SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, NOW

Softly, softly, now; here there is no beneath or above, no hell

for miscreant flowers opening for the moon, no ghosts

who can’t find their way back to the grave. No one

is unacceptable in this place where even the dead dig

for the blue bones of heaven, cracking

them open like fortune-cookies

to taste the light gold of the marrow. This is the kingdom

of empty cups waiting to be filled

by the black wine of union that ripened

in the skull-shrines

of a thousand drunken buddhas

begging outside a brothel door

for the same holy candle to show them the way home. People

are seldom grateful for what they don’t know

and thought is only the dog of reality

if you can catch my drift in this back-alley

where I’m dancing with a gust of wind. How lightly

you step off my tongue into your veils and shadows

dropping your masks like petals all over the asphalt

until you can’t be seen. Is that freedom or death; do you

bathe in your grave or your heart

when you remember the sorrows you’ve buried like daggers

in the wounds that widowed you? Do you tremble

like a kite at the end of your own life-line

waiting to be found by the witching-wands of the lightning;

or have you forgotten your madness, the dark jewels

in which you took sanctuary for the night

like an orphan in her longing, the crazy wisdom

that put on the costume of a dead clown

and offered herself to the blind and humourless

like a chessboard? Do you still swim naked in sapphires, raise

gardens of fish on the moon, perform

open-heart surgery on paralyzed serpents

that wake up from the anaesthetic between your legs

like a spring thaw, believing they can walk and then

come crawling back, veteran amputees

demanding crutches? Wild moon on a lonely river, night-lotus,

flesh and stars, every moment of you is origin; why doubt

your own reflection in the mirror of my voice? I’m

not selling snake-oil on the midways of eternity, filling the sails

of a slave-ship and calling it the love-boat; this is not

a wardrobe of auroras I buy up cheap in Montreal

and hawk from the back of a truck in Sunday parking lots. If the words

dance, if the wind plays lightly in the leaves, if the fire sings

and the diamonds flow and the rain falls musically

like phantom fingers on the spotted touch-me-nots, should I impugn

the graces of perception that sing, unseen, in the deep woods

because they fly without a limp, praise without a stutter?

I see in whispers; I hear in glimpses. Nameless affinities rooted in silence

bloom in the saying and fall back into themselves,

fountains within fountains, pursing their waters

to kiss the light as it breaks like glee against them. Fountains,

not pedestals. Deep sky-dwellers ride the helix of their own thermals,

their wings spread from dawn to dawn, and if they build,

they build from the sky down, not footstools, scaffoldings, and temples,

not ladders of bone at the bottom of dry wells, but tents of light

in the secret grottoes of space, supple as life.

Up is not up nor down, down, when you dream in the seed, neither

born nor unborn, yet nothing missing; creation within the Uncreate,

the intimately impersonal holy mother that is born and perishes

with us. I walk this vastness alone; who, then, to impress or pedestal

in this empty, pathless, mouthless, dark bliss of a world

where even the silence is speechless before it? If

the ignorant see the world as an open hat on a lonely streetcorner

begging for change and prizes; let them. That is their hour,

their seeing, their word. All seeing is a kind of love.

Orchids and dandelions alike. All that is loved is seen to be beautiful

but not all that is beautiful is seen to be loved. I see

a blue rose, shedding lives like petals and skies,

night skies, freaked by stars tattooed on heavy eyelids, falling

into dream and destiny. Graffiti Mona Lisa mother Bacchanal,

mad, menstruating, moon-dump bag-lady, I see you

vaulting topless over the horns of lunar bulls in ancient Crete,

or lady of the lake, royal witch-bride, bored with weddings

and vase-tamed bouquets, waiting to grasp the hilt

of magic swords whose power is older than the stones

from which they’re drawn. And there, in the window

of the thirteenth house of the zodiac, isn’t that you

plucking dead leaves off the herbs you grow on the sill, hanging curtains

you’ve pirated thread by thread from old mythologies

and woven again like the moon into light? Crow-weaver,

tell me, have you ever stolen silver from the mirror to heal a wounded vision,

or known an appetite so great, so incomprehensible

it consumed the galaxies like krill? Death is the dark inspiration,

pure energy, radiant and whole, the mute mirror that reflects nothing

that stands before it in an arrogance of forms; the face you wore

before the beginning of faces. Already achieved,

not something up ahead, a black star on a white night, the dark mother

who fills the wombs with gestures of light. Death is the ancient future

that passes instantaneously, the crone-nymph, oyster and pearl,

the miner in the ore that releases the child like a bell. The dream that wakes you

from a dream, the dead tree that gives birth to a bird. Death is

the terrifying abundance, the terrible joy of perfection falling

into perfection, the honey and the horror of the sacrificial wound. The child

that carries her mother in her womb. Death is no less life, no less us,

than a wave is water. Death has no beginning so life is never

finished. One afternoon, in an autumn garden, the air shuddered with mine

and I knew that it was already done like the stars above the flowers

of gardens to come. What death, then, to stare into

that isn’t already under your feet? Wombs, waterclocks, and coffins;

can you tell me the difference? Here’s my skull. Break it.

The bird’s already out singing you like a handful of joy

hurled well beyond itself into the dawn, and in the morning market

among laughter and apples

the phantoms array their illusions.

PATRICK WHITE

WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE

WHETHER I LANGUISH HERE

Whether I languish here in the cold tin rain, everything

black, green, and gray, and the violet crocus

adjusting its bruised crown to the fragile light,

and the willow already an accomplished dancer,

and the sad brooms of the pine

that sweep the stairs of the wind

heavier than ever in their helpless plight, or

tired of the slow exorcism of old Septembers

that still shine blue and gold

in the back of the family bible where people

come and go like migrant doors, I accept myself

like a heresy of rogue stars

and look for a deeper night within

for the honey and wine of the radiant wonder

that walks like a woman in the guise

of a silver herb through the valley of the wound

that life can be when the geese return from the dead,

I am the lament of a pointless mystery,

an intimate namelessness, an unknown agony

that consumes me like an exile, a severance

and a longing of which I am not worthy

even now among the leaves and birds, all

these manic, animated nations of the spring.

Is it myself I mourn,

some diamond fiction of the mind

that refuses to thaw in a season of flowing,

or have I acknowledged, without knowing,

there never was anyone real to regret,

no one to let down, no one to raise up

and nothing ever missing, no lack

of what I needed to be to live, no

second person to assess the outcome,

and all the coming and the going,

the exits and entrances, transits and transformations,

all the urgencies and emergency graves

were the immaterial props

of a dream, of a life, that was never mine

and isn’t me. Even when I hold

the invisible ink of the wind

like a page of the sky up to the light,

I cannot read my name, my death or birth

perched like a bird

in the concealing foliage of revelation. It seems

in the mystic ore of the oyster

I am not a pearl or a planet

or even a grain of sand

to found a universe upon,

not even the slightest of these agitations

robed in the nacreous dawn of a new beginning.

How many years, how many days and ways

have I groaned like an old wheel

in this river of grief

trying to grind a harvest into bread,

sorting the weeds from the wheat

to allay the chronic torrent

of this bridal hunger on my death-bed?

What faceless love is this

that wakes me with a kiss again and again

in every moment, the lips of the rain,

to squander myself on nothing

in the shrines and asylums of my eloquent pain,

the aging conviction

of a fetal contradiction

trying to celebrate the unattainable

in the resurgent fountains and fictions

of the unexplainable? And what a fool is here

to deride the gestures of his own devotion,

laying his life on the altars of the years

to make a gift of a gift

that isn’t his to give, stealing the wave

to pay tribute to the ocean, easing the flame

from the purse of the fire

to spend on the blaze? What could possibly be ours to give

when the only acceptable sacrifice

in the elusive eyes of magnanimous life

is to live?

PATRICK WHITE

NOT IMITATING ANYTHING WITHIN MYSELF

NOT IMITATING ANYTHING WITHIN MYSELF

Not imitating anything within myself. Not

cloning, replicating, or even confining

the same seeds to the same plants, endlessly

spiralling through space like a galaxy or a hawk,

drift, release, and disperse, condense and shine,

shudder with motherlodes of lightning in the ore,

let the light turn back on itself like a solar flare

or an ingrown hair, let the presence show me

the absolute purity of its absence if it must,

and that which is greatly unknown retain its sublimity.

I seek nothing. And find it everywhere. I make

no appeal to the silence to make something happen

for a change, as if it had a mind of its own

that didn’t come with an explanation or an alibi.

Neither indictment nor confession, I’m not listening

to the stars through the black walnut leaves with my ears.

Three blocks away the teen agers sound like

white water in a small rapid, and the heavy night air

can barely keep its eyelids open, and though

I’ve lived here before they were born,

I am always the occasion of a stranger

who takes note and moves on down some deserted avenue

or path through the woods where the moon

and the stars appear more luminously invigorated

as they were before the town began to smoke them out like bees

and they dimmed to mere chalk dust on a blackboard.

I give a military salute to the lamp posts of the Imperial Guard

and go into exile like Napoleon. Je me souviens.

I will make no more wars upon my solitude.

I will walk with Sister Lunacy, my strange companion,

and we shall return our shadows to the darkness

like the feathers of two birds of prey renewing our wingspan

just to wheel on the wind like figure-skaters no one is watching.

Not to aspire. Not to long. Not to fulfil, acquire, or achieve.

Simply to act boundlessly as the smoke from a fire.

As the breath from our mouths on the afterlife of a star

that was a great arsonist in its time,

as the ashes of the bridges it crossed will tell you

in words of white phosphorus that will burn through your eyes.

Sweet absorption into the darkness on the other side

of seeing, I leave my images and metaphors behind me

like a man who’s just wandered off the job

leaves his tools as they are, and follows some intuition

lingering like the fragrance of a night out of time in the air

that means nothing sustainable to anyone but him.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BIRTH OF RAIN

THE BIRTH OF RAIN

Drifting on a drab Sunday in Perth among the ashtrays and leftover sublimities of the church bells. My studio window above the rooftops a smear of willow and wet pine undulating gently in the stillness that followed the rain. Wolves on the easel, waiting to pay the rent. May of the fifth year into the twenty-first century, fifty-six, I sit in a blizzard of tobacco crumbs because I’m too poor to buy tailor-mades, coughing at the computer, wiping small drops of water like pygmy tears from the Cyclopean eye of the screen that glows with the same effulgence as the dirty sheet of the sky. The main migrations are over, but maybe these words are rosaries of late-returning birds. Two anthracite, boat-tailed grackles on a branch just beyond the grimy glass and a gust of sparrows chirrup like squeaky alternator-belts, manically elated in the wake of the storm that has just passed. My freedoms are more sober, my resurgencies probably less profound than the gray roses I give birth to here at my desk, waiting for one of these terminal urgencies of insight to sway me like a bell.

Maybe Louise later today with her Cola and cassettes, and her rough, voluptuous, laughing humanity scorning the random acids of the vulgar world that schools her, a muse who doesn’t take requests, a generous longing that’s been through a lot. So I sublimate the root-fires of my leafless batons into an auto-de-fe of white canes tired of trying to tap their way through a maze of sexual creeds, blind. The result? A novel and dozens of poems apples above the worms. And I keep her cats, Morgan and Rain, mother and kitten almost fully grown. There are no humans Louise loves more.

The kitten was born beside me on the couch at one-thirty in the morning while Louise was in the hospital and I read La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Diderot, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Rousseau and Helvetius, eighteenth century French les philosophes. Two days ago, remembering, she asked me to write a poem to celebrate the birth. And it’s two hundred and fifteen years since the French revolution went into convulsions and mothered daggers out of its wounds, and we are neither free, nor equal, nor brothers, and the birth of Rain, by association, is only the smallest of iota subscripts below the voluminous pretext of that slaughter, hardly, if at all, a mote that matters; but in a way she was born while the peasants stormed the Bastille, and time sent corpses and ideas floating facedown on one of its more famous rivers of blood all the way to the embryonic comma of this tender, contrary event. And there was honour in being a witness when Morgan jumped up beside me

and lay her head upon my right arm as a pillow, the great red text

with ivory pages open to the public like the Vatican before me

as the soft, gray satchel of her body shuddered with the natal lightning

of a different storm, the quickening eruptions of a different riddle

than the one that dropped its answer like a blade

on the necks of the cropped carnations as I kept on reading, thinking

to run for a towel before deciding not to disturb her,

that a little blood on the couch wouldn’t hurt anything

compared to the streams of gore that caked the pages of my book.

And there was a humility in the act of watching, and a trust,

as if a great secret were demanding something of her

she was willing to go through hell to give. And my heart

laboured with her like a sympathetic strawberry, convinced of a miracle,

and even the colder lizards of my mind were awed

by the conception of the material immortality achieved

by the platitudinous genius of replicating genomes,

and who among temples and havens and research labs

could hold a candle to that, and what have I written, or felt, or thought,

that even comes close? And there wasn’t a manger,

but the whole of the vast, star trailing night

crowded in behind the adoration of the angel-winged lamps to observe

genesis in the portent of its light

as Morgan rose like a violent squall

and squatting let slip with a howl of wounded passage

a black, sleek pickle of life wrapped in pink ribbons

tied to the tongue-sized kite of a pink placenta

with nothing left to say

while the French Revolution lay open on the table,

crazed with vertical caesarians. Two minutes more

and the afterbirth was eaten, Rain, because she’s rippled, blind

because her eyes were queered by the living room light,

groomed and heading for the tit the way

a baby turtle waddles out of its cosmic egg with the world on its back to the sea,

her three-toed paws not yet the heavy seals of tigers,

and stumped by the impasse of continental plates

between the cushions, her first obstruction, tried, but insurmountable, I

appointed myself a force of nature as good as any

and gave her a boost to the bottle, Morgan,

a cat that seldom purrs, purring like dough

at having the cleat of her nipple kneaded into milk.

Two and a half hours I walked and waited to see if she would live;

window to window, through doors and back again, two and a half hours

to ascertain if the uncertain droplet of her heart

that reflected the hidden glory of the living

pulsed to a martial strain or the beat of a funeral drum,

or better yet, fell like music from the eaves. Everything

was given, as black cherries are given

and fingertips and stars and saffron orchids under eel-skin leaves

and drunken voices in the street proclaiming imperious ecstasies

and names and gods and dragonflies

or the silence coiled in the throats of overgrown wells

like the psalms of sleeping serpents older than the rocks is given.

And what could I do as life divined the outcome, the wyrd

of a beginning innocent as whiskers, but live the history of everything

in the mystery of the moment and wait with the wind and the trees

as others had waited for me to pull the ore from the stone

and crown my own existence? And I thought of the children

of the French nobility, I thought of Lavoisier and Buffon

who loved animals and plants and oxygen,

and fifty thousand pikes forged for the Paris militia, and Goethe

who affirmed the auspicious aspects of the sixteenth Louis’ reign,

and the train of death carts that creaked toward the guillotine

with their saloneries of elegant women shaved for death,

and of all those who had been bled for centuries by the lies

of the mitre, the robe, the sword and the crowns of luckier stars,

wasps who laid their eggs upon a living host constrained to entertain

their vicious myth of origins, and it seemed to me in passing

that this simple birth of a common kitten

in the smalltown hours of a bird-freaked morning on the verge of dawn

washed out the blood of millions in their indistinguishable graves

at the first sign of this feline gesture of primogenitive rain.

And born a Leo, flame in the tinder enough, equal to her claws, a gift,

she lived and suckled and slept in the bay of her cloudy mother

as I went off to bed, my nightwatch ended, more enhanced

by a single birthstain on the couch, her watermark,

than the thousand pages of bloodshed that drenched my weary head:

And I dreamed, a marvelous dream, a crazy blue dream

as if Bast, the Egyptian goddess of cats slept at my feet commingling

her visions with mine, images and symbols and the strange arcana

of things released from time and sequence and history

to dance freely with the dead who lived again emphatically

beyond the clamour of their chains and violated thresholds,

and it seemed to me their eyes, their incredible gold-flecked eyes

were slashed by black crescent moons that waxed and waned

like cups and flowers, like tides and the improvised hours of childhood

as if each were the pearl and the lens and the seeing

of a vast ocean of a living liquid light that fed

the umbilical rivers and womb-waters of all it called back from the night

like the words of a wounded song. And slowly as my mind

adjusted to the subtlety of the nurturing glow, I realized

this fathomless reservoir, deeper than any idea, wider

than any feeling, was the watershed of my own frail knowing,

the nacreous mother of all, older than beginnings, creatrix of all,

whole and unbounded in every atom, star, leaf, cell, skull, tear and firefly,

the fountain-mouth of form and time, nights and mornings,

everything the issue of the bell of her being, storms, bones, dreams,

suns and their planets, starfish and leopards, heroes and snails,

the thief in the window, and the burnt salts

of the excruciating murderers who cut out their own tongues

everytime they kill, spiders, fish, wheat and poppies,

and the blackholes that are the engines of other universes,

all the language and the lyric of her substance, the birth of time

in every heartbeat, chaos and cosmos in every pulse that shakes the void,

space, her skin, intelligence, her eyes,

and the wavelengths of her wild hair, the fragrance of ancient nights

that ripened like apricots, everywhere curled into galaxies,

and all, forever, without exception,

the auroral transformation of her vital radiance, and she,

without dimension, the broad canvas and inspiratrix of life.

And in an instant I saw the shadows of the generations,

billions of men, women, and children, maligned and celebrated alike,

the cursed and the blessed, the beautiful, the wise, the athletes

and the cripples, the criminals, the tyrants and the saints,

moving like the sloppy surf of autumn leaves through the darkness,

dry, used-up things, heavier than the sorrows of coal, tears of coal

and the torn pages of banished books

ushered by a wind that seemed the breathing of time itself

toward her lavish shores to drink from their own reflections

and be restored, not saved, because nothing can be lost,

like flowers to the luminous wines of life

that poured into their desiccated creekbeds like rain, like roots,

like trees and the dendritic boughs of space, like bloodstreams

in the hazardous course of tumultuous histories, each, like anyone,

like me, like you, like Louise, Morgan, Rain and Voltaire,

because the whole of the sky, the moon, the stars

are mirrored in every eye, shine in every eye like being itself,

and from every tear, every droplet at the tip of the stargrass,

from every berry of blood that stains its own seeing,

from the tiniest womb of water that falls into life through the night,

Egypt and the Nile, France, kittens, dreams, insight.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.

I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.

I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.

A poem’s got one foot on shore and one in the boat.

Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait.

Even when it’s calm, my heart is an idling storm

and every third thought is a voodoo doll

as it sees itself on the inside

behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse.

Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to put

the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva.

Look at me tracking myself all over this paper,

mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper.

How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn’t exist.

God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs.

Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood?

Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad

but once you get there it’s easy to see it’s the lily that shines

in a whole other realm of language

that everyone understands but no one can speak.

I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through.

I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly

applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals

of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch.

What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask

and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you

like a dimension you hadn’t detected in your awareness

than the light is to what you see when

you’re sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning.

What a world, hey? What do you make of it?

The marvel and the horror and the mystery

and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery

for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays

Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all,

this mere speck of nothingness that can embody

in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies?

And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear

and the way things change and disappear

as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere

and everything’s either an approximation or consolation

of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air?

I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass,

but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound

and not even the dead are as free as I am right now.

The whole universe is one big solid insight

where inanimate things are just another mode of motion

sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time,

and I’m tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter

you weren’t expecting in a language that could read you

like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint.

I’ve been listening to you for lightyears like leaves

listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight

and what you have felt about being alive

to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling,

and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels

and the generosity of their expansive interventions,

I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations.

And my feet swept out from under me

like an undertow of shadows on the moon.

Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light

of these intensities and immensities for long

this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars

without reeling in the delirium of simply being here

to witness them as if they somehow depended on us

to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids

as if they were no different from us than we were,

all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean.

The imagination transforms everything in to us.

The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them

like pyres and telescopes and censers, it’s

in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover,

it’s what makes the meteorites as kissable

as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy.

Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini,

what have you been dancing for all these years?

Have you been pearldiving among the castanets

for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell

that could sing to you like the ocean you’re lost upon?

You’re the station every seeker gets to

on a pilgrimage he doesn’t know he’s taking

where he damns the consequences and blessings alike

and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion

as he addresses himself to what’s arrayed before him

as if there were only one voice between himself and another

like a bridge that flows, like a star

that doesn’t drown in your eye like a firefly.

And if there were anything I could ever say I was

it would have to be this just as it is, this

endlessness I keep being poured out into

as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by

and disembodied space the only medium

that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations

like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars.

Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds

and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows,

and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if

someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness

see you standing on your barren precipice

and long to know what it is you’re thinking.

In order to understand you must become the thing itself.

You must abdicate your own presence to be

remotely at peace with the world, it’s a strawdog anyway,

and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse.

And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed

like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water

laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins.

I shall come to you at first as a premonition

as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight,

a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity,

and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere

and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars,

and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose.

Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground

my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain

and though I look at you through a broken window,

the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE