Nameless Tonight, Not Me, Immensities
Nameless tonight, not me, immensities
beyond my reach. The windows
thawing in the heat. Blue moon
above a junkyard of farm machinery.
The pioneers' bones have been exhumed
from the land they settled. Empty
the graves of those who slept in these hills,
lunar lichens plastered like playbills
over the closing night of their names.
Echoes we all disappear into like waterbirds
soon enough, skipping out over the lake
like gravestones in the hands of those
who effaced us from our own history.
I can't place myself anywhere,
alive or dead, no homestead of my own,
where I can watch the raspberry bushes
flourish year after year and listen to the rain
drumming the tin toolshed roof into a trance.
I'm unselfishly disciplined when it comes
to rendering the unsayable communicable
through events of form that shape-shift
to the counter-intuitive logic of metaphor
that transcends physics in post cosmological realms,
but that doesn't mean I've got the will of a socket wrench
to go on tightening loose bolts the rest of my life.
Rocking fields they won't let me die in.
I like knowing the pioneers used wildflowers
for soap, Bouncing Bet, Pride of London,
Lady at the Gate, and if I were ever
to survive a nuclear war, I'd put this knowledge
to good use like a lantern in a housewell
to keep the hand pump from freezing,
potato peels in the fire to desiccate the creosote.
I'd eat staghorn sumac and briney frogs for breakfast.
My mind would be an assortment
of different size nails and screws
I've saved for years to meet any occasion
I might have to keep things together anti-dramatically.
In the meantime I explore these old farms
the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,
listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes
fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales
of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.
After the original occupants die
and the last born son has left the farm for good,
we're all strangers in a used solitude.
The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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