Tuesday, April 30, 2013

GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY


GREY DAY AFTER GREY DAY

Grey day after grey day, little nicks and slashes
of insight, the Mongol compound bows of her lips
or the angel, Jabril, when he enveloped Muhammad in Hira
like two bows placed symmetrically opposite each other,
embraced by a Sufi experience of inclusiveness,
or was it the neck of a black swan enthroned in its own reflection,
free association of the word made light, but at this late date
I don’t think I can forget anymore than I already have.

Nor really want to, wholly, though the pain
sometimes burns like a matchead of white phosphorus,
tentacled jellyfish when I think of the translucency
of her aquiline eyes, the terrorism of their beauty
when they fixed on me like an innocent walking by.

I sleight nothing. Not a hair on her head, not one plinth
of the starmaps she smashed at my feet like chandeliers
in a sudden ice-storm in November. I was her tree.
She was my nightbird. Things were always as clear
as a glass menagerie between us when she wore her horns
like the moon in a china shop, or a viper, or a garden snail.

Always knew a day would come when
all I’d have left of her would be these memories
like fossils of the constellations we used to walk under
as I pointed out through the gaps in the wild apple trees
the Andromeda Galaxy, two million lightyears away,
as the furthest thing in life the naked eye can see,
though it was obvious to me at the time, once gone,
o is it still so inconceivable, she would be.

Just look at me, I’m weeping like a window
for the lost phases of a moonrise that’s never
going to startle me again with the same madness
I felt around her as if I could see for the very first time
in eras of trying to imagine, what a dangerous drug
love is to be addicted to after a single taste for life.
Demons revel in their sins in the darkness and dance
with slumming angels on an eye-level with paradise in hell.

The temperate homogeneity of these grey days doesn’t know it,
but I remember, I’ve lived it, apocalyptically
when joy grows so intense it’s a darkness that burns
like the portal of a blackhole hourglass that tears
the sea star of your soul apart galactically
like trillions of stars passing into a whole other world,
worlds within worlds in every one of them
and life and love and wisdom and who you
thought you were reverses spin omnidirectionally
and you can see more deeply into the heart
smeared like a rage of lipstick on a black mirror
than you ever could into the guileless blazing of the white.

PATRICK WHITE

Sunday, April 28, 2013

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE


I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I showed up with a rose and you said
it was the wrong colour. I showed up
with my head on a silver platter
and you asked as you danced for another
where I’d buried my heart
like the last love affair of the summer
as I watched your body move
like the moon on a famous river
where others before me had drowned
like fish in a dead sea of shadows,
shipwrecks thirsting for the waters of life
you denied them like the taste of your reflection
in the oceanic deserts of their tears
as they died in a graveyard of wine.

I brought you the fallen leaves
of my latest book of poems like autumn
but you swept them off the thresholds
of your hidden doorways like junkmail
and said, yes, there’s fire in their longing,
but if I’m the muse who refuses you,
next time edge the razor of your tongue in blood.

I retreated like a hermit for awhile
into the severed candle of my solitude
that burned like a comet to return
on the day of my death in your eyes
like the last known address
of my homelessness on the lost gospel
of the loveletter I sent you lightyears from paradise.

O how much I couldn’t second-guess loved you then,
like a weathervane loves the wind,
how much I learned and took to heart
like the golden fossils of sorrow and regret
that lie buried like sundials and hourglasses
in the secret gardens on the moon
where I used to wait for you life after life
like midnight at noon when the earth
stood still and the light held its shadows
like a drowning man holds his breath,
like content delays the timing of its heart
until it’s too late for anyone to show up
like a water-gilder to mend a broken cup.

PATRICK WHITE

ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE


ONE EARTH, ONE THIRD EYE, ONE WILD IRIS OF LIFE IN SPACE

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.
Nacreously pearled out of the darkness of death,
no, not even death, but the godhead of nothing,
this our crib, our grave, when our flesh falls like snow
from our leafless limbs in the spring and dissolves
back into the womb we’ve never been out of.

Who fouls their own mother like the place where they live?
Who would climb up their umbilical cord to heaven
like a waterlily anchored in a swamp and sever the connection
like the jugular of their mother’s throat, before, and before
is as endless as forever after, amen, she’s brought them to term
under a blue eyelid smeared by a patina of air as thin
as the mirage of the dream she conceived them in?

Five billion times around the sun, that star
we’re all courtiers in the presence of, five billion times
hung like the earring of a shepherd moon in an orbit
through your earlobe and we’ve managed to turn it
into a game of Russian roulette with the microbial dawn
of our own existence when she conceived of us
like a water palace of life out of her own translucency,
the firefly of an inspired thought that crossed her mind
and nudged us into being, this sentient seeing we smear
with the effluvia of our own offal then turn away in revulsion
from what we see in the mirror that repels us from us,
from each other, trying to get away from the loss of face
we made ourselves in the image of. This military-industrial,
late Bronze Age megalith of warring heroes who
distorted our vision of love by fletching it with arrows
we’re as vulnerable to as an Achilles heel.

It’s time, ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to upgrade
our metaphors to more peaceful myths of origin
we create among ourselves so every thought and act
every ocean of emotion that neaps and ebbs in our tidal hearts
is in accord with the facts of who we imagine ourselves to be.

Time to swim out of the hourglass we drown our sorrows in
down to the last drop, and learn to live galactically
or what was the point of getting high in the first place?
Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum as much as she must us by now.
Let’s clean our act up so our lover doesn’t turn away from us
toward another that doesn’t offend the protocols
of her incomparable beauty and inconceivable intelligence.

Hey, you, who put the longing in the nightbird’s song?
Who put the awe in your heart when you’re kissed by stars?
Who humanized you out of the ore and oxygen of meteors
stone by stone on the grave of an Archaic native
with a bird bone flute that still wasn’t enough weight
to keep the music of life from arising out of death
like a poem out of the mouths of deaf-mutes that spoke
for trillions of stars through their eyes? When
you look at a river can’t you feel the melody line
of your own blood and mind behind the picture-music?

One earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space,
iron, stone, water, air, ion and this the frailest
sphere of mind, this aura of awareness,
these neurons and dendritic axons of our cities at night
we all resonate in like the wavelengths of fish
jumping for the stars, fireflies over the water,
this sentience of ours, this exalted mode of dirt
we’ve been raised out of by this earth breaking
into consciousness, a young planet waking from a dream
she had of us to find we’re all as true as she is
to the same roots she’s welling up out of like apple bloom,
like the spine-stems of ladders to the moon,
like the interdependent origins of insight and stone,
all one body, born of the same cells, to shine, do you hear me,
back at the stars, the trees, the sky, rivers, clouds,
thermophilic bacteria in hot diamond mines,
fire like the mad passion of a genius swept up
like a poppy immolated in the blooming of its own flames,

as if we were opening our eyes to look upon our mother’s face
like the very first dawn, and we had only one smile
like the fertile crescent of a waxing moon to spend
on recognizing everything and everyone alive and dead
as we are to the whole, every grain to the harvest
in the full siloes of our dark abundance, the source
that hides us out in the open from ourselves like stars
so we never have very far to look for the efflorescent fountainhead
of our evanescence, or the foundation stones under our feet
or what keeps us afloat like the lifeboat of a hand
when nothing else reaches out to us but the earth itself.

Learning wisdom is learning space. One mile east
is one mile west, my teacher said. Quantumly entangled thus,
we linger in the doorway of this available dimension
of the future in our house of life, like a palatial room
we’ve never entered before and the crucial hour come round
like a waterclock breaking from the womb, will
someone die in there, and we mourn our own demise,
or will someone be born of the metaphors we spread
like the seeds of wildflowers in the starfields
on the wind that issues like the breath of life and death
out of our own mouths and hearts and minds
as one of the most inspired ways yet the light turns around
removing the veils of endless night from its face
to look at itself, one earth, one third eye, one wild iris of life in space.

PATRICK WHITE

Saturday, April 27, 2013

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN


NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in
while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin
rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore
in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.
The holy men who couldn’t speak our language
without trying to fix it with an accent of their own
were recruiting for an army on the moon
to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels
who didn’t share the same direction of prayer
as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials
with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps
that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas
so when you asked how things were going,
they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.

I was sitting in the window of a burning house
trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,
when you showed up like a stranger’s doorway
out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell
with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold
of a black hole that said jump right in, there’s light
on the other side of sin if you go through this
like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.
Who could forget that day you came like a muse
up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage
looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse
of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage
like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound
that languished in the eclipse of your innocence
like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself
like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.

I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh
like a staple gun under a rosebush in league
with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed
as if the great mystery of love were nothing
but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs
though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong
about the moonrise, you weren’t strong enough to be right for once
without starting a pogrom that interrogated
the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months
I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.
I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on
and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp
on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus
a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.

It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest
for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm
it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos
that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms
in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots
that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if
they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music
in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.
Even the madness wasn’t enough to mollify the sadness
of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out
in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools
to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.
And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,
you were trying to set fire to my voice-box
like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out
like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell
to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id
and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT


LOOKING FOR AN ORBIT IN THE RIPPLES OF RAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Looking for an orbit in the ripples of rain at midnight
like a rogue planet that doesn’t belong anywhere.
I enter this page like a tent city in my homelessness
without self-pity, a vagantes wandering in exile
having cast myself out like an ostrakon of one
when my heart shattered like an urn full of ashen insights
into my own insignificance as an ageing dragon among the stars.

Scars, scars, scars, the cuneiform of my flesh
trying to translate itself into the linear A of my mother-tongue.
I don’t pair well with women who aren’t as self-forsaken as I am,
though I’ve tried, though I really did love the effort they put into me
and how I was moved to see the eclipse of God
through their eyes darkly so I didn’t go blind
in the mountains of the moon no prophet has ever climbed
without a warning not to look directly into the sun.

As I’ve said somewhere before I can’t remember
my tongue is a leaf on the wind, my eyes are clouds
in a sky that absorbs me like the vapour of a contrail at dusk.
Ghosts of hindsight, no wiser than the man who lived them once,
I mistrust the wisdom I derive from them at these
lonely seances of the heart like an expiry date
on all I’ve ever aspired to in the name of love and poetry.

A great fool, I risked it all, knowing what I was doomed to lose.
My sincerity knew no bounds. My intensity made
the sidereal ore of my Canadian immensity weep starwheat
into ploughshares that laboured to harvest
the mistletoe of the moon as if I had to cut off
my own balls with the golden sickle of my last crescent
like the King of the Waxing Year to keep my imagination fertile
and the siloes full of the dark abundance I reaped
like a reward for the lightyears of bright vacancy
I had to endure like Spica in Virgo at the autumn equinox
before the days got shorter, and the long, cold nights
doled out short straws at the foodbanks for the blind
that wintered in my mind like star-nosed moles
that shone underground like the light at the end of a tunnel.

I raised a black sail like a new moon among
the startled angels fleets that scattered
like the phases of apple bloom on a brisk wind
that blew them out to sea like a deepening awareness
of how transitory even the most beautiful are
running before the storm like butterflies
over the flatlining event horizons
of the black holes I warned them away from
like the skull and crossbones of a poem on a headstone
I dedicated to them like a bride catalogue
of transfigurative unions, alloys of paradisaical hells.

Moonboats and bottles of wine, tokes, guitars, poems
and paintings, existential sex, tomorrow with a no exit sign,
fame a passing acquaintance of mine, I threw my heart
back into the fire time and time again. I ate
the blistered grapes of vinegar that soured
the still-life depressions that censored my subversive silence
like a cut flower on a chequered table cloth
next to the long stem knife in an operating theatre
where I stitched the wounded roses of my miraculous passions
up with their own thorns to make something holy
out of nothing. Holy, holy, holy, the archival dust
of love affairs heaped like the Library of Alexandria
to keep the fire burning in the cracked heartwood
I threw on the flames like a heretical gesture of forever.

Not good times, no, never what anyone would ever ask for,
no winterized cottages with organic orchards at the end
of a country lane, but whole and crazy, resonant
with meaningless significance at the time, no intercessors
between me and my emotions like second thoughts
before I jumped like a skydiving dandelion toward paradise,
encouraged by my failures to find a place to land
to try, try again like the little train that could or a bird
meditating in the third eye of a hurricane like a shelter
for the homelessness of the words I turned out like muses
on the streetcorners of the wellsprings and literary watering holes
of binging poets trying to get it all in before last call
when they turned the eye-burning gaudiness of the light on again
and the proprietors of profitable mundanity who thrived
as our vices flourished, said in unison like a choir of cowbells
haven’t you got a home to go to, knowing quite well, the answer
was invariably no. Not in the way you imagine four walls.

PATRICK WHITE

Friday, April 26, 2013

LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF


LIFE IS AN ORDER OF CHAOS INTERACTING WITH ITSELF

Life is an order of chaos interacting with itself.
Look at how much awareness has to take for granted
as if the body were the patron of the mind
to have the time to think of what I’ve just said.

On our own we’re wavelengths unravelling
like loose threads in a flying carpet that waxes and wanes
like the phases of a watersnake on the moon
that lays its light down like an undulant sword in tribute to the lake
that receives it like the hour hand of a many-headed clepshydra.
Together we make particles of ourselves.
We’re a compilation of perimeters we’re always
violating like boundary stones in an asteroid belt
in order to grow out of the visions and skins
that restrain us in this world of forms
like the normative straitjackets of ill-defined things.

Dictions change, the slang, the patois, the demotic,
the dream grammars in the abyss of little deaths
we experience as sleep that makes us visionary illiterates
on the scaffoldings of dark matter we climb up on
to paint an image of what we can see of ourselves in passing
of a world we keep failing to live in in order to survive
our own insights without losing our minds with
nothing to show for it but the mystery of why we couldn’t.
And the timing of our ignorance is as crucial and enlightening
as a recidivistic dawn that blinds us with its blazing
by rephrasing the aniconic lyrics of the birds that sing to it.

Everyone frames their shadow and nails it to the wall
like a degree that measures the expertise they have
in the discontinuous history of themselves
or the future memories of prophetic mirages
irrigating the deserts sands of an hourglass that never floods
or greens the harvests they thrive upon like a death wish
for something more than life as they know it to grow beyond.

Last night I was brave enough to remove the face
my death mask was wearing like a hidden secret
I wanted to keep to myself. Tonight I’m laying
my hands on my heart like a faith healer
without the courage to sacrifice the gods to it
like a cure all for what ails my human divinity.
No honour among thieves, no truth among frauds
to make their lies feel real against the odds they might be.
Auspicious constellations reveal the ambiguity
of my metaphoric initiations into the clarity
of my quantum entanglements in the mystery of a life
that recognizes me indifferently in the signs of what
I’m becoming liberated from like everything I’ve ever known
or second-guessed about the waywardness of my seeking self
never so much at home in the world as when I’m lost.

PATRICK WHITE

THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT


THE TOWN DEAD BY MIDNIGHT

The town dead by midnight, dark spring rain on the streets
like puddles of anthracite, the cat asleep in its feral innocence
and the furnace pipes cracking like arthritic bones

and there’s a bleakness that’s trying to speak for me
like a train whistle with a muse of its own. Words
are trying to understand me like a silence that sings
with a surrealistic accent in a stanza of migratory water birds
excluded from the aubades and aviaries of the dawn
because they don’t make cliches of the lakes they return to
to swim among the stars like constellations of themselves.

Sheltered from the adolescent temper of the wind
in the tolerable loneliness of my apartment, this bone-box
I write in the fair hand of a cursive script of smoke,
of rivers flooding their banks alluvially
with the emotional silts of a spring run off
that lavishes me on the roots of half-drowned trees,

I disembark like a lifeboat from a Viking funeral ship
and let my mind drift into the depths of an insignificant abyss
that’s never tasted the meaning in the flavour of death
or cared that much for the black humour of what I believe in
that labours at keeping me alive. If I knew why it should
I could only be a disappointment to the future
of my undiscovered solitude actualizing its creative potential
to enter into occult marriages with muses that sweep me off my feet
like stars and leaves off the stairwells of my deciduous arrivals.

I don’t petition the gods or summon the ghosts
of fires that burnt out yesterday like votive daylilies
in the aniconic shrines of the sun to return from the dead
and bless what I plead for as if I knew what to ask
from my sorrow that might help tomorrow rejoice
in what’s to come. Even wisdom doesn’t question
the nature of the song that emerges from the night
like a wild canary in a coal mine urgent as a pilot light
that smells apocalyptic gas in the subterranean labyrinths
of star-nosed moles blindly seeking to get at the roots of things
that only bloom in the dark underworlds of our radicalized starmud.

Bleak outside. Death, death, death in the dead air
of artless cement and chronic pageant of storefronts
like the repeating decimals of unappealing floats
in a municipal parade of all we’ve got to celebrate.

I don’t want to feel bleak inside, sickened by the world,
but Walmart is dyeing its fashion garments in the blood
of Bangladeshi girls skinned of their lives
by corporate traplines and parasitic politicians
baiting humans with 14 cents an hour seven days a week
like those wasps that lay their eggs like carnelian dots
on the foreheads of the living host to let their young devour it
like future consumers of the western world baptized
with brand names. Maybe I should meditate upon a flower
like the one Buddha gave Ananda with a knowing smile,
but all I see are white peonies freaked with the hemoglobin of children.
In my time, people with clean hands were usually the filthiest.
We were clever but we weren’t encouraged to be real.
We stuck to the unprincipled indifference of our social structures
like flypaper. We danced on the graves of our fellow humans
and promoted a trickle down theory of happiness like global warming.

Our weapons evolved like insects, but the abstract savagery
and rabid rage that deployed them were definitely
creationist, ante-diluvian, conservative, and simian. Nothing’s changed
since the first prehensile grip threw a bone ballistically
at the left front parietal lobe of another ape whose ideas
mythically deflated its brain. In back rooms
and sensorily deprived think tanks of lobbyists and spin-doctors
we made window dressing of democracy in the showcase windows
where we displayed the latest wardrobes like the death shrouds
of the humans our gluttony had culled. Misery polluted
the chandeliers of our crystal tears like a hemorrhagic fever of acid rain,
but we went on ghost dancing with ourselves as if things
would get better and better without realizing we were already dead.

Evil in the world. If you care, how can you not go mad?
If you don’t care, how can you not be peacefully complicit
in what it is by virtue of a sin of omission, forgetting
it will rush in like a backdraft of a fire through your door one day
because nature abhors a vacuum and paralysis and impotence
incite it like blood in the water, mice in a snakepit?

Atrocities perpetrated in the name of order are worse
than random accidents of chaos that hold nothing personal
against us being here without necessity or purpose
sussing out our feeble meanings for life like garden snails
bull-vaulting our own horns trying not to get gored on the moon
like a prehistoric aurex that went extinct before we did.

I should leave all these catastrophes behind me like
a graceful exit I made at the bend of an awkward entrance
and walk out into the darkness beyond this catwalk of streetlamps
posing like tungsten asphodels observing a moment of silence
with their heads bowed like cobras into the woods
down by the river but I’m loathe to track myself in like roadkill.

I want to walk ankle-deep in the starmud of the wolf paths
that will be thawing out this time of year before the rain
has had a chance to pack them down solid again or plump
the grass of the deerbeds. I just want to see one star
shining through the burgeoning branches in the burgundy crowns
of the birches putting their green gowns on again like renewable virgins.
Beauty coming out of the darkness like Spica in Virgo.
Trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, violet and crocus,
I want to see what colours the spring has on its palette this year.
I want to experience a pink full moon soon to be eclipsed in Scorpio
and expand the difference that makes to the way I understand things.
I want to know whose blood is coagulated on the candelabra
of the staghorn sumac leaning out over the river
like an old torch singer at a black mass beginning
to get her voice back as she feathers her reflection like a phoenix.

PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, April 25, 2013

FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES


FIREFLIES FLASHING LIKE A SEANCE OF MEMORIES

Fireflies flashing like a seance of memories
out of the low-lying fog of the past,
extemporal images that took me to heart
a long time ago, friends, lovers, children,
faces I cherished and could not live without,
gone from the bough like birds and blossoms.
I still feel this dark serpent energy coiled
in the marrow of my bones like the spring
of a ball point pen miscarrying in my pocket,
but the wavelengths are getting longer,
red-shifting toward the west into more
compliant sunsets than the youthful Armageddons
that confirmed my faith in looking for panaceas
and cure-alls in the heart of self-destruction
like particles of God in fissionable visions of creation.

Is this my half-life, uranium 239 stabilizing
into lead like a child’s sparkler returning
to the burnt out ores of some radiant conception
of what life and love, poetry and mind were,
meanings that elude me now in the vastness
under my homing wings, a crow in the dusk,
the crumb of a dream in the corner of a third eye
that sits atop my prophetic skull like the cupola
of an empty observatory half-closed in sleep like a cat?

I didn’t abandon the oceanic cosmologies
I shed along the way like skin so much as outgrow them
like rivers I’d floated down before all the way to the sea
where things get blurred and vaporous as desperate terminologies
trying to give a name to the nameless. The time
I wasted in the world’s eyes like a waterclock
of wishing wells trying to saddle-stitch my insights
like starmaps of the constellations of my age
that stare at me now like a blank page of silence and light
into the mindstream of what I am flowing through alive
urgent as an empty lifeboat drifting on a nightsea to know
where I come from and where I’m going
before I’m gone where I come from as if
in the depths of my eyeless seeing, I’d find a being
as blissful and sweet as the man I second-guessed my way
into wanting to be, writing in the shadows of the apple bloom
that crept across the morning grass like a beatific farewell
to things that can’t last longer than a specious moment before they pass.

I watch the stars that used to follow me through the woods
settle on my windowsill like dust and and the cinders
of exhausted houseflies. And even in this, there’s
something intriguing and strange like hidden jewels
in the slag of mined-out starmaps, that it should be this way
and not another, that it should be at all, and I be here
in the presence of my metaphoric awareness seeking
what can’t be sought like the sign of a flawless mind
in what befalls us from the inside out like chaos
embodied in the creative potential of time in the unlikeliness of us.

Nothing to weep over. No reason to indulge the heart
in a silence it can’t afford. Or sublimate your eyes
like dry ice in an isolated Martian mindscape alone at night
watching Deimos and Phobos, fear and terror,
eclipse your field of view with the cybernetic optics
of an Arctic labcoat looking for signs of life in a dustpan
of fossilized pollen. Like the queen’s clothes,
the sartorial flowers of life never bloom twice in a lifetime.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD


MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.
The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.
The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.
Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.
Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates
with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences
holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies
back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed
by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.
Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies
in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know
how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,
I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon
that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,
purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,
Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails
where the red-winged blackbirds sit
to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air
like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song
with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything
and requires nothing of the living but attendance.
Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness
among things as they are without trying
to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers
to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart
of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface
they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs
of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows
into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras
like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars
working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders
walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,
like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t
wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll
looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find
like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet
full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter
like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,
and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,
and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising
from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,
and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention
by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment
that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,
there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,
or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run
of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland
swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.
Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract
the wild grapevines away from her empty nest
as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection
of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze
like the more mercurial downside of itself,
and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks
like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful
of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,
trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.
And what can you say to the stars that are beginning
to look for themselves in the approaching night
except this too is the world where even the lost,
in attempting to return to themselves through
the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation
with bioluminous insights of the radiance
blazing out of the darkness of a white coma
as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically
just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows
of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord
to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud
as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites
and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers
to the currents and wavelengths, the turns
and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif
that plays to its own depths from the bridge
of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water
with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE