Friday, May 31, 2013

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

LESS AND LESS THE HEART ENGAGED

Less and less the heart engaged, though not dispassionately,
with emotion intensifying into form, and the elaboration
of its shadows into a sign language of the light.
More a clarification of time, how the golden apple,
about to fall, looks back on the blossoms of the spring,
and sees how everything has already been achieved
by the beginning blooming like a tentative leaf of foxfire
in the ashes of the stars that cram their urns
into every cell of the body to honour the creative detritus
of the light all things are the embodiment of.

How gently the stars open our eyes to them
amazed at how much tenderness can be expressed
by a dragon at a distance sage enough to know
life is a function of its shining blindly into the dark.
And we’re all trying to second-guess like children
anticipating gifts, what’s behind the tent flaps
on the midways of our blazing that drowns the night out
with the white noise of our mind. The careerism
of being alive, the lucky throw against the odds
that wins the prize that mythically deflates the carnie
as he hands it to you like the best of a bad situation,
happy to see you gone like an offence to his opportunism.

How many have wandered off a path that doesn’t exist
except they make it, rogue planets across the starfields,
leaving their wake like a green shadow in the wavelengths
of tall grass that soaks their shoes as if they were crying
and there were seeds in their tears like the waters of life.

Heretics convinced they’re blessed by an inviolable freedom
to dispossess themselves of the conventional fruits
of the tree of knowledge by which it is known.
Do you know the name of the emerald star in the core
of the apple when you slice it open with a Sanskrit blade
of consciousness, which loses its edge the moment
it goes looking for something that exists outside of it
to see where the light’s coming from. Easy enough
to return to the ivy-smothered gates of Eden
but there are no more gods in the garden, nor demonized reptiles
the angels have to raise burning swords against to keep out
of the no fly zone above the exiles and refugees
fleeing the wrath of Nobodaddy like the sock puppet
the manipulative wear like the deathmasks of their unmollified humanity.

There’s a dynamic that’s missing from our creative solitude,
alone with so much beauty it hurts our eyes sometimes
just to behold it and know there’s no one to share it with
but strangers just as amazed as we are at the lack of mirrors,
that there is no more mystery behind it when you peel back space
than there is in who we are, though only the dangerous
know for sure. You can make a housewell of this, or
you can risk drowning in your own watershed like a diving bell
crushed in the depths like a coke can, looking
for an ancient shipwreck that might give you a clue
to where you’re going, as if the truth were still
the prophetic skull of a cave-dweller buried in fire.

Should we dance to the music in the voice
of the life of meaning inspired by the riot of its absence,
and call that liberty, or submit to the slavers of a police state
with a golden chain linked by a consensus of selective orbits
we’re allowed to revolve in without arousing
astronomical catastrophes of petty suspicion?
Should we trust death more than we do life?
Turn over custodianship of our indefensible humanity
to evil clowns that laugh like lobbyists for the rich
at all the wrong things? What’s impotence if not the habit
of letting someone feed you lotuses or bread and circuses
in a repressively tolerant garbage-can?

Little doubt it’s easy enough for the light to be bent
by the gravitational eyes that warp the spaces
we live in like cameras born without eyelids
keeping watch on us in the weird belief
they’re keeping a prison population safe from themselves,
though they plead the focus of their seeing is fraternally pious.
Our children’s children will have mastered the shallow art
of seeing with their eyes, but how rarely, and what
a life of pain will pursue the visionary who actually
sees through them as if light were merely the key
to the magnificent gravegoods of our imagination
long after our children have forgotten how to see in us
what they’re not looking for in themselves.

Waterclocks pouring into the available dimensions
of an empty future, for the sake of the unborn,
let us carry the seeds of metaphors that will bloom
of their own accord in the starmud of the nascent imaginations
of our children so we don’t lose touch with them
precisely when they need us the most to be human.

To share the scars and shadows of our maculate conception
of ourselves, the way we’ve been invariably defeated
by the best that’s in us as a protest against death
that hasn’t suffered enough to understand
the genuine transcendence of a symbolic gesture
that took its hands away from its face as if the sun
weren’t ashamed to shine on it in the full light of a long day
of wandering where we will by the river to include

the wild irises some bush hog has cut to ribbons
in our transmorphic gaze, as it raises the unlikelihood
of the battered stalks of its budding colours up
like the torches of two blue-white, ultra violet flames,
to a suggestion of the Pleiades to bloom like a paintbrush in the face
of the sword that slashes at the beauty of its freedom of expression
like the spirit of the living word to exceed the bounds
of all plausible definitions of itself that limit
the sacred syllable of disobedience caught in its throat

like the blue-blood of an aristocratic nightbird
bleeding out into the future of longing in our children’s eyes
like the ancient anthem of what’s heroically perennial
about humans defying the self-imposed imperatives
of their own tragic existence, by blooming nonetheless
like stars renewing the innocence of our children’s sense of wonder,
our dark abundance shining into the bright vacancy
of the unknown spaces their faces are slowly emerging from
like moonrise over the burgeoning mindscapes
of sleeping hills dreaming aerially like fruitive familars
into the blue distance and intimately human shadows
of our inheritors tasting the same stars in their seeing
that lit up ours when we bothered to look up like wild irises
that refused to be laid low along the shores of our mindstreams
that insisted like water in its outflowing upon
the miraculous follies of an incontravertible life of awe.


PATRICK WHITE

Thursday, May 30, 2013

ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

Another lightning strike diverted from the oak
a moment so I can uproot my nerves,
steel them to the sensitivities of the light
on a rampage, electrical snakestongues of fire,
welding sparks jumping the gap between
one neuronic synapse stripped of vitamin B
and the next, the entrance and exit of a collapsed bridge.

I want to go out the way I came in, a poet.
All my prophetic skulls laid out like stones in a river,
an inundated cemetery of moons hoping
to catch the next providential tide of spring run-off,
I’m still trying to get to the other side of why
I’m alive, by jumping like the moonrise of a pinball
from one extinction event to another, keeping in mind
the meteor that gave its amino acids
to the elaboration of life on the planet in the first place
will also be the one that takes it eventually.

A blow to the solar plexus of the earth
that knocks the atmosphere out of it.
But my mistletoe isn’t fried quite yet
though I’ve had to pawn my golden sickle
just to survive the deforestation of my sacred places,
I’ve got the eyes of the Gulf of Mexico
though given the oilslicks and astronomical catastrophes
that always come as a suprise, I’m undergoing
a sea change of self somewhere in the Cambrian era.

I’ve integrated a sense of compassion into my cells
like the mitochondria of my mother. I empathise
to the point there’s nothing human under the stars,
from cartels to Cepheid variables that I don’t take personally.
Some people collect souvenir spoons. With me,
it’s scalpels. Especially the ones still buried in my wounds
like crescent moons waxing and waning
like the phases of my eyelids, the bright vacancy
of a full glass of emptiness, the skull cup of the dark abundance
of the ghosts in the shadows that refuse to be conditioned
by the medium of anyone’s seeing but my own
as if they were all familiars of mine from a long time ago
I met at a seance they summoned me to as if
I were the one who had died in this dream of life
and the living and the dead stood eye to eye
like binocular vision in the observatory of the same head.

Water, time, suffering, and the wind blunts the sharp edges
I flintknapped like obsidian from the eclipse of a new moon
that slowly pressed into my flesh like a black rose
in the pages of a book I seldom open anymore
like a bone-box with my fossils in it that an avalanche
on the sea bed wears like tattoos on the inside
to remember me by. There are wines and inks
as indelible and dark as the night, pumping
through the heart forever, long after
the last tear in the rain has flowed away
like a watercolour of a fallen leaf under the bridge
of the mindstream you’re walking on like a great blue heron.

Don’t let the brutal sorrows make you defect
like a plague rat the many joys of the moonboat
that used to unload its cargo of roses in Genoa.
As soon as you fall like a cynic on the bitter thorns of life
it’s oxymoronically inevitable you’re going to become
quantumly entangled with someone who strews
rose petals in your path with such disarming tenderness
you’re seated like a fool on the impoverished throne
of your own defeated predictability. Bad, prophet, bad.

Tomorrow mutates to adapt to the available dimensions
of a future that has no conception of you even
existing yet here in the past where the real business
of living is done and now, though you cut it infinitely fine
like God particles that turn out to be your own mind,
never comes because time is what you are and what
you shall be, embodied in the throb of your own humanity.

Live up to it like the cause and effect of the only
regressive alibi that has stood up for you so long
it’s becoming a paradigm of stars and fireflies,
a new myth of origin among the constellations
that count on your imagination to sustain them.

Fire in the eyes of a snowman. Shine, shine, shine
like diamonds in the coal, wine in the bitter grapevine
that doesn’t know where all this ends like a road
gravelled with the skulls of hospitable planets
across the firmament so some drunk can stumble his way
home alone, all his darkness and light singing
in harmony with the stars and daylilies
of the flames in his heart he’s standing in for
like an unrecalcitrant martyr to the heresy of the art
of staying drunk on the moonlight, the orthodox
who decree they know what’s right burn in effigy
like a scarecrow because there’s no body to dig up
when you drink life down to the lees of the crows
looking for hidden jewels in the ashes at the bottom of the cup

as if the urns of dragons are the seed beds of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE  

TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track
as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.
Grafitti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery
spray bombed by underground American artists
on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,
driving cab, I always wished I could publish
a poem like that, one line coupled to another
as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.
Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising
the red light district for a working girl who called
without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress
as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less
about where I dropped them off and picked them up
than they used to when they knew I had taken
an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest
who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,
on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise
with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical
wallowing in its own starmud as if someone
had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls
before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation
of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer
fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills
he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether
to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk
the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.
This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops
like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting
big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars
like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying
to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.
Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare
of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it
I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got
no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does
through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings
that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to
when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness
for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me
as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River
where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way
as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures
on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one
like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back
into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up
like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing
what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman
caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost
of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights
like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself
to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads
of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town
in the dead of the night like a found poem
I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines
from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels
rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads
of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord
you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines
rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower
with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows
horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively
like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,
each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed
like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time
as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s
a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same
mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly
the denaturing of creative humanity from his art
isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever
been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box
that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism
blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars
with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy
had freshly painted over the hunting magic
of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly
by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood
like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths
of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change
from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun
to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls
of howling bush wolves contemporaneously
packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds
echoing across the lake like the longing
of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why
we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly
like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,
hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.


PATRICK WHITE

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

DON'T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

DON’T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

Don’t be a stranger, come in, come in.
My house is your house. Out of the wind
for awhile, a hovel of broken mirrors
that help keep the cold out, or a palace of tears
synarthritically fused together like a glacier
of chandeliers by a candle in an igloo
slowly glazing its way to the calving sea
like the Nazi demolition of Warsaw.

When you’re dog-paddling in a shark bowl
of circling sundials, or you’re coming up from the depths,
remembering you’re a mammal, through
an airhole in an ice floe hoping your second innocence
doesn’t get clubbed to death as your first one did,
it’s only natural that the world dispossesses you
of your heart momentarily and you cringe.

This is where I’ve lived most of my life
like a poor boy that didn’t make good
in his mother’s eyes and now it’s too late, too late
to even hope I ever would. Not every sword
you fall upon like the truth guts you
quite the same, and some you don’t want to remove
for fear of what might come out that would
hurt you worse like a great black hole
in the center of the universe that’s bleeding out.

This is a shrine, asylum, shelter, lair, sanctum,
third eye of a hurricane looking back at you
like a snowblind computer screen which isn’t
quite what you expected of the enlightened,
and I don’t understand it either but here
transparency doesn’t mean you have to go to school
to learn to be a window. No sea change anyone
has to undergo like a mirage that’s just discovered
real water is the source of its eyes and the light
is an absentee father most of the time until someone
gets in its way and gives it a reason to shine.

No harm will befall you that I haven’t died for first.
But I won’t stand on the sum of all my failures
and call myself authoritatively experienced.
You’ve got to blow like a nightwind
on the apricot blossoms yourself to see
if that much beauty is as scattered as they say it is,
and we’re just a shadow of chaos lingering in the air
like the fragrance of an old song that came out of nowhere,
or creative annihilation is how we waterclock forward
into fruition like the ripeness is all windfall
into the big plunge into the abyss like Icarus
coming undone like candle-wax feathered in fire
like one too many parabolic flightbys of the sun.

No path to illumination but you can see
your way in the dark by the glow of fireflies
I keep like old insights that shine like night lights
through the eyes of my prophetic skulls
like metaphoric answers to questions that burn the soul
like a lantern held up to the stars overhead
to decipher the occult life lessons of your own starmud.

I started out afraid to write this poem but now
I see you standing in the doorway of this
my alternative, shapeshifting universe
playing transmorphically like a child on the moon
with lunar phases of its knowledge forms,
the crazy wisdom of my solitude waxes empathically
like a dream grammar coming into full harvest,
and for my sake as much as yours, I’m afraid to stop.


PATRICK WHITE  

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.
Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.
Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.
I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can
toward some flowering of the mystery
I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.
My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,
yet it’s never known my name. My best feature
once you get pass the indignation and the anger,
compassion. And though love seems to me
the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself
as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness
even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames
and there was no where else to cross before the falls,
to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?
Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,
each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.
Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.
I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain
that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.
I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.
I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.
I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,
I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,
though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,
should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself
like a hidden secret that wants to be known,
I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror
that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes
of as many life forms and more in the multiverse
than you can see without being astonished by the beauty
of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock
pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,
whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima
of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,
and my spirit be no more than my own breath
condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky
where I write the name of someone I’ve never met
with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,
let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength
into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness
a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,
a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known
a long time ago that reminds you of someone
so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.
I’m not looking for someone to whine to.
I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five
so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.
I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.
After so many nights of laying my head
on this hard rock pillow of a world
that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades
I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.
The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.
I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how
to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods
where I always feel as a human it’s the first day
of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl
or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering
what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,
just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm
I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn
to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me
instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet
isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s
a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything
like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart
in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void
that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life
on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,
his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking
from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out
I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re
the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence
I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone
with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,
and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere
that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon
so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,
light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,
and you be the light by which the light is known.
Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.
Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected
they can’t help shining out of everything as if
no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,
and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.
Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss
of molecular indifference. You should see the tears
I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face
with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.
You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.
Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign
and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.
I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget
when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire
has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,
if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill
stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance
as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,
however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock
that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you
could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.
That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart
since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood
for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,
the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were
nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk
beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother
half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven
and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax
to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven
when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?
How do you return to your toy truck after
the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother
and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares
don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile
that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open
like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,
everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity
of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life
with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds
like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.
Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain
in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,
in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished
like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas
of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,
until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,
small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression
upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,
like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,
just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in
on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true
in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,
and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon
until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October
when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.


PATRICK WHITE

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

In the left front parietal lobe of my crucifixion window,
beatifically blue sky letting the slow motion clouds pass as if
they were too white and puffy to be solemn about things,
chilly sunshine casting a neatly cut geometry
of occult hieroglyphs on red brick heritage walls.

Sunday. Free. Blesses its own bells like the left-handed virtue
of a secular day to celebrate a shopping mall.
No mail. No bills. No threatening phone calls.
No answering machine that talks robotically
in the tone of a guillotine in the Reign of Terror.

Good day to write if you’re summoned by other voices
beyond the range of the usual crows who talk
about the dawn of another encore more like roosters than moonbirds
whose feathers turned from white to black
for going as they were told, but never coming back.

Words aren’t a medium for fortune-telling your afterlife.
They’re vital organs of the trees who have no other way
of singing about what they feel from the bottom
of their heartwood up. All lightning and root fires
flashing on the waters of life rippling like tree rings
when a fish jumps like the mind at a low flying insight.

Twenty first century siege mind, brain meat,
soft walnut in a scorched black skull.
I’m dragon-spotting forest fires from a long way off.
I’ve got a computer for a watchtower and a moat
and if I can see any folly in your madness
that passes for the grailquest of a loyal clown
I’ll lower the drawbridge of my lap top
and show you where to stable your horse.

It’s freedom itself to drift like the sport chute
of a dandelion with a flightpath of smoke
away from the thermals of the canyon walls
of an abyss that’s as open and closed as
a tight-lipped door with no expectations of
greeting my alienation like a threshold that means well

and even the silence doesn’t care if you’re listening or not
to every thought that crosses the moon
like a Canada goose that empties the urns of the dead
at midnight, the echo of an ancient pathos in its voice
even on its return journey to pick up
another payload of solitude like a hearse.
There’s no doubt daylight’s kinder to love
than most nights are because there’s less magic
in its prosaic approach to metaphors that only
glow in the dark like the shadows of strangers
in the niches of sacred doorways slightly left ajar
like a black star saving its last ray of enlightenment
before it goes out nirvanically to see better
in the eclipse of the mirror that nothing can be recognized
for what it is until it’s looking through your eyes
as if you didn’t have an identity of your own
but you were still willing to share your absence with them
like a well-thumbed starmap and a telescope
that occasionally weeps to wash the accumulation of stardust
off its lens for clarity’s sake on a seeing-eye night.

Down by the broken phalanxes of the cattails,
their pale ochre almost a shade of moonlight
on the broken lances of an old war gone long in the tooth
like the shell holes of biopic cannoneers sighting their guns
on the British fleet in the harbour of Toulon
and a sea of lunar tranquillity nothing disturbs for long
except the odd wolf nosing around for muskrat,
the willows waltzing with the wind like ladies in waiting
in the most vernal of their ballroom gowns
under the chandeliers of the stars to the music
of a river in passing like a mindstream retreating through time.

Funny what comes to you when you’re dreaming awake
on a late Sunday afternoon in a small town
that’s going on around you like circuitous ants
in the pheromonic labyrinths of the water-logged grass
greening their prospects of pillaging the larvae
of dragonflies that spend most of their lives as nymphs,
hand-picked by the sparrows like krill from the grills
of parked cars beached like baleen whales on hot asphalt.


PATRICK WHITE