THESE DAYS, THIS LATE AT NIGHT

THESE DAYS, THIS LATE AT NIGHT

These days, this late at night, I’m usually a lone wolf sage

high above the timberline in a sanctuary of solitude

that occasionally breaks the silence

with the elegaic echo of the anquished shriek of a hawk

wheeling in the abyss like the stars overhead

feeling as if its flightfeathers just caught fire

and for a few brief moments no longer

than the wingspan of a wavelength

it was shining like them and there were jewels

like a woman’s eyes cracking the rock

of a heart that’s been more of an asteroid

than habitable planet with a few ancestral skulls of its own

for moons and a creative atmosphere where the clouds

can move mountains to tears with the beauty

of what can bloom spontaneously out of nothing

like wildflowers strewn all over the starfields

as if they were expecting someone to come

of the things we really feel are worth crying for.

These days, this time of night, I delight

in looking for the most beautiful nocturnal metaphors

I can compare to you inside and out and beyond both

like a spirit of female serpent fire that haunts me

into paying tribute to her like a muse

who’s beginning to possess me like the sea does

when the moon swims out to practise witchcraft

on a lonely island retreat that sings to itself at night.

Even from here, I can hear the song being carried

across the light years like the dove of a deep lament

she keeps like the wind in a locket the size

of the noose around her neck, and the flying carpet

under her feet all that’s between her

and firewalking on stars like a burning kite

someone let go of like the umbilical cord

of a lifeboat that had come unmoored in a lunar storm.

Maybe I’m just fossil hunting on the moon

I’ve been howling at all these years

over the bone pits of dark wisdom I’ve dug up

on the far side of a black mirror

that doesn’t insult your seeing with a night light.

But I swear sometimes when I think of you,

what lies like an archives in the riverbeds

of the sedimentary starmud you put back down

like a book you’ve read eras of time before,

and look out the window like a door

where you don’t have to leave your body

on the threshold like shoes at the edge of the sea

when you walk into your own depths up over your head

to see if your eyes can still swim

with the dolphins and the stars and the flying fish

you left in your wake like a locust plague of urgent telegrams.

I know we’re still more strangers to each other

than intimates, that there maybe watersheds

we have in common, and maybe it’s still too early

for the fountains to come into blossom yet

as the last stars of the season become

the chandeliers of the morning stars of the next

like dusky candles going out in the blue light of the dawn.

And maybe there are ladders of fire to paradise

trembling like crutches on the edge of a shaky precipice

trying to climb higher than its cloud cover

to break into light like the Pleiades

just above the moon and Jupiter on a good seeing night,

but these days, this late at night, I’ve been inhaling

a lyrical lantern of oxygen and breathing out stars

like the circumpolar constellation of a healing dragon

pole-dancing with the caduceus of the celestial axis of the earth.

I’m laired with the unmarrowed riddles of bones of my own

I’m trying to read like the yarrow sticks

of a bird skeleton with rose-arbour wings

to see if the light I sense approaching out of the dark

is a mirage of fireflies disguised as a lightning bolt

or the soul mate of a rogue planet

that wants to ghost dance around the third eye

of a first magnitude star that doesn’t have any idea

of what I’m doing up here, nor how far

a whisper of light away can seem

to a man fully awake these days, this late at night,

writing in the shadows cast by the candelabra

of a homeless zodiac off the beaten path

like the first draft a waking dream

sleepwalking beside me like the dakini

of a star struck maniac lifting the veils

of the inconceivable like the paint rags

of the night vision shining in the eyes behind them

that even in the dark make everything seem

so incredibly counter-intuitive and lucidly beautiful

I’d be truly out of my mind, like a crystal cranium

that’s lost touch with its own translucency

if I didn’t find it wholly believable

down to the last mystic detail my enlightened lunacy

howling like a wolf seer at the rising of a new moon

out of a valley where I can hear the distant barking

of the seeing-eye dog that follows Orion around

like a traffic light for the blind compared

to the way you light me up like the Pleiades

whenever I’m trying to get a parallactic fix

on your radiance dancing like a cult of fireflies

on the event horizons of my prophetic skull.

PATRICK WHITE

TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

TRYING TO GET CENTERED IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAOS

Trying to get centered in the middle of chaos

isn’t going to turn me into the third of eye

of a hurricane rose, or square the circle

with the clarity of a lens with a seeing-eye dog.

The rags of the clouds are teaching the dandelion seeds

how to drift with a good conscience,

just let things go awhile. What’s done, what’s not.

Why labour at either when together they’re just

the human way of walking away from things

one moment after another? Chaos has a way

of conditioning itself into people like me

who relax because they know it’s all out of control.

Been feeling like a dead branch, a maple witching wand,

these past few days, because I’ve given up

divining water with a snake’s tongue,

and I thought I was blossoming again

when I saw the first bud of the moonrise

but now it seems to have gone down

behind a screening myth of eyelashes and trees

and my heart is so disappointed in me

there’s no help for it, it’s crying in my bloodstream,

and when all my childhood insecurities

come mocking me like a fox in my sacred hole,

I don’t even bother licking my wounds anymore.

Hope. But it’s dogpaddling just beneath an airhole

in the middle of a seal hunt on a bloody ice floe

that’s grinding its molars in its sleep like sheet ice.

Always hope. A crack in the door left ajar

for the light to get in and the darkness out.

Only a fool would make the exceptional a rule of thumb,

and hope is a palace of water with so many windows

even the best thieves of moonlight

don’t know whether they’re breaking in or out.

Just the same, my blessings on everyone’s head and house.

The wingspans of two birds hinged to a gate

that doesn’t need a guru to teach it to open,

where I’m a stranger who stopped to talk

on the roadside of the fence, and on the other,

I’m a nocturnal wildflower in a secret garden of bliss

that doesn’t notice the difference in the way I bloom.

Anyway, who’s got the eyes to see any further

into their fate than a pair of dice do, and if things

don’t break your way, you’re not washed up

on Circe’s island like a love affair with the moon,

the manuscript of your first loveletter doesn’t

regrettably meet anyone’s needs at the time

but feel free to submit again if you’re a masochist,

so what, there a more mirages of fish in the desert,

and the star you wished upon digs its spur into your eye,

Giddy up. After you get over a little death,

an emotional stone age when Perseus meets Medusa

on his way to rescue Andromeda from a killer whale,

rejection can be the burr under the saddle of Pegasus

and there’s nothing in the way of these high, wide open starfields,

that have never known a fence or a gate, to obstruct you

from burning a little dark energy off

by taking to the air like a mythically deflated weather balloon

in an expanding universe that’s just taken

its thumb and forefinger off your throat to let you breathe out

as if you’d managed somehow again

to exorcise yourself from your own self-possession.

A lot of gurus have to like that. But I’m sick of the sound

of one hand clapping like an overly-disciplined seal

with one flipper left while Orca eats its trainer.

I want to take a leap of faith, not death, like the rain

through a circle of my own making whether

it amuses the crowd or not. Or meets the approval of rainbows.

Attachment too is a buddha activity once you get back

from the sad, cold, desolated shore of enlightenment

and the spell has unsilvered the back of the mirror

like flakes of moonlight, and effaced it with a clarity

that lets you see right through yourself

like the stars in an autumn sky into nothing.

What is it Dogen Zenji said in medieval Japan?

When the truth doesn’t fill your body and mind

you feel you’ve had enough. But when it does

you always feel as if something were missing?

God, what a lot of empty truth I must embody

to be so hungry for the taste of all my lost illusions.

PATRICK WHITE

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say

everything there is to say, one heart to another.

I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.

Write it in blood and honey and snow.

Write it in moonlight on the water,

in the sands of sidereal deserts

where the wind doesn’t sing

as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness

when you’re on hallowed ground and those

who are scared to death of what it all means

and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,

give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo

to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth

to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said

imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination

and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.

And that’s the way space gets bent

like the nightsky of my third eye

whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon

that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers

to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.

Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.

A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull

that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music

you like and if he were ever called upon

to go down into hell again before your eyes

got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,

I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp

for someone like you to follow me up out of death

without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion

that has made us both feel at times,

like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly

preserve our bones, if nothing else, so

the future can tell by the fang marks

what pierced us through the heart

like crescent moons into voodoo,

baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs

so we both look like we’ve been carved on

like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus

You can weave a wavelength into

a beautifully disciplined flying carpet

and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine

on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton

that thirsts for wine from your heart well.

I may be the inspired in this, but you’re

the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,

a shape of space that teaches matter how to move

in orbit around you, even from this distance

where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries

to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one

and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face

toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion

for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,

but life always comes like a vestal virgin

or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,

who knows what they’ve seen in their time,

but whatever it was, or is, or will be,

they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see

the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.

Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light

as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky

and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through

like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower

in my field of view for light years that have left

the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,

one warm breath, and I begin to melt

like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.

The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells

of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes

when I began to believe they were seeing things

from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.

Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,

even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,

and if I’m not weeding the constellations

in secret gardens where the gates open

at the same time as these flowers in my eyes

it’s just because of the way I can empathize

with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,

show some timely respect for the pariahs

burning at the same stake that I am for flaws

I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night

casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow

and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.

PATRICK WHITE  

OLD GATE OFF ITS HINGE

OLD GATE OFF ITS HINGE

Old gate off its hinge.

Matted like a lapwing in the long blond grass.

What is there to distract me from?

I pass, but not as a predator.

I seek the high field at the end

of this narrow dark road at dusk.

I’m out for stars. I’m out for solitude.

Like these deep cuts in the road

my scars have taken me out for a walk

in the gathering darkness,

nothing to keep in

nothing to let out.

The sumac denuded.

The last of the asters ruined.

There’s a farmhouse back here

abandoned years ago

like an old book in the basement

under the covers of its collapsing roof.

And the ghosts of two children

hidden deep in the woods

from the authorities,

autistic prodigies

who could fix anything mechanical,

clocks, watches, small engines

anything the neighbours brought them

but their own hearts and minds

and that’s how they lived for years,

with nothing but their own estrangement for company,

fixing things the neighbours broke.

A cage. But with the door open.

A road. But nowhere to go.

A house. But no one to shelter.

A mind. But no one to know it.

The chassis of a rusting car.

A bear.

I get caught in the glare

of my own mental headlights

wary of making more noise than I should.

And then my eyes

adjust my fear to the darkness again

and I’m not sure I should be here at all

unworthy of the silence,

unknown to the trees at the side of the road,

no clockwork universe

to bring these backwoods geniuses

that even they could fix.

A fox on the path. A startled bird.

The barking of a farmyard dog

way off in the low-key distance.

Stars in the ripening twilight.

A clearing with maple saplings to say

here nature picked up where it left off

and broken shards of moonlight

still clinging to the windowframes

as if it had to break through its own ice

to draw water from a stream.

Perseus holding Medusa’s head

above a barn drunker than it looks

swaying from side to side

gaping through its doorless loft in shock

at what is happening to it.

Aldebaran in Taurus, the Pleiades,

Castor, Pollux, Auriga and the kids,

an airliner leaving Ottawa without a sound,

and something that sweeps over me

like the shadow of a thought

with an owl for an eyelid.

So little harmony

so much tension among the stars

and their conflicting myths of origin

in the chaos and confusion of creation

and yet around here

in the stillness and profusion of their radiance

blessed and hexed alike

they all seem fixed.

Here where the unknown breathes

and eternity doesn’t seem

like anybody’s business but its own.

PATRICK WHITE

NOW HALCYON SEAS

NOW HALCYON SEAS

Now halcyon seas, the Kingfisher Star, Alcyone.

No sign of ever having drowned here. Most

are as unaware of the sentient space they’re immersed in

as a fish is of the water it wears like skin

or a bird of the air it plunges through. I was

given a brain. The universe was rolled up

into a ball of starmud, a planetesimal of my own,

that was meant to receive a lot more than it

could ever transmit. The way this bursting bubble

of a multiverse gets you to listen to it

once you get sick of listening to your own voice

trying to lift words and feelings like an ant

with a butterfly wing in its mandibles like a sail

that knows more about which way the wind is blowing

than it does. I may be only a whisper

of the shriek I used to be in a much denser medium

than this when I felt my lungs being crushed like bag-pipes

by the implosions of a black dwarf. Thirteen tons

per cubic centimetre of mass. Things weighed

heavily on me back then like basso-profundo bells

with overactive pituitary glands in a shell game

of the pea in the pod. Maybe I was looking for God,

and God was playing hard to get, who knows,

but the devil, time, death, suffering and the brutality

of certain modes of oxymoronic mystic bliss

have blown like compassionate winds

on my magma ever since like a mother

cooling the burns on her only child’s fingers

as if she were blowing out a votive candelabra in a church.

The river reeds are drawing maps of my mindstream.

I’m going with the flow without letting go.

Serpentine currents of picture-music playing me

like a cobra plays a flute in the sway of things.

Precisely where you run out of rope and road

to hang yourself is where the way begins and ends.

I look up at the stars tonight, and as aloof as they are,

my heart opens up like a black waterlily, and says,

without any prompting from me, after all these lightyears

of staring at each other, they in their heights, and me

in the places I had to climb up to see. Friends.

Because it’s not hard to imagine them suffering

the way I do, shooting into the dark on the midway of life,

like a ray of light hoping to hit a flower or two

to let them know it’s time to wake up like radio telescopes

looking for signs of extraterrestrial life

like a loveletter that doesn’t have to be opened with a knife.

The dire wolves of all my Pleistocene ferocities, extinct,

I don’t think Gandhi’s hearing footsteps coming up on him

from behind, to bring him down like a bison on the run,

but I can still hear their ghosts howling in the dark hills

that surround my homelessness with a local habitation and a name.

Now I’m a gray wolf by acclamation. A gentler adaptation

to my environment than my environment is to me.

I’ve still got my fangs but I’m into smaller, more diversified game.

The beavers are huddled in their mud bunkers.

The lakeshore rocks still bear the scars of the glaciers

that were driven off by the sun protecting its prey.

And the new moon is flint knapping itself

into a lunar spearhead that sinks a lot deeper into the heart

than the old Clovis points used to. And I can smell

hot poppies of blood on the air startling the pungency

of vegetable detritus and decay in the duff

of last year’s holy books going up in flames.

Never been a fan of words unless words are living creatures,

dragonflies in their chrysales. But once the secret’s out,

they have wings of their own, and names that have power

and a unique integrity endowed upon them

like their mystic specificity by the mouths

of the humans that use them like rain.

Thousands of droplets falling like veils

from the wings of a rising waterbird

shattering its own reflection like a sand painting,

a mandala, a spell, a holographic projection

of the pineal gland or a two dimensional black hole

like the urn of the ashes of the Library of Alexandria

after it burned down. John Keats said

here lies one who name was writ in water,

but here it is before us, written on gravestone.

The whole universe is an encyclopedia of wavelengths.

And it doesn’t really matter if you send out the dove

or the crow first, by the time they get back to you

about sighting land, they’ve reversed colour

like chameleonic dice in the cold hands of misfits.

The willows are looking haggard at the approach of fall.

The aspen and the birch leaves are beginning to curl

and turn brittle like gnostic gospels and the sumac is burning.

My thought waves are syncopated to those of the lake.

My heart is jumpstarting the frogs like dozy engines

as I watch the wavelengths of the watersnakes

hunt them down like serpentine wizards

with tuning forks with perfect pitch for tongues

to make up for their lack of ears, as do their scales,

as if amphibians were always half a note off key.

And all this seems so surrealistically mystical to me,

when I consider the infinite number of ways it could have been,

and probably is somewhere in the multiverse like a fruitfly

perfectly preserved in a tear of pine resin creeping

like a snail of incense down the trunk of an evergreen.

It’s the billions of switches in between, not your genes

that determine whether your thought-trains

are going down the right track or not. A diesel howls

like a dinosaur in mourning for the end of things

through the country darkness, immeasurable pain.

Once you realize the way things are are who you are,

there’s no room for separation, even the skeletal wings

of the bracken that fossilized its way back to the living,

even a pine-cone, is a psychological event. What then

to make of Jupiter and Venus descending in the west,

Venus near Regulus in the Lion, Aldebaran in Taurus

and Alcyone in the Pleiades bull-vaulting its horns?

Turn a leaf. Look at a starmap face down. Turn the light around

Exorcise the sprite in the candle. Thaw your eyes.

They’ve been falling for light years like tears on the stars

and they haven’t put anything out yet. Orion soon

and pharaonic kas on the Road of Ghosts disappearing

over the skyline of a black hole that doesn’t come with lifeboats.

But once and awhile, under my Kingfisher Star,

lets things float along in time upheld

by the buoyancy of their own wonder

that things are as they are as you are in a world of forms

where each engenders the myriads of everything else

and no more, even with a razor, than you can

peel the moon’s reflection off the water

can you find a skull’s worth of separation

between the inside and the outside.

Tat tvam asi. You are that. Your mind

arrayed before you like jewels of your own seeing,

almost a Mephistophelean compassion for humanity,

more that of others, than my own, to judge by the way I’ve lived,

estranged by my own familiarity with what I wish

I didn’t know. Ah, Faustus, why this is hell, nor are we out of it.

With this one inclusive exception, that if you were

to ask an angel where heaven is she’d say the same

as a fish would say it’s all the sea, or a bird, the sky.

If you want to be a pilgrim walking around with a death mask on.

Don’t be surprised by the apocalypse that dooms you

like an out of date Mayan calendar that knew time

was an eternal recurrence of a moment with no afterlives.

Maybe you’re a spiritual humming bird sipping

nectar and ambrosia from the goblets of the gods,

or an existentialist dimming the lights with tunnel vision

or you’re an alley-cat going through triune phases of the moon

as if birth, sex, and death were all synonyms

for lyricising the same event. But reality

is a lot more original than it’s usually given credit for.

Even in science, mind is an artist, able to paint the worlds,

and the masterpiece you paint is the world

you’ve been living in for as long

as you’ve shown up to model for it.

That’s how you know there’s compassion

quantum-mechanically saturating the whole universe.

Everyone’s living in a world

that fits them like skin they’re growing out of

like waterclocks shedding one world for another

like watersnakes of serpent fire with backbone.

You see those constellations in the crowns of the ironwood trees?

They’re not out there shining at you across

the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces out of earshot.

They’re all paradigms of your own mind

whether you look at them in a gallery or paint your own.

They’re every bit as intimate as sunshine

that gets in through your eyes or caresses your face.

And if you give them names, not words,

Aldebaran, Regulus, Alcyone the Kingfisher Star

and let their dead metaphors age like sages of heartwood,

they’ll whisper in your ear creatively

about the leaves of the silver Russian olives

glistening like Byzantine lunettes

in the markets of moonlight with a dusky touch of soul

low on the horizon of a visionary mindscape.

Look at the stars? What do you see? If it isn’t

your own eyes shining back at you without

a mirroring consciousness in between,

it’s got to be traffic lights for fireflies who’ve gone blind.

And that, too, is a fingerpainting of your mood and state of mind.

And further proof of a compassionate universe

is that no one can abuse another’s work

by using it as a palette for their own because

when you’re wholly effaced by what you’re doing

there’s nothing to imitate but what you see before you alone,

the urgent potential of a whole world of your own

crying out like a nightbird in the plenum-void of the darkness

kun fia kun, fiat lux, let it be, and it was,

like the first taste of light and longing in your mouth.

PATRICK WHITE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.

Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,

and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars

still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much

out of habit, as to show a lot of class

in the way you fall to your knees like a bull

in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams

like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,

as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s and thrown

like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.

Trying to see things I’ve been dying for most of my life

not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,

night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,

soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead

so they could get a good night’s sleep, knowing

there were more nightmares in their lives

than the hard pillows of the world

they lay their heads down on as if

they were getting used to their gravestones.

Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends

of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone

without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,

that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust

with the pain, the pain I’m holding in, on trust

it’s going to transmogrify itself into something

death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,

like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time

were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable

that’s good for you, hoping the character it builds

isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness

of some other species of suffering keeping its distance

because it can’t believe it’s descended from you.

My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,

I’m still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth

like a physician who knows how to heal himself

but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin

than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,

a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair

like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone

to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I’m still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,

a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door

that’s hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.

Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange

one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs

for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.

As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I’m doing my best

to live wholly and now in the moment,

without losing my appetite for time

or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,

but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card

than there are wounded new moons making a recovery

on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn

scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.

And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions

having tasted a little of its own medicine

and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope

around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live

I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,

voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast

as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street

as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,

until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last

and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past

with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal

and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.

Trying to be a man that his jeans aren’t ashamed to wear.

Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain

than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones

giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill

even when I’m swimming through quicksand

or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I’ve been

on this long, dark, strange, radiant road

that isn’t just another starmap with pit stops,

that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,

or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings

like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet

I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids

just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts

I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps

to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU DON'T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

IF YOU DON’T TAKE THE RISK, JUMP THE ABYSS LIKE A FIREFLY

If you don’t take the risk, jump the abyss like a firefly

between two polarities, how are you ever going

to release your potential as the stem cell of a bridge of light

from one hemisphere of your brain of starmud

to the other side of your shining? Whenever

there are two eyes it’s crucial that you make a third.

And if you haven’t got the courage to jump from your artificial paradise

without knowing whether you’ve got a parachute on or not,

go ask the dandelions gone to seed how to take a fall

like the free radical of a kiss on the breeze, touch life

lightly as if you were feeling the weave of the silk mist

rising like someone’s last breath off the morning lake

or ask the seasoned helicopter pilots of the dragonflies

and maple keys about doing double wheelies like dna helices

when you’ve driven way past the end of the road like Thelma and Louise

and your animation’s been suspended trying to cling

to the wind like a rafter of air you can hang from

like the larva of a caterpillar repelling down a Dutch elm

on a thread of fate you’ve got to pull like a rip cord

if you want to be a skydiver instead of a half-baked butterfly

always on the run from base-jumping spiders

on a strafing run of balsa wood gliders that never got off the ground.

If you don’t jump into this life like Basho’s frog

into the pond of the world. Splash. At the end of time

when your life flashes before your eyes like an implosion

going supernova, just before you drown in your own tears,

you’re going to realize that all along you were

an estranged embryo that committed suicide in the womb

by making a noose of your mother’s umbilical cord.

How wide does the sky have to be before you’ll fly?

Or the sea, to swim? You want to know the flightplan

and the wingspan of the wind before you decide

if you’re going to ride it or not, dig your spurs into the storm

like white lightning into the heart of a brahma bull

or run before it like a rodeo clown who wanted to be a matador.

All my life I’ve run into cosmic matchbooks

with a solar flare for bucolating back on themselves

like ingrown hairs festering they’re not the galaxies

they once aspired to with the candlepower

of a single illuminated insight without mirrors

that was enough of a wavelength to surf for light years

and would have carried them all the way there

like Hero to Leander across the Hellespont,

if they’d only been creatively self-destructive

or counter-intuitively absurd enough

to trust the road born with their own feet to walk it

so all your crutches don’t have to do it for you.

How could any of your planets be habitable

if they’re still hanging like a mobile of green apples

on a skeletal bough in autumn long after the leaves have flown?

Cowardice always did have the worst sense of timing

and an alibi like a sin of omission it didn’t commit

against itself like a moralistic etch-a-sketch or the tabla rasa

of a travel journal that never got any further than the page

it wasn’t written on like a tidal pool cluttered with relics

of how dangerous it can be to set sail

on the great night sea of awareness without

even so much as a petal of the moon for a lifeboat.

Falling isn’t for petty people. Go ask the waterbirds

descending into their reflections ascending from the deep,

or light being twisted like a lock of hair

around the finger of any black hole

with the gravitational eyes to point you out

like Icarus re-entering the atmosphere,

a white feather of fear going up in flames,

a meteor with a biological impact on change.

PATRICK WHITE