I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.

The stars were dazzling through the tops

of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings

like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight

on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake

in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet

as ancient as the wingspans of the stars

I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines

in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand

to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan

laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram

as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent

like the feathers of the highest weighed

on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam

of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps

in your eyes without seeing the blueprints

of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry

celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars

that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires

trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers

in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth

I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice

when you reached out and touched my skeleton

like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy

on the petals of the roses in your blood

I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life

like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell

for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me

or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse

that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did

the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,

trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets

in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood

I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way

to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,

like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear

the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea

handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs

so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels

and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers

at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon

where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts

of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies

bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken

and left the rest to the silence to explain because

it never took any of your dream grammars long

to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth

to say something when I realized immediately

my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat

like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared

to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed

the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire

and leaving me your spirit to follow suit

as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing

into the religious art of two wavelengths

of healing serpent fire entwined around

the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking

pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae

getting ready to put some English on the planets

in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking

the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes

of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds

of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss

from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

And in that moment the stars come down to earth

and light up the lanterns of your cells

you’ll finally see that constellation of your self

so many of us have been born under

shining like eyes in your blood, your bones,

your tongue, your skin glowing with starmaps

like the holy books of the fireflies. You’ll

light up this whole night sea of sentience

with a vernal firestorm of essential insights

like the full moon conducting a seance

among the corals, a fertility rite of enlightenment

in which you repeatedly give birth to the universe

moment by moment, cosmic eggs in a halo of comets.

To love the earth in all its mutable variations

is to love the music of your own revelation

playing like a genius in a beauty pageant

with the spontaneous brilliance of billions

of miraculously catastrophic forms of life

with an appetite for adding flames to the fire

like leaves and petals and wings to a wildflower

until the elaborated order of things is a loveletter

chaos wrote in its own beautifully cursive hand.

Above everyone’s manger there’s a star

that becomes incarnate in humans

who go looking for themselves like three wise men,

or the trifecta of three wise women in their craft,

Alnitam, Alnilam, and Mintaka in the belt of Orion,

and Sirius updating the calendars of the Dogon

lower down in the southeast such that even those

lost in the deepest black holes a prophetic dreamer’s

ever been cast into, can’t help adding their light

to the darkness by following their own star

back to themselves, to find the light they’ve been given

to go by, was like the mind, like the lantern in their hand,

like the lostness they ever despaired of finding their way out of,

the illumination of their true destination all along.

The mountain was climbing the guide back up

the stairwells of its own elemental genome to the stars

like a child that can’t wait to slide down the bannisters again

or a sparrow hawk riding its own gleeful thermals

like the first star to appear in the sky like the eye

in the moodring of the peacock blue-green of the sunset.

Every time a species is effaced from the smile of the earth,

our own bodies are desecrated by the act

and in every one of our cells, lockets of the galaxies,

where the firmament places its highest hopes

close to our hearts, a star goes extinct, a candle goes out

that’s been burning for millions of years,

and the windows pull down the blinds like eyes in mourning.

The world is more collaboratively communal

than it is solitarily universal. First rule of thumb

in creating life out of its own cauldron, organize,

like starlings rising out of a birch grove.

First law of the heart in cherishing and sustaining it,

is to respect yourself enough to look after it

as if it were the changeling daughter of the new moon

placed in your care by the dark matrix of a passing eclipse

that let’s you in on the family secret the stars

have known all along, that every conception

of your heart and mind is blood of your blood,

flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. And in your genes

the sacred syllables, relics and runes of your own fossil.

Add your life like lyrics to the cacophonous symphony

of the jungle music you hear going all around you

day and night, the ancient exhilaration of life

sword dancing with the stars to the dangerous riffs

of a predatory lead guitar hunting solo in the shadows

of a game of snakes and ladders that can see like dice in the dark.

Hone your instincts like the blade of the crescent moon

on the stone of your heart in a biochemical state of grace,

and don’t neglect to let your spirit break

like the new dawn of a lobster out of your body armour

or a dragonfly escaping into one sky after another

through the window casement the first night of its moulting.

Compassion is the visionary collagen of life

and imagination is its agent. Its metaphors

graft the trees and the sponges into lungs.

Can you hear the generations of nightbirds

in every single vowel of your voice? Do you know

they don’t sing just for themselves, but in the lament

and longing of their songs, you can hear the faint traces

of the lumbering bells of the dinosaurs bellowing

like the eidolons of carboniferous foghorns in the mist

off the coasts of consciousness? Sometimes

when I hear the bush wolves howling in the hills

I catch a note or two of a pack of killer whales

going deep to recover the black voice box of tetrapods

who preferred dancing in water to walking on land.

Compassion is the recognition of your identity in everything.

You wound the earth, an arrowhead sings in your rib cage.

Can you hear the demure laughter of the willows

walking like geishas along the shores of your mindstream

undoing the ribbons of the stars and waterlilies

to let them fall free from their hair to pale in the moonrise,

the memory of old lovers mingling in the living light

like the ghosts of the waterbirds returning to their shoals and inlets

like the bridge of a song, a waterclock of stars

between one stanza and the next life keeps coming back to

like the refrain of a melody line of the sea

it just couldn’t get out of its head like the reflection

of trillions of stars writing irradiant treble clefs

of the original sheet music in constellations high over head

like a five string quintet for the hymeneal cosmologists

while archaeologists achieve illumination

in the golden ratios of the life and death spirals

of the fossilized bass clefs of the equally alluring

mystery of the vocally earthbound children of the starmud

singing their hearts out like a choir off key as if

they grew by losing their balance against

a background of cosmic harmony so sweetly

that if rain could speak of what it’s like to fall upon

the fruits and flowers of the earth, it would sound very much

like the laughter and weeping of the ungrammatical stars.

PATRICK WHITE