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House Full Of Spirits

House full of spirits, suffering ones, dead flies
punctuate the way
your lives have settled
on the windowsills of an indifferent eternity;
as foretold, the wind
has raked up your footprints like leaves,
and your smile no longer denudes the rose,
not even a rag of flesh
to sop up your exquisite tears.

And still, no one understands your pain,
no one sits around your heart,
the raging blue fire of your fragrant grief
trying to water your eyes like gardens.

And the brides move like waves
without a sea, the shadows of young horses,
and love that promised so much
down on its knees at the end of a wharf
that never led anywhere,
thistled into hatred and smouldering suicide,
and blood that rattled its chains at the moon,
and the years passed without remark
as if the measure of a life
were a butter knife and a French carnation.

Late at night, when the town sleeps,
when every thought
falls like the feather of a passing bird
or a pellet of bitter rain against the weeping glass,
as if the unrighteous were being stoned
by those without sin, I feel you
looking for your passage back through me,
as if you would adorn my voice
with the phantom bells of a forgotten joy
you never told anyone about,
as if you would add the ghost down
of your aimless autumn
to the warmth and moisture of my breath,
and flavour the air
with the subtle auroras, the secret dawns
of your quiet dispersals,
the petal of a blind candle
shedding its light
with every exhalation.

Take what you need,
the sorry cargo
of what you are able to carry;
and even if I don't know what room
I am the door to,
what window I look through,
use me as your small hunger suggests,
the feast and silo of your unknown needs,
the penumbral gardens of the world next door
that never turns the music up loud.

I will leave myself out
like a portion of the garden
after harvest
for the birds who must winter forever
on a dead branch stiff with time.

And I will not ask about you;
I will not look into your eyes
as if I leaned over the wall of a well
to listen for how far the pebble I wished on
more out of habit than faith
had to fall before it drowned
in the shapeshifting starmaps of your watershed.

Be what you are, the fragrance
of the lingering rose in stale lace,
the hesitation in the shadows of intenser forms,
I ask nothing of you
and expect even less.

I have my own solitudes to cultivate,
the business of being human to get on with,
and beasts at the gate
who stutter like hinges,
energies darker and older than coal,
begging me to be the one
to carry my corpse the rest of this journey
that lies still in its coils
waiting for the last breath,
the last murmurous pulse
to quit my poor body.

Even among faces and hands,
even on the abandoned street
nodding disarmingly
at the suspicious outcasts
ostracized by plaster rooms
and hooded for hanging
in the doorways that I pass,
I am driftwood on a remote and lonely beach,
the bone of a thousand island storms,
each a transfiguration of my heart
rounded out in the brutal tides
and undertows of sorrow.

And the hands of the clock
don't point at numbers anymore
but shine radiantly in all directions
as if the hour were a vivid gypsy
trying to dance the truth away.

And no one knows more
than the old, wooden office chair
I'm sitting in
as if I were enthroned by the life
of my own mind,
what it is I've been doing all these years
stuffing symbols like fortune cookies,
the vulva and wombs
of chromosomatic destinies
every one of which I've had to eat and live
before I could read the whisper of blood
that it was written in.

I could have made chairs,
I could have fixed shoes,
nailing on new heels with tacks and stars,
buffing the night with a spin of a brush,
I could have proposed propositions
about propositions,
and been a teacher, I suppose,
toiled at something simple
and recognizably purposeful;
nibbled nocturnally at a salad of money
when the garden was left until the morning
to the shy and the discrete.

But I was a rage
of arrogance, lies, and delusion,
I was black lightning that sneered at repose,
and any notion of the heart was justified
that stoked the furnace with the dead.

And I had to know what love was
and the damp star under the leaf
of a woman's body,
and oblivions that tasted of honey and chalk,
and the suggestive familiars of a darkness
rich with the ores of a stranger's voice
feathered with the light
of unknown constellations
extinct as the dice of a crucial gamble.

Enamoured of the eloquence
of the rarest paradoxes and absurdities,
considering the nature of the sea
I lived beside, and the moon
that edged her crescents on the anvil of my heart,
and the agony of being alive
that I could not overcome, the unanswerable emptiness
that always stands like the last syllable
at the deltas of the silence,
before I enter the unimpeachable abyss of its wisdom
like a falling tower
trying to bridge the infinite
by skipping mystic stones out over the sea,
and the way I always splinter into tears
like the eyes of a message in a glass bottle
that bobs at my feet to tell me I am lost and cast away,
what else could I be, born
with this talent for autumn, but a poet?

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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