The Pale Months
The pale months discharge their attributes of green
in the gripe of small, bitter apples
and the white blossoms
have got their laundry done like nursing caps
and the bonds of friendship with the young
have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,
as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens
with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays
and the busy wavelengths
of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons
that might lark their threnodies with real wings
and flammable paper if the little mummies
ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep
their tears fall like the cold lenses
of leftover concentration camps
they may or may not have read about,
and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,
the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers
run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar
thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,
and the silence that lies in state
like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime
is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine
how many stars and planets and lives it takes
to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,
how much light must give itself up to the night
to get one dropp of translucent honey
flowing through the narrow veins
of their slim contingencies
and into the green flutes of their bones
like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not
the red wizards of autumn yet
forging swords out of the ores and eras
of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.
They’re too busy looking for their place
and white surplice
in a travelling choir with portable pews
and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young
and imagine because they say the word good a lot,
they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems
as they will, it’s natural, it’s right
and there’s even a beauty
in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms
of ancient hydrogen
that looks like the birth of stars,
the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,
or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,
white dwarfs and cepheid variables,
young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light
to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets
[...] Read more
poem by Patrick White
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