NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN. Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart. A penny on the third eye of the hurricane I’ve been trying to ride out all day without having it throw me off like a big cat on its back. Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws like quotation marks and crescent moons around the silence of your name. The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings. Inspiration doesn’t trample on things like flowers and stars. No more. No more of those feelings that were meant to be as famous as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war. Eyes running down the windowpane in tears as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers when you fire the voice coach and teach them to paint watercolours. It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard and let it dream like wine in the dark until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds. For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome. I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom. Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path. I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on and not expect to lose my way back home wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea. I should raise naval flags like spring flowers to signal the relative victory of a few short hours but the candles have already sent the message in flames and the shadows have answered: message received. No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake of the irreligious history of the world trying to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god someone met on the way to the promised land and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon. Rare revelation to the changelings of lust released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire as if to say you can come this far, no higher. There’s never been a star named after a human except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second, dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider, under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips of a mermaid in the desert like real water to a true believer in the midst of delusion just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain. And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck that went down at the end of her song, the whole town on board this leaking ark and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat like a woman with her face in her hands at the news. Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring, the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain. And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs, and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots in the pungent closets of the watershed that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River under chandeliers of light-footed starmud in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing like gusts of air to the heritage harps that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair. A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance, an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine. Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time no more vernal in the east where the moon rises than eternal in the west where the sun sets, I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets, I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars. Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago. And neither of us had anything to fight about. And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet, like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea. Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best. And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night. PATRICK WHITE
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 15:19:47 +0000
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