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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476743" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Listening To The Nightsong Of The Silence</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Listening to the nightsong of the silence <br>in a clearing in the woods that used to be <br>a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn, <br>and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations <br>of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood <br>as the cold comes on, slowing down into <br>long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives<br>the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals <br>who can't afford migration, to dream half the winter away, <br>soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside <br>from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses <br>as if they were being whittled out of ice<br>or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs <br>into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Chronic boredom of a white screen they'd <br>rather smear with something than look at nothing at all, <br>whether cadmium red on a blank canvas, <br>blood on the snow next to the hollyberries <br>the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on, <br>or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal <br>gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars<br>spreading the rumour around. Wonder what <br>the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day <br>when the cops were afraid to go there, <br>would have to say about their whiskey barrels <br>being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias<br>and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or me out here on my own looking <br>for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark <br>hasn't been distempered by the bottled light of the town. <br>After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes <br>I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place <br>who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness <br>taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound<br>like Huron women in the moonlight <br>beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds <br>into the bows of their spectral canoes <br>silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves<br>before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves <br>just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation, <br>and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder <br>so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately <br>as the deepest intimacy of time you'll ever experience <br>in your passage through it. And it doesn't matter <br>what the message is, whether you can interpret <br>the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight, <br>or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations <br>for real light, you're assured, without ambivalence <br>of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility <br>startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity <br>is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough <br>to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight <br>as if you'd just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid <br>by denying it. Right now I'm still a seance <br>of living fire in the woods the shadows of those <br>who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved, <br>lived, laughed and died here competently long before me<br>gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts <br>turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell <br>or I were the axial blackhole at the nave <br>of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me <br>as if the black queen of the sweetness of life <br>were founding a new colony of natives, exiles, <br>and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal <br>to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises <br>all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years <br>of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side <br>of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust <br>and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese<br>embody my migratory soul on a long journey south, <br>there are rituals and protocols of life and death<br>that must be upheld with a patience and grace <br>born of understanding how vital it is to adorn <br>what can't be understood with osprey feathers, <br>cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild <br>in the starfields of our dream mothers <br>leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors<br>for the wind blowing through the catkins. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the beginning was the imagination. <br>Imagination is the mindscape we're all aboriginals in. <br>Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop <br>looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake. <br>Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace <br>with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it's awake<br>when the elders gather to name the newborn <br>after the dancing waters and fire talkers <br>consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude <br>in the presence of the inexpressible events <br>that create the things of the world <br>like the sensory simulacra of a story <br>that always dying to be told around the fires of life<br>in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow <br>like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon <br>out of the leafless crowns of the trees<br>so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Patrick+White">Patrick White</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=476743" data-title="Listening To The Nightsong Of The Silence de Patrick White" data-description="Listening to the nightsong of the silence 
in a clearing in the woods that used to be 
a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn, 
and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations 
of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, t..."></div>
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