Full Moon And The Mournful Thunder Of A Train
Full moon and the mournful thunder of a train
passing through town. Venus, Jupiter, Mercury
long gone down for the rest of the night.
Orion a pale imitation of itself in the west.
Mars near Regulus, the little king with the heart of the lion,
and Saturn off to the east. Like water returned
to the river it came from, everything immersed
in the fluidity of silence
swimming through the trees
as if virgins were older than fish at the spring equinox.
A habit of wandering when no one else is around
walks me out of town like some unknown journey
stringing my feet along with a line
and two minutes with a lunar hook dangling
in the effluvial plains of the moon's volcanic seas
as if I needed to be played into it by the sacred syllables
of ancient starmaps talking in tongues like oceans of awareness
into the ears of the seashells who can repeat
every word they say to themselves in secret.
All I've done most of my life is write and paint
spring, summer, winter, fall, four seasons,
and a writer not only adds another dimension
to the state of affairs, but constitutes
a fifth season of his own as well, a sphere
of thin-skinned spirit that covers the earth
like an invisible aurora of imagination,
the third eye of a wobbling satellite
lost in space with spiritual vertigo
like the black sheep of a shepherd moon. Five
seasons in all, but the fifth includes the other four
like a mood ring on a chameleon in front of a mirror.
And the rest of my life in between
exotic flame-outs and catastrophic inspirations
has been about running back home to my life
like an ambulance, a squad car, or a fire truck,
and, yes, even the occasional water bomber
to put a root fire out before it broke into blossom
and spread like daylilies to the rest of the neighbourhood.
Just as I can't help looking extemporally at
the extraordinarily ordinary dandelions sometimes
and thinking they must have been born middle-aged
because they all look like yellow G-7 type bachelor suns
that have rubber-stamped themselves all over the place.
Dandelion wine, but I wonder if anyone of them
ever longed to be born a red head, looked
at the gypsy poppies like blood at the side of the road,
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poem by Patrick White
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