Come Some Moments In The Squalls Of Time
Come some moments in the squalls of time,
however flammable the orchids are
behind the burning woodshed,
your life turns into an inert gas
and you're not holding hands with anything.
Singly the waves go to their graves
like trombones in a rock band
as harmonicas rave at the moon
like lonely dogs that have lost a faithful owner.
What can you say, what can you say
to fill such a vast silence
with gravitational eyes that can bend
time and light back around your way
instead of sending the usual flowers?
Sometimes in the brutal shallows of life
you find yourself out hunting dragons
with a butterfly net that's gentle on their wings
and all you catch are fireflies that sting.
Occasions of insight, eventful revelations,
the stars divide into congregations
of myopic constellations to improve
the ferocity of their narrow points of view.
I am the Hunter. I am the Swan.
I am the whirling castle of Arianrhod
in the last crown of the Celts
who could sing in silver almost
as well as the moon on an autumn night.
And none of this is true by three in the morning
but it will help get you through
the worst of yourself like an air raid warning
screaming like a banshee at a broken window
for your blood in a black out of bombed-out cities.
Whatever befalls you in this matrix of accidents
you don't attribute to the errors of mere coincidence.
You'll catch up in time to whatever you're seeking
if you sit still enough to outrun your thought,
whether it's a god or an enlightened woman
in a Zen brothel, and when you do, you'll say,
I love you, and they'll both ask
what language you're speaking
in the accent of a demotic form of betrothal.
And that's when the roses fall on their thorns
like a woman in the doorway of an honourable death
and you're dazed by how easy it was
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poem by Patrick White
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