bough, a man, or a bell, groaning

under the weight of itself to cast the burden of its ripeness

down like a heart that’s been tolling in the sunset

and moonrise long enough to return its starmud to the earth

tasting of the harvests and famines that made the best of it,

sunlight in the spring flashing its knives like sabres of rain

off cold tears running like the juice of bitter, green apples,

summer in the blood like wild poppies in mangers

of scarecrow hay where he lay down for a moment

on insignificant hillsides along the way and was nothing

but a small perturbance of the wind silking the green grass

along the banks of the river as if he were watergilding with silver,

and the absolute clarity of the winter nights when the stars

were ferocious and beautiful, the bright vacancy of space,

brutal and uncompromising as an ice-age predator

that’s overcome its fear of fire. Dark nights of the soul,

stupefied by shovelling out the urns of nocturnal ashes

in mourning like doves, by the spoonful, when the lovers

throw their bodies like dragons on the pyres of desire

to gratify their death wish to immolate themselves

like sunflowers in a corona of flames in full eclipse,

as if life were self-taught, but love was mentored by death.

No lunar calendar of prophetic skulls, no rosary

of the names of God in transit like habitable planets

that might take a stranger in, no abacus of gravestones

in a cemetery of pioneer farmers can account

for the sums of autumn that sweeten the succession of zeroes

on the wild grapevines that bleed wine and water

from their eyes, spiced according to the season

by lemon moons and the rusty cinnamon of star-gazer lilies

when the honey-bees are firewalking the plinths of their petals

and the sting has gone out of the sweetness of an old man,

the anger and the hatred, the suspicion and the doubt,

reptilian moments in the plumage of peacocks,

the search for God in the spiritual lost and found,

the search for self, voice, fate, love, wisdom,

the mystic carillons of the spirit drowned out

by a choir of wrecking balls in a demolition derby

of upscale decadence in a free for all of unconditional chaos.

Listening as he speaks to himself now, he liberates

aviaries of metaphors that once captivated his ear and eye

like the picture-music of nightbirds that suggested

like a whisper in a mirror he was this and that

as if he were born the shapeshifting changeling

of a copulative verb with no future tense of now to speak of

or subjunctive mood ring to bring the blood to his eyes

like the longer shadows and wavelengths on the sundials

of his timely existence. Blue hellos and red farewells,

coming both ways like the embrace of a passionate triste

in the middle of a burning bridge with the lifespan

of a secret love affair with fire and water cancelling

the sums of autumn in longing and lament. As if

you came down to the river with a bucket

to help put a mirage of fire in the house of life out

like the overturned cup of an empty heart

and you’ve been shooting for the moon with both eyes open

to the rush of love in the rapids of a waterclock ever since.

In the silence of time, eternities expire when the sun

stands still at midnight and to have known it

as you know your own shadow, if only once in a lifetime

is to go on shining like Aldebaran in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, sign, cipher and paradigm

of the mystery of the meaning of your oracular bones

so much like firesticks in the firepits of meteoric thrones.

PATRICK WHITE

MAKE MY PATH INTO THE VOID CLEAR AND WIDE

MAKE MY PATH INTO THE VOID CLEAR AND WIDE

Make my path into the void clear and wide.

Purify my absence in the waters of life.

Let the silence I was improvised out of

like a meaning to a life that didn’t make any sense,

find its own equilibrium like water left

to its own resources. Take care of the medicine bag

of my body when it’s empty. Lived in it

most of my life, one shoe on, one shoe off.

Meant to be a pair I suppose, two wings on a bird

and a mystical third, but it was hard for anyone

who loved me to keep up with the holes

I kept wearing out in the soles of the road I was on.

No where in particular. Here was as good as there,

I wasn’t the locus or the landlord. Years as a kid

growing down on the street, I learned to stand

my ground. Wisdom more of a threat to me now

than it’s ever been, more and more, I let the ground of my being

stand on me. I wore space like lightweight body armour

I never had to defend, and never went on the attack.

You’ll be able to tell by the cracks and the welds

in my bones, I bumped into the world, I bunted

my head against the moon, the moon head-butted me back.

I was alive and interactive. Weirdly radioactive,

an estranged spirit of one summoned to a seance

in an abandoned schoolhouse, drawings still on the wall,

textbooks strewn like dead starfish on the floor,

and all the children of Chernobyl, the abysmal

silence of gone, who knows where, for good.

Hic sunt dracones. Fire and tears. Inter my Orphic skull

under the hearthstones of the urns and ashpits

that surround your heartwood like the orbital tree rings

of shepherd moons and uninhabitable planets

and I’ll spell it out like a waterclock of dragon blood,

the forbidden wavelength of a monstrous lake

that receives the swords of the dead in tribute and surrender,

how many light years it will take to cross the dream

they died for as if your entrance owed a lot more

to their exit than either the door they went through or you

have ever acknowledged. Live the continuum

like the creation myth of a nightsky full of eyes

that keep taking you by surprise when you least deserve it.

Those are stars in their eyes. All that anyone

has ever been left with, when all is said and done

and undone, a tear-shaped drop of the waters of life

hanging by a thread from the end of a blade of stargrass.

A synteretic spark of insight that bloomed,

a tiny blossom in the galactic shadows of ageing galaxies.

Let go. Let go. Let go. Even the wingspan of a single flower

exceeds the measure of the sky and every star in it.

Even in hyperspace you’re never going to fly out of yourself.

Don’t wait to be pryed open as if you had no faith

in the wind. Spread your flightfeathers like a snow owl

in a blizzard, like a sparrowhawk or swallow in the dusk,

helically orbiting Venus over the roofs of the showcase carlots

abandoned on the highway between the fast food pitstops

and the last chance turn offs. Shed what you have to shed

to travel light and gain altitude like the candling parachute

of a weather balloon or a daylily, until as it is above

so it is below, and even a hole in the ground

with the rock of the world on your chest to keep you down,

your coffin lowered into your starmud like a lifeboat

no one’s going to save on the high seas of awareness

in your wake, seems like just another avalanche

of mountainous planetesimals peaking at the cruising altitude

of one more sky burial free falling through

the valleys of death above shrieking with sidereal eagles.

Like I said, even dead, a street kid. Tough love.

Never take your death lying down. Snake-eyes

or seven come eleven, roll your bones like oracles

trying to read the dicey eye-sockets of their prophetic skulls

like the alphabet blocks of starmaps to come.

Hold your candle up to the stars like a nightwatchman

in a wax museum, but don’t teach the fire of life

within you, to hold its tongue in repressive reverence

for the dead like undertakers for the names of things

when the urgent longing of their most cherished dreams

is to enter you like a upper atmosphere, engulfed

in your flames like a meteoric return to their panspermic beginnings,

planting seeds of starwheat in the fertile crescents of Antarctica.

PATRICK WHITE