The Morning After Everything
for Luke Cochrane
Saturday morning rain in Perth
and things seem as intimately far off and strange
as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.
No birds on the black boughs of the November trees
and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot
and on the other side of me
the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church
that looks better in the nicotine lingerie
and dusky seaspray
of a single yellow floodlight at night
that can't get it up to be a lighthouse.
It would be a lie to say that I'm not in love
and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,
as I excuse myself for being me
and put myself off like the small death of another way
I could have taken to get back home, but didn't.
November's an orphanage after the last kid has left
and I'm sure there's an ancient chthonic wisdom
under the duff and detritus
of all these slick, leechy leaves
that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice
to draw the violets and worms out in spring,
but right now my mouth is not a wound
with anything deep to say
about things too deep to be said
and there are memories of women and friends in my head
sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer
that I have saved for when the day comes
to open the flowers and doors
that I've forgotten,
all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance
of the halo around a black hole
haunted by these ghosts of light.
I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey
and there's more healing than thorn
in the cool aloe of the air
moist with a seance of emotions
that gust lightly around me
as if yesterday were merely a fragrance
hovering over an eye of wine
like the dust and smoke of today
that bottles its purity like water.
Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you
and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin
and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in
and the sun comes out like an exorcist
and you feel like you've been baptized in ice
or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall
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poem by Patrick White
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