Sunday, September 30, 2012

BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT


BARLEY MOON, TONIGHT

Barley moon, tonight. Hurt deeply but don’t know why.
The threshers and the raccoons and soon the Canada geese
have already done their work, so there’s nothing to harvest
but a few cobs and kernels of cattle corn that look like
they have bad teeth. Pale yellow ochre ribbons of the moon
that flake like the acephalic pages of old holy books.
Something unknown is trying to be born of my emptiness.
My heart and my body strain to sustain sufficient gravity
to hold it in its orbit long enough to attain fruition
and hopefully, then, we can both let go of the labour
of trying not to let go of the climber that fell over the cliff
tied to our spinal cord like a burning box-kite
or the arrested development of a corpse past its prime.

For all the fury of their clarity in the cold air,
the stars seem more distant, aloof enough to be cruel,
almost savage like these fields returning to their own agendas,
purple loosestrife and mustard, and the hopeless green
of stunted plants trying to get their time in before the first snow.
I’ve walked these meandering dirt roads before,
but now everything’s gone inside, except for a few dogs,
and there are no lights on at the farm. I don’t care
where I’m going. I just walk. I just look. Exiled by the outside
of what’s sleeping in the hearts of the farmers
and raccoons alike, as the nights grow colder and longer
and the grave stars seem to shine brighter
the fewer there are eyes to see how radiant they are on their own.

Burridge up ahead, a gas pump, a grocery store,
a hippie who makes brooms. Think I’ll just keep on walking
until I run out of road, and after that, have to make
my own path through the woods to sit beside
a small unnamed lake with the wisdom of a sage
that’s got nothing to impart to me but what I came with.
And I can nurse the subliminal agony of a poet on the Milky Way,
bemused by the passage of all things around me
as if they too were walking the same Road of Ghosts I am.
I see the beauty. I see the bat flash across the moon.
I feel the mythically inflated sublimity
of my comparative inconsequence. I lament
the rubbish of the last flowers of the season,
the trashing of the wild irises as if they were all wrapping
with no gifts inside. I wonder what death is. What purpose,
if any, life serves, if it isn’t just here to serve itself.

PATRICK WHITE

YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS


YES, THE AWFUL THRESHOLDS

Yes, the awful thresholds.
The taboos of lace and razorwire
that threshed our blood like kings of the waxing year,
queens that were crowned like the full moon in broken windows.
And you, dark one, hidden familiar, switchblade,
last crescent of my torment when all else had failed,
bloodsister of the same wound I’ve been dying of ever since
as if this life were the greatest affliction
that could have been visited upon either one of us
by the closed doors that drove us away
like scapegoats and pariahs, the untouchables
of an infernal caste of homeless innocents.
How could I ever forgive the boundary stones of their skulls
for what they did to you with their false prophecies
and promised lands, the hatred of your savagery
when you were mauled by the snakepits
incarnated in the hands and the glands of the toxic fathers
who brought their drunkenness like garbage barges
to the bed of a terrified girl to waste her
as they had themselves as if you’d been born to be trashed.

The deepest outrages and sorrows in life
have had their tongues cut out, and over the course
of many demented stars, the light evaporates from their eyes
like the last grey thread of smoke from a candle
dipped in flesh, and the soul, no longer a spinal cord
of serpent fire burning like a fuse toward
some apocalyptic illumination that would right
the errors of perception in the awareness of heaven
that washed you and I like motes and cinders,
the crumbs of dreams clinging to the end of an eyelash
out of its field of vision as if we were never meant to be seen.

O my lover, my salve, my muse and anti-self,
my heart still burns in the cold out here alone
in these broken starfields under these shattered chandeliers
lucid as ice-storms in the abandoned ballrooms
of the scarecrows that once used to dance here
until they broke into flames like strawdogs
at an outlawed ghost dance that promised to return
all those things to us that we had irrevocably lost.
Where have you gone? Is it warm, there?
Do they leave you alone to nurse your heart
back into feeling something remotely human again?
Even at this late date, your gesture of silence
still humbles my voice like a night bird
I haven’t heard before, as you ask for nothing
in the darkness, knowing as I know,
it would only make you more vulnerable to joy
and joy’s an arrow fletched with our own flight feathers.

And though, even now, wherever you are,
it would probably make you wince like a black rose
waiting for a pearl of blood to appear
where you pierced your eyelid on a thorn of the moon
in lieu of a tear you couldn’t show to anyone but me
without them breaking it like a mirror they didn’t want to see,
I have to say it, because you have to know,
though we’ve grown old apart, and I don’t even know
if we’re still the same astronomical catastrophe of fireflies
trying to keep each other warm in the immensity of the solitude
we once huddled in like a cold furnace of the heart,
waiting for a new world, anyone but this,
like a new universe to hatch out of a cosmic urn
though we both knew matchbooks don’t just
suddenly flare into fire-breathing dragons
out of the ashes of creatures like us
who could not forgive our childhoods
for abandoning us to the ferocity of their absence.

I have to say it, as if I were threshing arrows
like stalks of wheat in Virgo, what
an unlikely blessing of a sphinx you were
among so many obvious curses in utero.
And you must know, though I say it in broken glass
that never learned to cry, that I really did love you
even if I never said it at the time for fear you’d mistake me
for the others who did to excuse what they took from you
and never returned. Thousands of miles away
and more light years than the journey could keep up with,
in this open field, leftover for the birds and the worms
and the homeless weeds that are turning it into a refugee camp,
I stand like a hypocrite under a harvest moon in silence
and think of all the empty silos I’ve tried to be grateful for
as if I’d broken bread with them in order to learn
how to live on less than nothing but this vengeance
that still burns inside of me like the vow of a vacuum
that has yet to be fulfilled whether nature abhors it or not.

PATRICK WHITE

Saturday, September 29, 2012

AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS


AND SHOULD IT COME TIME TO SPEAK OF THE SADNESS

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that reaches fruition in the medicine bag of the heart,
don’t bring a teacher that can’t heal by singing and dancing
to the wounded discipline of a lost art that’s gone
into the sacred solitude of the secret suffering
that upholds the integrity of the silence in your eyes.
This is a seeing that has nothing to do with truth or lies
or the innovative causality of pain. Don’t speak
of its release as enlightenment or liberation,
as if you were uncaging doves from the ashes of your voice.
Don’t seek what has eluded you when you’re cloaked
in an eyeless night like the screening myth of a lonely alibi.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
don’t humble the message at the expense of the medium you choose
to weep in when the hidden urges you into the open
like a dragonfly emerging from the hovel of a chrysalis
into a palace of air with the wingspan of your diaphanous windows
beaded in tears like the afterbirth of the rain
in the post-natal mirrors of your indefinable awareness of life
as the sweetest agony of sorrow transformed into bliss
you ever had to endure like the darkest night
of a sea change in the unforeseeable nature
of your inconceivable soul trying to emulate
the unknown likeness you shapeshift to accommodate
the arrival and departure of everything you’ve ever had to let go of
like summer stars, and waterbirds, and legendary ordeals of love
when the full moon so often filled the empty silos of your longing
with the unsuccessful harvests of hungry ghosts
that competed with the sparrows and the scarecrows
for the seeds of a garden the wind neglected to sow.

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
that saturates all human affairs in an aura of mourning
that hangs in the air like a mingling of swords and bells,
don’t pretend your life was a nuclear winter of unrelieved misery
when everyone knows if it weren’t for trying to cling to joy
or even the longing for it, you might have smiled your way
through everything like the cold stone of the moon.
Remember those thoughts that used to come
like snakeoil salesmen that greased their sinusoidal way
into your heart like coiled serpent fire that mesmerized you
like the blue bird of happiness on your own projections
until the promise wore thin, and all your ploys at joy
turned out to be nothing but the hucksterism of tapeworms?
And, then, as it sometimes happened more often in autumn
than spring, your heart soared like a guitar with a broken string
taking wing like a waterbird off your tears
until you burned out like a comet with an uplifting message
in a niche that was meant for candles with slower wicks?
That kept you hanging onto life like a burning box kite didn’t it?

And should it come time to speak of the sadness
like a sin of omission that overpowers us all eventually
because the best things we promised ourselves
were never unattainable and the joy we sought and fought
and laboured for, and did not find, was barely explainable
even to us who became experts in grinding mirages into lenses
to reveal where it might be hiding somewhere in the universe
right under our noses. Up close and as intimate as our eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME WHOM I WRITE FOR, HONESTLY


IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME WHOM I WRITE FOR, HONESTLY

If you were to ask me whom I write for, honestly, I really wouldn’t be able to say. One day it’s this. The next it’s that, depending on my mood I suppose. Sometimes I think I ingested so much negativity when I was young, and hadn’t even learned to get my hands up in front of my face yet to block the blows, when I found myself going toe to toe with a meteor shower that had already done the dinosaurs. I think I’ve lived with a battered self-image like the pitted moon ever since. A pariah or a voodoo doll no one’s ever clung to for long. They could put the pins in, but they weren’t much good at taking them out. Go ask any butterfly. So maybe in a twisted, subliminal kind of way that makes something good come of something bad, I write for people, to make up for having been born as I am among them. It’s gesture of sorts, the parting gift of an exile, if you like. Art for art’s sake has always struck me as sure sign of impotence, aesthetic masturbation, and about as productive. Not my style. By their fruits ye shall know them. So, yes, people, why not? No people. No music. No art. No poetry. Simple enough. First come, first served whether it’s deserved or not. I’m so at home in the darkness, my eyes have evolved to the point I can see it shining in an abysmal aura of ferocious clarity that would humble diamonds, and I know the black mirror’s brighter than the white one, so I make a virtue of a vice, a strength of a debility, and write on the walls to humanize the dark spaces I explore as if my fingers were spiders crawling along the dank stones, someone was here before so as brutally isolated and inexplicable as it seems to be in this space, it’s habitable. And I can say things in such a way, I can stitch up a hemorrhaging rose with its own thorns. I can rage like a wounded dragon at atrocities that would make even a phoenix grow hoarse and lose its voice. Or scream in silent agony. And born on a Wednesday, under Hermes, I am a Vas Hermeticum of metaphors and occult sciences, an understudy of the eloquence of night. A black mystic standing in the shadows Venus casts on a moonless winter night. The nightwatchman of the new moon. A guide of the dead who couldn’t afford the astrolabe of a pyramid to aim them at the stargates in Orion. Cloven hoofs with winged heels, well before Pythagoras, the Persians, or the Ojibway, I knew all the lyrics of the songs of the birds that carry the souls of the dead in the urns and amphorae of their bodies like the angel of death does in the modern version of the myth. I’m an ancient asmatographer. And I use my pain as an antidote for others. One fang kills you and the other heals you just like the horns of the moon, or the tits of Medusa. I extract a cure for others from the heart of my disease. I dip the other wing of the fly that fell into the Milky Way so you can keep on drinking from it uncontaminated. Out of a surrealistic twist of karma, I write for people like an evil that was condemned to do good, and I’ve seen hell, and I’ve seen paradise, and I’ve got two eyes open on both which is something the one-eyed angels can’t say. And as I’m fond of telling them, just because the doctor’s got the disease doesn’t mean he can’t cure it. So would you bless or would you curse a creature like this? And do you think either way, it would make a difference, or matter in the least?

But sometimes there are no people around, and late at night, after the drunks have gone back underground, sitting here at my desk, watching my fish swim around, I’m just another nightbird longing for a companion out in the woods where every ear is attuned to the sound of their solitude. And I can hear my own mindstream making its hidden way through the darkness of the birch grove whose albino limbs glowing in moonlight all look like Corinthian pillars bent and knotted by arthritis. And I don’t think I’m writing for anyone but myself just to add my sad noise to the estranged voices of those talking to themselves in the universe as if no one were listening to what you had to say before you offered your head to the ax of the executioner’s moon like the period of an exclamation mark that had just transcended its many-splendoured wonder with its own extinction in the unmanifest unity of it all. So I don’t always know for whom or what I’m writing for, then. Maybe I’m writing for the stars who’ve never failed to write back to me, or I’m just feeling the approach of autumn, and shedding leaves. Lament draws near, without the sting of sorrow, memories I haven’t relived in light years, and out of the stoic air, the ghosts of old muses who’ve still got beauty on their side, and fires that never age behind their veils of distant smoke dancing on the hillside to the picture-music of the aspen snake charmers to defy their own exorcisms.

PATRICK WHITE

Friday, September 28, 2012

I AM A DRAGON


I AM A DRAGON

I am a dragon,
but I’ve got cloudy teeth.
You are a vase among jars,
a feather among scales.
Obviously you are the sea
and I am the seabed.
In the darkness you are the shining.
I come to you
like lead to an alchemist,
base metal to gold.
Already I am transformed
by your mirrors of fire.
There is a light, a glow,
invisible but more illuminating,
not of the moon, or sun, or a star,
but of the heart and mind,
the light of life itself
when it’s the only candle in the room
dancing behind its veil of shadows,
and in the least filament
of the down upon your thighs,
there are suffusions of fireflies and galaxies,
mystic lanterns
ripening like apricots
over the open doors of worlds within,
over eyes that bloom like wild asters
rooted in the earthly fields of the heart.

I have been a ghost
trying to say itself into existence;
and my bread and my blood
have been the whisper and breath of you.
Not the mountains, not
the mothering floors of the wheat seas,
not the forests or the hills or the rivers,
not the ladders or roads or miles between us,
nor the seasons of the threshing clock,
have kept us one eyelash apart;
we have been wings to each other;
we have been the secret tides of the rose
in a bay of blood to one another;
we have been the substance of a dream
that lingers like the impression in cool grass
of where the deer slept the night before.

In the flights of winter birds,
on moist winter days,
I have rehearsed endless summers to come,
when the sky whispered your eyes
in bells of sidereal fragrance
into the abyss of my longing for you
and love seemed a petal of light on the wind,
and you were that petal,
and I was that wind.

And though I have stood for eras
on this bridge of night alone
waiting for you like a letter, an afterlife,
a voice of fire in a well urgent with stars
I want to live with you,
we have always embraced, not two,
arrow and bow,
pilgrim and shrine,
release and enlightenment
reflected in these visions
the insistent palettes of the heart
paint on the impassioned waters
of the lifestream.

I have been a storm of blood and stars;
I have drowned in the crypts of my own tears
and learned to breathe through a new medium,
set the crown of my fin on a rose of gills,
and bloom in a mythically enhanced
immensity of sorrows,
and the shadows under my eyes
have mourned for me
like black bells in a tower of thorns,
two horses of night chained to a heart
that dragged itself around like a hearse
looking for a lost grave.

I buried myself in women
who were torn like the satin lining
out of a coffin just
when they were about to give birth.
Their pain always tasted of an afterlife
that danced like lightning on the tip of my tongue
until my blood caught fire
like a rose with a voice of wine.
Black, apostate madonnas
of body, heart, and mystery,
even the moon a bead of devotion
on a thread of their blood,
a dream vow under the eyelid of an eclipse.

I never knew what to say
that wasn’t a life shy
of an inadequate skeleton
trying to reflesh itself with the ashes
of its last sidereal cremation.
I was born again and again
like a sword drawn out of a stone
to hurl my humanity
like a sparrow
against the windows and eyes of the gods.

They knew I was right
to live the prophecy
written in the book of my wings by the wind,
but their tears fell like glass rice
on the stairwells of the bridal mirrors
that wept like silver serpents
at the heels of the moon
and whatever road I walked,
whatever direction I wandered in
like a drunken river
I passed through my own ribs
like an opening gate
to a sealess exile on the moon,
a lighthouse to the sail of a ghost in a desert.

Events of the spirit,
and the imported executioners
of tormentive ecstasies
that made our bodies shudder with oblivion
until even our shadows glowed
like feathers of light
that glutted the abyss we pillowed like stone
to lay our heads down upon and dream,
every emotion,
keyed like a highwire
over the infinite emptiness
of a guitar in the corner of a tomb
eating the dust of a blackboard
that schooled the scrawl of the angels
into the writing on the wall.

How many lovers have perished in me
like the rings and eras of a tree,
and what enormities of childhood it takes
to sweeten a single ruby of fruit,
what tides of blood and light
collapsing like eyelids on the mystic circus
that pulled off miracles
under the sheets and skies and skin
of our lascivious tents.

Now I am a dunce in a wizard’s hat,
a cone of light,
the pillar of a fallen shadow,
freeing the wings of wounded birds
from the nets and mesh of the stars.
I am a dragon
with the soul of a bridge to here and now,
a weed on the stairs of an unknown temple
to a god that sweeps me away like ashes
with the broom of my shadow,
and my face is the footprint of the wind
as flowers are the footprints of the light,
and my heart is a pebble
I keep dropping down a well
to listen for an echo from the depths,
for a whisper of fire on the water,
to deliver me like a burning dove
with a leaf of the moon in its beak,
a letter from you,
to say there is a south of the heart
that can thaw this arctic desolation
that overtakes me like an ageless night
as my thoughts fall away
like the flames of descending matches,
like angels and demons
tilted from heaven,
from the plane of their orbital hearts,
toppled like towers and lighthouses
by an urge to kiss their own reflections.

I am a dragon
chained to the nightrain
that inks the roots of the locust tree
with thorns and stars and flowers,
and my blood is a dusky mess of dawns and ancient sunsets.

My heart was scaled like the moon
by the phases of an empty cup,
my eyes were birdless skies
and nothing flew higher
than the feathered shadows of the trees
that roosted in the grass like water,
and there were no tears left
in the wineskin of the heart
withered like a lily that bloomed for a day
like the soft clarion of a bruised trumpet.

Now I think of you
so many nights and miles away,
and I walk like a bridge toward you,
and my wings are spread out
like the pages of ample skies
that have yet to be written on by the stars,
and I must blow on my longing to be with you
like a spoonful of hot diamonds
just to keep the deserts of my thought
from etherealizing the tropics of my blood,
my eyes evaporating like crucial oases
in the heat of these visions
that burn the air
with fountains of fire
in this tavern of mystic passions
where I drink alone to you,
the furnace of my blood
silked like a black poppy
when I reach out,
a tree in winter,
the afterlife of lightning,
to touch your face like the moon.

I have been a lonely crusade of one
fighting for the gravestone of a dead god
enthroned in the leaf-fire of his falling,
lost in his dream like salt in the sea of the world,
stars in the seed of the apple,
a shadow devoted to the cause of the wind.
I am an era of scars
inspired by the talons of the moon
seizing my heart like a rag of meat
in these elevated bone-bowls of birth and death.
I have been a poet among humans,
an indignant warrior of the heart
with an army of seasoned candles
reconnoitering distant fires in the night
that bloomed like the breath
of insurmountable divinities
gathering like birds
in the border hills of the darkness
that always took the form of a luminous woman
bathing naked in a sea of eyeless windows.

Crowned like an apple star
for the brilliance of my defeats,
I fall like a key of crazy sugar,
a mysterious elixir of midnight orchids,
a squall of renegade stars
into the transformative valleys and bays
of your forbidden paradise,
happier than a fireproof heretic in the flames,
singing into the abyss of an unknown god
that has robed my heart like a wounded boat,
a solitary on his island,
in these auroral tides
that play my blood like the pulse
of this keyboard of light
where I drown like a stone messiah
true to the excruciations of his faith
in these delinquent oceans of you.

All my poems, chalk-dust,
all my mystic nightbirds iron weathervanes
bent by the lightning toward earth
like the forlorn hope of a battered metal,
all my paintings a bleeding and bruising of snow,
and the sincerity of the ways I got lost
in this labyrinth of mirrors
unspooling like a thread of blood
from an immortally wounded star,
an agony of human fire
rooted in the voice of the wind like a bird
the abyss of a night without bounds
squanders on the supremacy
of the oldest silence
time ever distilled from the eyes of the dead,
the perjury of a perishing light,
if I did not love your ashes and orchards,
the way you tear your constellations
on the thorns of the moon
and bleed like black silk
for an innocence that never found its way home.

I can taste the dark prophecies
and oracles of infernal delight
written in scars on the dangerous mushroom
of your nuclear body,
and flow like the silt of stars
white mountain gold and night honey
through the hives and deltas
that enshrine the ore of the rose.
I can prolong the dawn like the wishbone of a note
broken like a harp
in the throats of the singing masters of the flesh.
I can blood the night with a fever of poppies
and scoop weeping diamonds
from the black fountain
in the furnace-heart of an electric glacier.
I can wield ecstasy
like a blade of the moon bewitched by its wound.
I can untie the knots and nooses
in the spinal cord of the butterfly
pinned like a calendar of eclipses,
a quarantined blossom,
to a dead branch under a bell of glass
and wire Eden back
to the infernal nerve of the lightning
that severed the afterbirth of the moon
from the dark mother in the garden
like an angel with a slash of fire at the gate.
I know how to make love
like an embassy of shadows
to the most distant longings of a woman in exile.
I can pour the oil of winged serpents
into the lamp
and entice a ghost of snow
to dance naked in the fire.
I can lead the lost cloud
out of the mountains of the key
to the doorway of candles and stars
enshrined in the skulls of seeing.

And even when I turn my back
on the darkest flowers of fire in my roots
to rise up like rain
into the immeasurable wingspan
of these desert clarities
that bead me like a caravan
of nomadic moons,
no more than a breath of light
in a gust of stars,
I’m still only a ladder of thresholds away
from stealing you like the night sky
through the astounded vowel of an open window.

PATRICK WHITE

EYES IN THE SHADOWS, IN BLOOD, IN SPACE


EYES IN THE SHADOWS, IN BLOOD, IN SPACE

Eyes in the shadows, in blood, in space, incubating the light
that has yet to be born, wild asters in the deflowered fields of death,
and the return of the living out of the eyeless abyss, delinquent,
and a redness in the air of this September night,
saturating it like a deep wound it holds under its breath,
a black rose, a fossilized thorn that no longer grows old,
memories fixed like crucified bats to the sticky brown stars
of the fanatical burdock trying to wear me like a starmap
as if every day of my life has felt like the approach of autumn
watching the constellations turn like the pages of a calendar,
a waterclock of new moons flowing like dark matter,
sundials at midnight encircling me like shark fins
slashing the water like sabres with surgical precision
and their eyes, oblivion, a focus of shadows, perennial night
after a supernova of dismemberment, dehumanizing horrors
in a hydrodynamic abattoir. Spirits of old root fires
smelling of pine and cedar at large in the dark like hunting magic.

And the clouds a wolf pack of shapeshifters among the stars,
the exhilaration of spiritual wariness out in the woods alone at night
where it’s unwise to trust anything too beautiful at first sight,
and a sudden flash of inspired self-destructive courage
to do just that in protest of the abuse of beauty as a Venus fly trap.
But it’s not hard to tell a real muse from a false one
because a real muse never wastes her passion on the sane,
and if there isn’t an occult side to a poet who works his madness
like a medium in the dark he had to sacrifice his eyes to see
beyond the visuals of the retinas and the cameras
with lizard eyelids that blink like guillotines, into
these visionary realms where galaxies are shed
like the feathers of migrating swans, gravity’s gone,
and if you want to go up, you’ve got to go up without a parachute on.
Mystic physics. The illogic of the heart delighting
in the absurdity of itself just because it can and you can hear
a sword master of black Zen singing his heart out in a brothel:
A good heretic never disciplines his disobedience.

The brutal moon offers me the cup of my own skull
and says drink, and I know it’s death to hesitate
because you lose control of everything in the moment
if you do, so I drink it like an elixir of dark tears
from the eye of the shark in eclipse, and I peer
into the black mirror of a midnight lake to see
if I’m still alive or dead, and the mirror breaks
like the unleavened bread of a gnostic gospel in my hands,
wholly enraptured by a spell I wasn’t ready to wake up from,
and I can feel the lustrous radiance of a light
so inconceivably darker than the one I go by
like a shadow of that, the ferocity of the clarity
immolates my heart with a terrible joy
in a prophetic furnace of hot diamonds
that howl like the insights of a firestorm of dragons in extasis
breaking out of their cosmic shells like stars out of the void
shining out of the dark heart of things within
like eyes seasoned by compassion
for the low hanging bells and fruits of the earth
trying to express the infinite solitude between birth and death
where we walk alone together forever with everyone
and everything, like pilgrims sleepwalking
in the unattainable dream that animates us all
to keep on divining the inspired limitations of the impossible.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, September 27, 2012

ALL THESE BOTTLES WITH S.O.S. INSIDE


ALL THESE BOTTLES WITH S.O.S. INSIDE

All these bottles with s.o.s. inside
but not a genie in a lamp among them.
Occasionally the Cutty Sark
in a forty pounder of whiskey,
but the masts snap like matchsticks
whenever I try to pull them out
as if I were trying to give a caesarian
to the chrysalis of a dragonfly
that got turned around somehow. Too often
a viper body surfing the dunes of the Sahara
in the hourglass of a gamma ray burst.
A lot of starfish that have quit shining
that I pick up off this sad, far shore
and bury them in the starfish cemetery
each in their exact place in a starmap
that replicates the constellations perfectly.
It’s what the enlightened do when they’re bored
and there hasn’t been a word
they don’t want to hear from anyone
for lightyears. All the sages
have left the house with Elvis
and Morrison’s just turned the lights out.

Raw solitude underneath such thin skin.
Hush, the flatliners are meditating.
They’re putting transalpine creases
in their theta waves, hoping to levitate
like a lifeboat up off the rocks they’re scuttled on.
Neap tide in the affairs of providence
for barges and schooners alike I guess.
Met this man once who said he was homeless
then gave me his card with a name
and a home address, so I asked him
if he could spare any change for postage
and after that, his mail never came here anymore.

Just thought I saw a ghost, but now
I’m convinced it was only a reflection
on the rim of my chromatically aberrated glasses.
O, ya, or maybe they’re the magic circles I draw
around my eyes empowering me to exorcise
the apparitions as I please, or spiritual junkmail
that lavishes way more on the promise
than it budgets to spend on its fulfilment.

Whenever I want to remember how the truth feels
I run the blade of the moon along my tongue
and sit in a sacred place where two rivers
of lightning join to split the oak, and if the truth heals
hope it isn’t cruel to realize, even to myself,
that most of us are the unrealized simulacra
of things in accord with the contradictions
of what we once wanted to be. The palettes
of the lichens that mixed lunar blues and greens
on the rocks, are scattered all over the place
around here like folk art in a Zen gallery of minimalists.

What’s important, crucial, in fact, when things turn infernal
is to observe the protocols of hell if not the content
with unparalled grace and distinction. Demon up
until you’ve burned all the slag out of your field of view
like asteroids trying to make a big impact on you
like a swarm of blackflies buzzing all around you
like spy satellites and semi-colons. Until
their radios short out. And I’m awash again with stars
in the cooling silence of my dispassionate clarity
with a wry slash of a smile on the deathmask of my face
it would be uncharacteristically ignoble of me
to let anybody else see, even if they had
the eyes and the mirrors for it because
I didn’t abandon all hope when I entered here.
I transcended it. I got real wicked. And clear.

PATRICK WHITE