IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby-throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

ALL THESE BUSY BUSY ENTREPRENEURIAL POETS

All these busy, busy entrepreneurial poets

trying to substitute their usefulness for talent.

If you can’t sing well enough to bear your own voice

to get lovers and applause on your own merits,

manage a band, control those who can,

network like gypsy moths in a Dutch elm,

take two creative writing courses

from a narcissistic mystagogue projecting

the fraud of the Wizard of Oz on the unsuspecting

listening to a firefly of talent talking like a starmap

about shining, about black holes and supernovas

dark energy and gravitational eyes, and the myriad galaxies

he teaches on the lower rung of a swing

in an institutionalized aviary of higher learning

as if the closest he’s ever been to the light

was a dead starfish among the usual relics of a low tide

or sodden firecrackers of insight on a Halloween night.

He teaches you to take out whatever there was never much of

to put in. To strike the definite article

like crab grass out of your well-mown lawn

so you ending up writing in the patois of a robot.

Listen to this swarming starcluster of gnats

in the sunset of the word that’s wondering

where all the songbirds went. Maybe it’s me

and I’ve grown reactionary without knowing it

into a vicious old age but I swear my stomach

can’t turn another page of a saddle-stitched chapbook

that reads the tea leaves in the broken skull-cup of the moon

like a bowl of soggy cornflakes that taste like breakfast haikus.

You can’t live like a maggot and write

like a wounded dragon of the soul. You can’t

paint a tsunami in watercolours and claim you know

what it’s like to be caught up in the emotional undertow

of a tidal pool that threatened to sweep you out to sea

until your guru or your shrink reminded you like a tugboat

you have to sink before you can call yourself a shipwreck.

I think of Van Gogh. I think of the intensity of a man

of immense humanity, and it occurs to me if he were sitting

on your saffron sectional in your coffee-book living room,

going on obsessively about the nutritional value of cadmium yellow

you’d commit the same sin of omission and condemn him

to his solitude like an asylum for the underfed

listening to the voices in their head telling them

they’re better off mad or dead than living on

the aesthetically modified junkfood

you drop in their begging bowls like chump change.

And, o yes, wouldn’t you just be the exception to the rule

who knew how to tell the difference between a sad joke

and the rage of a sacred fool eating his palette like buttered toast.

I think of all the poets that have been crucified

as a proxy for you like kings and queens of the waxing year,

as you try to step into their shoes like the waning twin

who isn’t Orphically dismembered between July and December

to ensure the creative fertility of your cloned cornflakes.

Merd! Rimbaud screamed as he stuck a knife

through the hand of a pompous muse-molesting poetaphile

and abandoned his rational dissociation of the sensibilities,

denying he ever wrote poetry, to run guns in Ethiopia.

A temper tantrum over the point size of your name

on a poetry poster and the publishing hierarchy

that sorts the planets out from the shepherd moons

by the order in which you’ve been asked to read

isn’t the same as the creative demonism of a real enfant terrible.

You can’t rent a ghost in a creative writing class

and then wear its deathmask around as if your persona

were tragically haunted by the past. Or pretend

you’re a bad ass from a bourgeois suburb where

the closest you ever got to a slum

was your Mommy’s makeshift studio basement

and an album cover you shot on the wrong side of the tracks.

Fifteen minutes of fame in a photo op with a candleflame

isn’t enough to shed a lot of light on a regressively darkling world,

or even turn the head of a single sunflower.

You need more than a flashlight to get a rose to bloom.

You might be the loudest toad on the biggest lily pad

in a small pond, sounding off like popcorn

in the lobby of your own double-feature,

but you lick your sticky fingers clean with a long tongue

when you sup with the devil like an award-winning liar

and there’s no long oar of a spoon in your lifeboat.

And even when you claim to be a damselfly in distress

I don’t see any starmud caked on your winged heels

after you say you crushed the head of the snake

that bit Persephone in the spring while she gathered wildflowers.

You might sleep with the Lord Of Jewels, but who said

you could sing? Though I like the bling

of all your dangling participles ringing like wind-chimes

in synch with the dissonant cosmic hiss of universal bliss.

Kunaikos. Dog. In classical Greek. Diogenes the Cynic

asked Alexander to get out of his light, not turn it off

because the music was over and all there was left to glean

were the random seed words of an abandoned alphabet

that will never come to flower like sacred syllables

in the mouths of scavenging birds pecking among the pebbles

at the feet of a crucified scarecrow where the literati

are rolling snake eyes for the emperor’s new clothes.

What did Horace say when he’d had enough?

Terence, this is stupid stuff. As the cynics bark

like barnyard dogs at every shadow and blade of grass

that moves in the dark woods beyond the knotted chains

of their dying dactyls while the wolves bay elegiacally at the moon.

Which page of this book did you suffer the most to write?

Clever the way you put the climax of the narrative on the cover.

Best place to hide is out in the open. And, my God,

just look at the quality of the quotes you’ve

called into court like a twitter account to verify

your inability to write an alibi for why

your works aren’t literate enough to speak for themselves.

Odious the stink of number 2 book paper and hot ink.

Worse the lack of the use of your nose when you’re writing.

Or the way you abuse your eyes by looking at the world

through a glass darkly as if you were aging the wines of life

like a total eclipse of the new moon in an antique inkwell

no one draws inspiration from anymore since the bottom

fell out of the bucket when you replaced the Pierian spring

with an unenlightened fire hydrant in a volunteer fire brigade.

And who more reasonable than you about

all the aesthetic atrocities going on in the world.

When murder is done I know of no one

more eloquent than you about not raising your voice

for fear of polarizing the situation unnecessarily.

But peace isn’t a euphemism for cowardice

and if your words aren’t guilty of precipitating a confrontation

then your critically acclaimed silence is complicit.

When did the sheep start practising hunting magic?

When did the m.b.a.s start chanting like Druids

and the gleemen of the king make a jest of their calling?

Are you still experimenting with taking all those

tiny fractals and digital pixels of retinal experience

and one day elaborating them by cutting and pasting

into a unified field theory of the visionary continuum

that focuses on the infrastructure of the scaffolding

at the expense of Michelangelo who had to scramble up on it

like monkey bars in a playpark to paint the origin of the species

as he saw it in his imagination before the plaster dried?

Here, if you give me an award, I’ll make one up of my own

and give it back to you in return. That way everyone

can feel special about their mediocrity. Watch out, Mozart

here comes the lunar fire of the lime they throw on your corpse

like desiccated moonlight before the dirt. Burn, baby, burn.

The fire hydrants are learning to play the harpsichord like amputees.

And Keats is trying to pick out a more buoyant font

than the lead of his despair to write his name in water.

The roots are dead, the leaves are gone, the blossom flown,

the fruit has dropped and the branches dry and brittle

as an old woman’s bones. Pageants of funeral barges

floating down the Thames like the wilting lilies

of long-necked swans that used to make

the most beautiful compound bows out of the arrows

of their fletched reflections. The timber clear cut

and the underbrush flogged to death by the bush hogs

and snarling chain saws in the mountains of the muses.

What do you think, is Shakespeare still out there somewhere

leafing the stumps with the magic rods of his imagination?

Is all the world still a stage, the airy nothing

he gave a local habitation and a name, or merely the dream

of the crone mother of the muses on her death bed, Mnemosyne,

reaching for a cellphone, trying to remember who she was

before they erased her on facebook and disconnected the internet?

PATRICK WHITE

LOST IN THE GUTTER

LOST IN THE GUTTER

Lost in the gutter, skeleton keys

that used to be people before

they ran out of doors to open.

How many thresholds back from here

to yesterday? And those eyes,

such dark jewels, where can I

get a pair of sharky shades like that?

Ghosts dance around a burning oildrum

where the prophets are boiled in alcohol

for not saying anything of much worth,

like a poem no one wants to steal

the hubcabs off, or a rainfall in November

too late to do the flowers much good

or the working girls on the corner

like cotyledons in hot pants. Indoor orchids

under tungsten grow lights in the snow.

When the mystery wanes unadventurously

and what you see in life asks too much

of your eyes at dusk and moonrise

to look for a black box that isn’t

a voice-over of the stars’ untimely demise,

but might be the genuine you singing to yourself

in your sleep like a hermit thrush

trying to accompany its own silence

with something sweet and sad that beguiles

your melancholy for awhile, the jester

too deep to ever take himself seriously,

the apostate mystic enters a surrealistic circus tent

redolent with the cheap thrills of enlightenment.

He walks around like the ground of being

with a sacred limp believing he’s experienced

a meaningful death much more profoundly realized

than the nocturnal longings

of the wounded street gurus

busking outside the liquor store

like a cult of uncut koans on a Friday night.

What an estranged world this is

that has such exiles in it. Intense heat,

unusual sprouts, and this era’s been unbearable.

Something mean about the water

we’re depleting like our own housewells

of oxygen as we kick the issues to death

for fracking on someone else’s astroturf.

O look, a finger puppet show of gang insignia

spray-bombed like Kufic writing on the wall.

Why is it always the literate who are the last

to learn how to read that? Tomorrow comes

soon enough. And yesterday’s an obituary

with spelling errors. And as for this moment

together with you in the abyss, you’ve got

an imagination. Make it up for yourself.

And I mean that as a gift, not an insult

to the unkept promise of your native intelligence.

Madame Maudlin with her magic phials

of snakeoil and tears guaranteed to restore

your sense of pity like a purgative at the end

of all these endless tragedies, says

there isn’t a watershed in the world deep enough

no matter how far it got her down like Atlantis

she couldn’t buoyantly bubble up from

like something obnoxiously effervescent

about her nature. And you notice her breasts

on the marquee of the matinee, and you know

right away, that’s a double feature of her

dogpaddling on the moon with mythically inflated

waterwings making flightplans for Leda and the Swan

like one of her runaways and a john.

What kind of a coma is it to live dissociatively

in a society where even the emergency opioids

can’t numb you to the recurring nightmare

of orphaning your dream of a better life from sex

like an unwanted child you’re trying to keep clean

by driving it away from yourself like a scapegoat

into a wilderness with the sins of a tribe on its back?

Street wisdom is the occult science

of demonizing the innocent by exalting

the deviant as a special form of the straight and narrow,

the fledgling rain targetting the tree rings

and rootfires in the heartwood of its own arrow.

Here comes another heroic prologue

from the Bronze Age to make a coward

of the text. When you receive a loveletter

you’re always the envelope trying to read

what’s been written on the inside of your eyelids

but send one that unfolds like an encoded flower

and you’ll always feel as if you were putting

your emptiness to good use, your silence

to the task of deciphering your third eye in solitude.

Ever weep and not know why like a waterclock

trying to keep pace and pulse with a time zone

as big as oblivion overflowing the abyss of your heart

like the bucket wish of a watershed appealing

like a housewell to the rain to bail you out by

filling you up until your skull cup runneth over

like a gutter on the moon that cuts through your heart?

Among the lost arts, suffering is the most

ferocious form of compassion the imagination

of a human being can be disciplined in

without any effort on our part at all because

we were all born with a genius, if not

the motive for it, or the experience, from the very start.

In the gutter you can always hear

a sincere young woman singing the blues

like edgy moonlight through a broken window

and later, no crossdraft in a hot apartment,

huddle in the cement threshold of the doorway

where she lingers in the cool of the night

like the smoke of a rebel cigarette posing

like the portrait of a ghost for an empty picture frame.

In the gutter you’re a drop of emotion

in an ocean of chaos and Lady Luck’s

the patron saint of talent, and for city blocks

as far as you can see through the blazing of the blind,

people are either waiting to be discovered

among the bullrushes like illegitimate children

exiled from their own promised land,

or orphaned on the steps of the temple

with blue ribbons in their hands

that meant something much less venal once

than a dynastic return to a pimped-out innocence

riding like a gold rush through a slum

trying to stay an avalanche of starmud ahead of itself,

or the greater vehicle of a medicine chest

of pharmaceuticals hatching out like cosmic eggs

of crackhead serpent fire living the dream

it was cursed by when it got what it asked for,

anathematized by the backfire of the blessings

we don’t bestow upon one another as if

even here in the gutter where nothing matters

given how random forever is, and love

just as seldom and rare as the opportunity presents itself,

o, yes, yes, yes, let none deny it, it especially does.

PATRICK WHITE  

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

After the long labour of ashes in the rain

the phoenix is shrieking like fire into life again.

I can hear it in the valleys auditioning the mountains

like a voice torn out of the heart of pain.

My shadow is in complete empathy with the ghost

I cast like an imaginative projection of myself

into the emptiness of my crowded solitude

where everyone is recognized by the inside of their faces

in the light of the return journey to the seasoned innocence

of my homelessness beyond the gates I’ve passed through

like an earthly garden blooming in the star fields.

Singing again, as if the stars knew all the lyrics to the song

long before I opened my mouth to swallow their fire

without setting myself ablaze like a funeral pyre

gone supernova in a neighbouring galaxy.

As if a lighthouse off the dark coast of the shipwrecks

knew that timing was the medium of the message

and it was time to rise again on the updrafts

of these buoyant adagios of picture-music,

like a heart immersed a long time in the depths

of its own crazy wisdom abounding

in the bliss of an unknown treasure

rising like a lost continent that drowned in its sleep.

And even in the weeping for things that have passed

through the immensity of the solitude I was the last to leave

like the captain of a lifeboat going down on the moon,

an undiscovered joy in the way I learned to breathe underwater

in the ocean of sorrows that overwhelmed me

like the beauty of a rose that burned

like a torch of blood in the rain.

I’ve given up trying to save the world like a moral ransom

I pay to the one-eyed pirates of circumstance

for the redemption of a self that was more a mirage on the moon

chained like an empty cup to a wishing well

than real water that flows like the tears

of diamonds thawing like glaciers from my eyes.

And may all the wildflowers of this circuitous blossoming

astound the nostrils of God like a fragrance of music

growing like white sweet clover along the roadside.

May every firefly and lightning bolt of insight

illuminate the whole universe like the flaring of a single match.

Let the dead whose souls I bear toward the south

know that I remember their names like loveletters

I’ve sent on ahead like the return address of the future

that waits to encounter them again like birds

that came to the windowsill of this burning house of life

like the notes of a song from a voice well beyond

these spinal cords that bind us like kites to the sky.

I scatter my cremations like ashes on mirrors of ice

for those who would follow me to ground

like the cornerstones of a tent

pegged to the wind like a flower.

I gnaw on the dice of my bones

like a wolf above the timber line

mining the white gold of a motherlode of marrow

and I let tomorrow sing of the things tomorrow brings

like hungry lovers to the round table of feasting stars.

And bless the sword that guts me like an envelope

that bleeds like a wound of love that never scars

the words that are written on a magnanimous heart

that doesn’t pace the rate at which it gives itself away

like a poppy dreaming in a field of leonine dandelions.

And though I fall like an oak on a hill in a lightning storm

let me not live on my knees dumbstruck by the revelation

that burns in my heartwood like a calendar of fire

where somebody’s fixed the dates of spring

as if they didn’t want to forget how to be taken by surprise

like a scholar that can’t bring himself to believe

in the chameleonic nature of his own eyes.

Though I fall like a waterclock of rain from the sky

into the deepest blackholes of time, let no root say

it was ever denied access to my watershed

that even the dead were the guests of a living host

that welcomed them like the voices of a familiar solitude.

Uplifted by spirits of fire, stone, and water,

I’m flying through stars with my wings ablaze

like a comet that exalts in jumping for the sheer joy it

from the black halo that encircles the beatified sun

like the prophetic zero of the final outcome.

And I shall not set my circumpolar throne

on the hills of the skulls of my traditional enemies

nor abide by the jinx of the birds on a prayer-wheel

turning in the direction of cosmic destruction

like an ill wind fouled by the contagion of time.

Every moment of the day, every era of the night

I shall remember the infallible atrocities of blind religion

that gouged the eyes out of the light like gravediggers

cooking rocks in the shovels of the backhoes

rummaging through the remains of the resurrection

for the relics of the names on vandalized gravestones

weathered by the acidic rain of the great desecration.

A little bit of joy balancing on a perilous precipice.

I know about falling. I know the risk. Not a mandate

nor anything I choose to take as if the danger were all mine.

But just a little sweetness in life, a wild grape, the eye of the wine.

A moment stolen from behind the backs of the calendars

like a man in space, with no time to reflect on the outcome

of being younger than when he left. Not listening to signs

but resonating with the hidden harmonies of myriad symbols

arranging picture music for the eye and the ear and the tongue

like dew in the night, whole notes and semi quavers

on the staves of the dreamcatchers and spiderwebs

when the shining comes to the morning as unprepared as swallows.

All my Platonic ideals, the black matter of desire

in a goldrush of the heart that can’t hold anything back

in a Zen panic to stake its claim on nothing

as the fairest jewel of all to give back

to the ocean of awareness you retrieved it from

and hope the moon among the corals appreciates the gesture.

Buddha, too, had an ill-advised attachment to the unnattainable .

I won’t starve my delusions, just to please my insights.

My mirages drink at the same well I do without condition

and it’s ok if they want to leave their veils on too.

And I’ll observe an ethical truce with society

But more goes on in the dark, inconceivably,

than even the light could possibly visualize

on a cold seeing night from a mountain top

with an asphalt road that coils all the way around

like a serpent doing research into the seven ages of man

trying to keep its credibility up with the times.

On my left palm, the star of Isis, keeps me from drowning,

and in my left ear, enough gold, if I’m washed ashore

on some galactic island after another shipwrecked exemption

to burn me down by the sea on a pyre of stars this time.

I want to ingather my ghost out of the smoke, and watch it shine

like fireflies in the fog, like lighthouses along the coast

off the starboard side, looking for moonboats

on the slopes of the swells heaving easily

like bells full of emotion swinging out over the edge

to prove it’s not afraid of falling back

to the ground it arose from like a boy

daring the devil to an apple fight

in the crowns of the trees to see who

can climb high enough to scare the other down.

PATRICK WHITE