YOU CAN AIM YOUR SHINING BUT BETTER TO BURN LIKE A STAR

YOU CAN AIM YOUR SHINING BUT BETTER TO BURN LIKE A STAR

You can aim your shining but better to burn like a star.

A calm continuous explosion. Just like the Big Bang

before dark energy entered the scene

and things started to get interesting

as they accelerated. Space grows.

More light years between stars

until the last firefly goes out like a nightwatchman.

Everything’s like that, people, love affairs, gardens

at the end of summer, suicides, girls

that have never worn purple before, wisdom

and the love of knowledge, honour in a life of crime,

flying carpets that never made it any further than the windows,

fruit trees, the eyes of luck fixed on a starmap of dice.

Everything’s evaporating into a breathless abyss.

One day every cell in my body is going to feel

like the lone survivor of a homeless colony on the moon.

The trees, the birds, the stars, everything will have

transcended itself spontaneously including

any heaven, afterlife or reincarnation,

or even long oblivious eras lost among the molecules,

you might have planned on as a pit stop along the way

gone with nobody left to know it.

Especially when I’m down by the river at night

in the early fall, and the air is pungent with duff

after a rain that really messed up bookbinding the leaves

and the stars are moving to their winter grazing grounds,

I feel it more than think it like a deep wound in my heart

this inclusive sadness for everything that has ever been

or is and yet to be. And I want justice now

for generations that have yet to be born

and though it’s as elusively numinous

as trying to make out what constellation

the fireflies are trying to shape out of the valley fog

after a lightning storm has just passed over

and everything is as clean and disordered

as the dishevelled bouquets of the wildflowers

beside the singing ditches and in the vetch bound fields,

it seems like a desecration to have arrayed

all this beauty, these woods, my eyes, Arcturus and Aldebaran,

even the anti-mystic details of the history of war

we keep a record of to consider ourselves civilized,

and all the hurt, the sorrows, the disappointments, the sacrifices

and even in the way we born to love each other like appetites,

all that and more reaching out to attain the unattainable

and then the startling realization, like a mirror

recognizing its own twin in a crowd of unrelated reflections

you are the abandoned crocodile that grew up

in a slum of radioactive slurry, and at this time of year,

when the wild grapevines are ripening like shepherd moons

with life-sustaining seas under methane ice-caps

and dusty mauve cataracts, without an eyelash of distinction

you are the wine that life is intoxicated upon

and extinction is a kind of trance we go into when it’s time to sober up.

PATRICK WHITE  

JUST BEFORE DAWN VENUS IN LEO BETWEEN THE MOON AND THE BEEHIVE NEBULA

JUST BEFORE DAWN VENUS IN LEO BETWEEN THE MOON AND THE BEEHIVE NEBULA

Just before dawn Venus in Leo between the moon and the Beehive Nebula.

The chimney of the old shoe factory reflected

like a toppled obsidian obelisk in the Tay River.

Couldn’t sleep. Now I’m heading home with the bats and the ghosts.

I’ve firewalked enough tonight, and the coals are beginning to dim

in the ashen light of my waning spirits.

The Perth Soap Factory still hasn’t managed to imperialize

the fragrance of the last of the wildflowers crowding

the crumbling parking lots and leftover wedges of field,

but it’s trying. I envy a squirrel its quick Zen energy.

And three crows think they know something about me.

Happens a lot in a small town, as I know you know,

because someone you know told me. You must think

I’m crazy talking to the air as if it were you,

but even out here, you’ve been inside of me all night,

and now it’s time to make some space for you beside me.

I like the feline water sylphs that follow me home

like feral cats in the early morning when there’s dew

on the brass heritage plaques of the lawyer’s offices

with ultramarine peacock’s eyes waxing in the windows.

I’ve been learning to play Jeremy’s violin on my spinal cord all night

to see if I can get you up and dancing like a kite with no strings

in a gust of stars. But so far all I’ve managed in my solitude

with you as my intriguing familiar is a happy kind of hangover

from a seance just you and I attended. But I’ll get better.

You’ll see. I’ll master this new medium of picture-music

half way between witchcraft and mystery. And beyond

if you want to walk with me that far. Or fly, if that suits you better.

Pick a star. Or the softer option of a nebula, knowing you

as I’m beginning to. Alcyone in the Pleiades, perhaps.

Or maybe an unknown destination that exceeds

the wavelengths of the speed bumps of the asphalt starmaps.

I’ll go there with you. And I’m as loyal as a skull.

PATRICK WHITE

MY BACK ACHING LIKE THE SKY GODDESS NUT DOING YOGA

MY BACK ACHING LIKE THE SKY GODDESS NUT DOING YOGA

My back aching like the sky goddess Nut doing yoga

over a sidereal painting that’s burning like a bridge.

I’ve been many kinds of fool before, some just silly, some profound

but this is the work of a sacred clown hemorrhaging in the heavens

like the supernova of a pot of gold at the end of a ragged rainbow

still shining through the remnants of a colourful wardrobe.

I’ve been accelerating into space driven by a muse

of dark energy with an expansive heart. Time stops

as I exceed the speed of light across a threshold of starclusters

flowering in my wake like New England asters

with cadmium yellow suns with auras of orange coronas

glowing in their eyes. The apartment is silent

except for the trickling of the water pump in the aquarium

and a dance arrangement of goldfish that are swimming

in synchronicity with my thoughts and feelings

as if the heart of a human can speak through many voices

like the wind through the harps of the trees,

like the angels that descend among the daughters of men

when they’re feathered in their beds at night like black swans,

or stars rooted in their own decay like waterlilies

that just don’t know when to quit making beauty

out of the muddy deltas of their creative bloodlines.

She’s firewalking in her sleep by now I hope, watching

a documentary of how the universe works in another city.

I’m flipping through the pages of the rooftops of Perth

outside my window like a weirdly bound heritage history book,

trying not to get any paint from my fingers on the view of the stars overhead.

Arcturus in Bootes still flying its kite in the west.

I need some rest. I’ve been bleeding like a cut rose

on the blades of the moon all day, and I feel threshed,

a cylinder of hay left out in the open starfields

for the black horse she told me to put in my last painting

to show something grazing under the full moon

like an eclipse that just discovered it had life on it

lyrically at peace with the siloes of light in the distance.

Even when love is cosmically oriented, God

how it loves to focus on the mystic details of everything

right down to the eyelashes of the ruby throated hummingbirds

hovering in a Pleiades of first magnitude larkspur.

Sometimes I feel like the fossil of a dreamcatcher

in the Burgess Shale, but right now, my third eye’s wholly open

and I’m casting silver nets I’ve woven out of

my axons, blood vessels, nerve ganglia,

lunar fuses of serpent fire coiled around my spinal cord

like a helical riff of a bass run on a burning guitar

I’m holding like a metaphor for the body of a woman in my arms.

When I told you I was a sacred clown. I didn’t invent it.

I meant it. I feel it. I can dance for ghosts at a seance.

I can dance for rain and war. I can paint my face blue

with moonlight and wode, and dance for peace, dance for fire,

dance for someone like you to step out of the darkness

as if someone had shaped a jewel out of the northern lights

and I was looking at it from the inside out through your eyes

on a a night of the new moon that isn’t on any calendars

that are going to hang doom over my my voodoo heart

because there’s never been a curse from the mouth of a Druid or Mayan

that could stand up to the courage that it takes

to receive a blessing without worrying what mistakes

inspiration might make when your muse is as flawless

as imagination obedient to the laws of her own myth of origin

and your art elucidates the crazy wisdom of your folly

like a discipline that isn’t for the petty or sane at heart.

The stargates just don’t open for those who are still in their right mind.

Just as the maple key to your entry, isn’t about

what you leave out like a sin of omission that’s culpably blind,

but what you leave innocently behind you

like mountain streams, and morning snails,

and the long uncombed comatose trails of sleepwalking comets

plunging from their dark haloes like Icarus

into a sun that only shines at midnight

like a candle on a windowsill calling out

like a poet for a new medium that’s lightyears beyond words

to the first of the autumn stars purring like a cat in her dreams

when she hears the holy nightbird just before the dawn

knowing Regulus and Spica and all the stars of my art

won’t pale in the lotus of the heart like real jewels in the eyes

of a sacred clown whenever he looks for her

shining in the ascendent of Leo long after

the Lyre, and the Swan, and the Eagle have all gone down

and all these poems I write on the wings of Luna moths,

enraptured by the sphinx of her radiance, are irrevocably skybound.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,

a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,

it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish

and it’s whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.

All my life I’ve tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy

and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair

that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.

A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties

I thought was worth fighting for even long after

I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music

for the rest of the duration. And it’s been as true

as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud

in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down

like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well

for light years around, and it seemed, and it’s

still dangerous to remember because time doesn’t blunt all knives,

I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had

mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth

like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.

Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself

for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain

in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.

I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat

to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love

like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down

upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young

and hoped would return the blood they were missing

as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals

like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn

that had made them bleed in the first place.

In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing

sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite

like twins that weren’t anymore separated at birth

than the first and last crescents of the moon,

engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it’s dying to protect

farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.

But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,

you meet someone inconceivably shining

in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel

into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream

and the moon silvers your heart like a sword

you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble

and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands

like an autumn equinox that’s just bumped into spring

wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden

and you lay it on the waters because choice isn’t an option

like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird

that can’t take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan

of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds

I’m crossing with you like Leo and Virgo

across a heartscape of enlightened taboos

that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood

like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle

that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,

that drew the sword out of the stone, the star

out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,

the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky

like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core

falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,

or a whole new universe, with a punk version

of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening

to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit

teeming with infinite permutations and combinations

of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,

as if we’d both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart

on the shores of this thriving island of stars

where the Milky Way meets the ocean

and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts

like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it’s been

wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin

from the starcharts of our comets and scars

that have me smiling at you in wonder like this

as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract

and I were the mesmerized gaping witness

to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss

studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids

in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light

as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth

to these poems that break into butterflies of light,

fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas

across the firmament, waking the valley up

to the morning of a whole new creation

as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you

like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open

and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings

and sings because this universe isn’t the shape of an hourglass

with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming

of solar flares behind the mystic veils

of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,

but in every illuminated detail of the form you’ve taken

to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you

that I am created again and again in the image of,

standing in the doorway of this stargate to love

without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years

of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle

that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go

a firefly like you out of the midnight blue

suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura

of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher

to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.

And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,

or sip like a humming bird from your own skull

there’s an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass

that’s greening the sands like the grail of a woman

passing it to you like the love potion

of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,

standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon

turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland

into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds

like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand

as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter

like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties

and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish

are swimming like cults of urgent stars

through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE I'M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

AND IT’S NOT HARD TO SEE I’M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

And it’s not hard to see I’m wandering in a dry abyss

trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert

that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.

Don’t know if I’m talking to a mirage, a reflection of some

aspect of the dark side of the moon I can’t see from here,

an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection

of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space

and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire

I’m sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox

beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.

Matters a lot, but that’s ok. I’ve had visitations before

and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate

and sometimes, though it’s a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.

If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph

in a housewell full of stars, who’s to say that isn’t

my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further

than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them

like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes

I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they’ll root and bloom.

I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,

and the fact that there’s vanity even in that. No matter.

As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.

I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see

come to me spontaneously in the early morning

before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night

when I’m haunting the Tay River with the willows,

or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.

And more than once I’ve talked my ghost

back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both

like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising

like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.

Within me, where the universe lives, you’re a muse

of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,

and I’m growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,

and I’m digging up my own fossils in the bone pits

on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,

and I’m adding a new shrine to my visual lobe

to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,

and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,

like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,

or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.

Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,

a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars

like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me

to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you

like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal

in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds

as tongue-tied for awhile as the gargoyles and ghouls

on a Gothic cathedral. Wanted to be an archaeologist

when I was a kid and ever since I got waylaid by poetic cosmology,

I’ve been brushing the leaves away like the wind

from the ribs and the vertebrae of the trees

in the late Cretaceous of autumn just to get down to essentials,

and see what kind of utensils they took to the grave with them

for eras now. You see how it is with me, all oxymoronic metaphors

trying to bridge duality into a unified field theory

that includes the spiritual like a prodigal wavelength

that might make a difference to the dark matter at hand

as well as the light in the other. I’m an ambidextrous nightbird.

A discipline of longing and renewal that isn’t for petty people

terrified of the truths that sting and sing within them

like dragons of rage and bliss who don’t need a voice coach,

a mentor, a guru, a nightschool, an intercessor or a crutch

to be told how to hold a note like a bird disappearing into the nightsky.

An hourglass, even when it’s filled with the sands of Mars,

gets bored with its own lies over the years, and I’m intrigued

by the earthly candour and sidereal wonder in the way you look at life.

Your ferociously indignant compassion for people, and the passion

to translate the mysticism of contemplation into action,

and the savagery of the solitude that snarls at them to go away

when you need to lick your own wounds, and mix up

a new potion of stem cells with starmaps so they can get

to the furthest parts of your body and mind, those outposts

on the borders between sanity and crazy wisdom

where the silence won’t divulge whether everyone died

in the last assault, or just ran out of ammunition.

And I’ve seen your eyes narrow like crescent moons

in the eyes of a cat that wants to get to the point like a pencil-sharpener.

You’re hydra-headed, sapiosexual, as you’ve said

and your face is as chameleonic as the birthmark of a black Isis

from Merovingian France seven centuries before

the troubadours of Occitania. You’re the Aquitaine.

You’re Eleanor. You’re the yellow planta genesta

that grew wild all over the hills like a stubborn field fire

of radical sunshine that burns all the way down to the roots.

Then you’re foxfire potted in the ashes of the urns

of your old lovers transplanted to an open windowsill where

you can give them some air and some light

and you get a chance to bloom again in your own right.

I’m a dragon, a wolf, a warrior son of Virgo,

a demonic familiar doomed to do good despite himself

by trying to lead other people away from me toward themselves,

though I admit it’s an ironic sacrifice to be

so gift-wrapped with flesh that few have torn my lifemasks away

to see how I burn in excruciating immolations like a root-fire inside.

Boo hoo, for me, if the moon cuts its finger and doesn’t

ask me to kiss it better. Fire doesn’t burn itself and the blade

is never sharp enough to make the distinction

between the moon on the waters and its reflection,

between creative annihilation and its extinction.

I’ve seen swords cry like dew at the tips

of the sabres of stargrass bent towards the earth

like the hands of a clock commemorating the ravages of time

saluting its purple hearts on review in a parade-ground of flowers.

I can see deadly nightshade in you, the palette of a witch,

and the orchids you mix into the brew like the petals

of a new moon, like a lonely wish against hope,

some warlock with gravitational eyes who can bend the light

like water, is going to see the masterpiece of the mandala

that could empower his darkness like the first sight of Venus

over the occluded hills of Lanark where these shadows

only want to serve your lustre to enhance its radiance,

to make you the threshold and gold standard

of his prodigal homelessness parsecs across

at the narrowest ford in my mindstream beyond

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

where Morpheus bends the river like a flight of crows and doves

like a zodiacal, shape-shifting Etruscan king releasing them

from an aviary of fixed stars, to let the constellations

assume whatever paradigm and legend of shining they want

into the perennially true meaning of

here, here, here, altogether here and now.

Venus approaching Regulus in Leo

and a torch of burning starwheat like Spica in Virgo.

PATRICK WHITE  

I'M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I’M HAVING AN UNREQUITED LOVE AFFAIR WITH MYSELF

I’m having an unrequited love affair with myself.

It’s surrealistically ironic and spiritually annihilating

at the same time, and I can say from personal experience

black holes have a profound sense of humour.

The waterlilies look up at the stars and wonder

if they could shine like that if they ever dried out.

Fire and water. The serpent fire of my electrical potential

jumps the gap like a spinal cord, a bridge is made.

Spiders weave enlightened filaments in a light bulb

like webs of neuronic wiring into dream catchers

and empowering mandalas. I have ignition.

Billions of eyes light up in the dark like fireflies.

I always thought if I really wanted to do the world some good,

I’d lead it away from myself. My alter-ego

shines like a demon in a dark light whose intelligence

is intent on ruining my life compassionately

out of a begrudging respect for sacred rodeo clowns

with red geraniums sticking out of their straw sun hats

like pathetic solar flares of blood trying to wave a red flag

to draw the bullshit off a Pacific mystic Zen cowboy

about to be gored by a horn of the moon in her crone phase.

All the women I’ve ever loved, lived, left and will live with

on these thresholds of the sublime and the ridiculous

like a seance that can see a future in calling things back from time,

have come to me in an aura of dark energy

like a poem in a dream expanding into space.

Or you could see Ophelia under her deathmask

drowning in wounded flowers. Two witches,

an apostate madonna, one ferocious priestess

from the dark side of the moon, one incubus,

one lamia, a Medusa, a delusional gold-digger

who kept working me like a motherlode

although I told her from the first all you’re going to find here

is the slag of meteoric ore that’s been mined out.

The last thing I heard her say when I left her

singing like a canary in the belly of an anaconda,

as I climbed out of the grave she was digging for both of us,

was, I thought you were rich. No, I replied,

a little taken aback at my innocence at this late date,

I just gave you everything I had

because I thought it would make you happy

if I gave you what you asked. Who else

should I have given it too if not you? Good-bye,

with blessings on your house and head,

that erotically upgraded body of yours

and all your excellent possessions.

I’m going to sleep with a bridge tonight

that knows there’s two sides to every river

holding hands secretly under the mindstream

and the bird can’t fly when it’s a lapwing

trying to lure danger away from its cosmic eggs

and all the other wing’s doing is flapping its lips.

And one Female Principle of the World

that needed me to help her incarnate in bed.

Muses all. Eclipses and full moons alike.

Eras of my life. Legends of my genome.

Each a different planet with a physics of her own.

And me the mere scaffolding of bones,

the passionate snakes and ladders

they climbed up on to paint their picture-music

on the ceiling of esoteric pantheons

where the goddess is always the pearl, black or white,

and when I know what’s best for me,

I’m the big-mouthed lunar oyster shell

gaping at the moonrise in desire and wonder

dying to say what leaves me more speechless than silence.

Never knew a woman who wasn’t a sky higher

than my wingspan, a sea deeper than my wisdom

despite the oceanic commotion on the surface.

I was always a continental ledge shy of their depths,

and even though I knew how to swim my way

through the darkest diamonds as easily as I did the night,

I’ve always considered it spiritual bad manners

and an abuse of grace, if I’ve paused to listen

to a mermaid singing to me, and I haven’t drowned

in applause for her as soon as the song is over.

If you’re not willing to die for the picture-music

you’re just another flatlining event horizon

looking for a lifeboat like a whole note with a tin ear

that can’t hear you singing like the fog horn

of a dinosaur mired in a tarpit like a keyboard of bones.

You don’t ask a goddess to be a sacrifice.

Your heart gouged out like an organ donor to the moon

you lay it while it’s still beating like a bleeding ruby

on her temple stairs and by that she’ll know

you were a real king of the waxing year

and eat it like the forbidden fruit of enlightenment

when the jewel is in the lotus like a dragonfly

in a waterlily, and she smears your blood like lipstick

on the petals of a rose that worked witchcraft

with the flavours of life and love she left in my mouth.

Most of the time there’s no interrogative scorpion

of bitterness up my sleeve of stinging nettles,

nor in her shoe when I put her crystal slipper back on,

having just removed a splinter of glass from the paw of a lion

I hope will remember my kindness if we’re ever

in the Colosseum together as audience to the act

instead of predator and prey of the fact

that the asters at the end of summer that we cherish most

are adorned by time in a romantic rite of passage

and then apotheosized as constellations of the autumn

approaching our lingering ghosts like a seance

of the fruits of the earth that all fell in their own good time

singularly, or a windfall in the night, sweetened by our ordeals

as if our hearts had always been bears in a beehive

of rapture and loss and paper wasps

getting mystically hammered on our tears

like the lightyears of life that have aged like stars in our eyes.

I can still taste the mystery of the dark mirrors

we held up to each other like synchronous swimmers,

that deepened so many insights into the strangeness of human nature,

even long after we entered the abyss of the future

like empty urns, I swear, there’s still a dragon in my ashes

that rises up like a pillar of fire or a solar flare,

an eternal flame, a sudden efflorescence of stars,

and makes a deep, sweeping bow to the women I have loved

who left me these gloves of moonlight

glowing on my windowsill when I’m alone in the dark.

And I can hear the Canada geese heading south,

and I remember how vast and eyeless the sky is

when exhausted lovers part like frayed mindstreams

trying to flow past the sacred junction where two rivers meet

without realizing the mingling of their waters is indelible

and it’s hard to find reverse in a universe

that just keeps on going the same way

in this time and place, this now and here

the same path of thorns and rose petals

that everyone walks like the wind in love,

leads everywhere like fireflies trying to read a starmap

from the past, that’s left its future far behind

trying to catch up to what it just let go of

like an almagest of prophetic zodiacs to come

longing for the Beast Mistress of the animal kingdom

to make them jump through their burning hoops again

like moondogs or the black haloes of comets

that keeping falling through the coronas of the sun,

or a dragon dancing in the ripples of the rain

after it’s just swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain.

PATRICK WHITE

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