SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her lucidity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

SO MANY THINGS I'VE EXPOSED MYSELF TO

SO MANY THINGS I’VE EXPOSED MYSELF TO

So many things I’ve exposed myself to

I had to integrate in order to overcome and survive.

And things I didn’t choose to see and wish

I hadn’t. It’s a flurry of a day and the sky

is almost industrial for a small, country town.

Slush and slurry of above ground emotions

that haven’t mastered their medium enough

to stop wallowing in the slop bucket of the heart

and throw everything out that isn’t a vital organ.

Diesel two track snow ploughs rattle the windows

out of their winter torpor, fogged in by the patinas

of grimy memories and the sidewalks are salted

like Carthage. Traffic lights blink and sharp corners

rear up into equestrian eyelids of brown water.

And then I fall through the earth as if I’d said

no worse, there is none, and the elevator plunges

another dozen floors to the thirteenth precipice

I’ve teetered on today in a kind of existential ballet

that feels like two swans mud wrestling

for the same dumpster. The air oppressively damp

with athletic ashes. All the women packed like astronauts.

Lean, homeless dogs shivering for affection

with their heads bowed down and their eyes turned up

pathetically pleading for hand-outs from the heart

as if they’d been beaten into a false humility

by their tormentors. If life were a blues band,

they’d play harp. They’d wail at the meanness of the world.

The day passes like a loveletter from an anti-muse.

I’m fumbling for the G-spot on enlightenment.

Something beautiful and sincere to slash me open

like an envelope full of nothing if echoes don’t count.

I don’t want to be stuck here forever

like a shepherd of wolves in a sheep pen,

every second thought shedding me like a snakeskin

in a civil war between solitude and commotion.

I don’t want to huddle under a red canoe

I wear like Napoleon’s hat or a courier de bois

with a scarlet sense of life trying to keep a poppy alight,

the smoke of a small, smouldering fire

making love to the ghosts of old paramours.

Except for you who stayed that winter

like a summer constellation camping out

in the Arctic, bushing it out in the rough

like a sex kitten with tigress claws blooded on the moon.

That was sweeter than pears and sacred strawberries

in a still life with the shadow of a knife

balanced like a partial eclipse on the edge of the table

that always held my attention like a compass needle

looking for true north like a hermit thrush in an ice-storm.

God what I wouldn’t give to see you again,

not as a consolation for all the pain we avoided,

but a flame that cherried the chimney pipes with lust

and burned all the embedded bubbles of lunar creosote

out of our oceanic emotional lives for a while.

Recess in the cemetery without a school bell.

Shipwrecks at the bottom of a wishing well

with only the fireflies and reflections of the stars

trying to warn us to stay away from the lighthouses

swinging their semaphoric lanterns on shore for salvage.

I remember as vividly as tomorrow shape-shifting

in the soporific drift of two galaxies passing through

each other in the commingling of a calling

summoned to a seance even the living couldn’t ignore

when we made love on the floor in the heat

of a Napoleon airtight and you were Poland.

Did you ever get free? Did you ever establish

your independence? And that feline body of yours,

does its passive resistance still know how

to turn a fist into the caress of a wildflower

with an open palm and impossible longings?

I’ve been a root fire in an incense burner

of apostate cedars ever since my worst desire for you

and every once and awhile I still smudge

the bats from the attic at the very thought of you.

I can’t look at a salmon rose without seeing you

like Venus in the sunset above a highway parking lot.

It was winter and on a moonless night

when the lightbulb had burned out in the housewell

you still cast shadows on the snow hot enough

to keep things from absolute zero freezing

like glacially slow tears weeping in the mirrors

of my third eye, knowing it would have been an insult

to love you spiritually when I could embrace

death in the flesh as if you were the succubus of my dreams,

Lilith who made it back to the garden, childless,

or Meridiana who got Pope Sylvester into the Vatican.

I’ve never repented, recanted, or reinvented you.

I’ve always been grateful you wanted more than a muse

from me, and what I had to give I’d give trebly

as any trinity just to stand here in these flames

a fully enlightened heretic with incendiary names

for the wind that swept like a hand in blessing

over the flammable firepits of my human divinity

as I catch you out of the corner of my eye sometimes

like the waxing moon in a waning window, undressing.

PATRICK WHITE  

WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS

WATER IMAGINING MIRAGES NO LESS REAL THAN IT IS

Water imagining mirages no less real than it is.

Delusion, too, one of the many flowers

on the bitter herbs of enlightenment

that bloom in fire under the eyelids

of the pine cones dreaming on the roots

of broken evergreens towering like pagodas

in the starfields of elemental meditations.

The imagination makes an impression on the world

like the charred fossil of a leaf on a cement sidewalk,

reminiscent of a fallen starling with outstretched wings

in the autumn, aviaries of constellations singing

like canaries in a mine with hoods over their heads,

and the shape-shifting medium of this space

we inhabit, each a planet unto ourselves,

undemonstrably accommodates the suggestion

into the experience of actuality we call ourselves.

We live in the worlds we propose for ourselves

but these houses of life we occupy aren’t based

on the foundation stones of our ideals,

or the lack thereof when they turn to quicksand,

but the aesthetic approach we can’t help making

toward our own stars and atoms, as if we

were the inspiration behind their creation,

the singularity of the eyes in the black holes

of the life and death masks we keep shedding

like the eyelids of a rose in an ongoing dream

that keeps changing fragrances we can sense

but can’t explain like the numinosity

of unnamed wildflowers in an atmospheric mind.

Individuals creatively collaborate

with the collective presence of everyone

to make a persona of themselves

they only wear in private when the mirrors

turn their backs on the stars like nightwindows

lit on the inside by the fires of more intimate candles

light years closer to home. Doves of white light

or crows of black matter the same.

What do the great seas of awareness

have to fear from their own weather

in a deluge of forty days and forty nights

without landfall? Every top of the mountain

was first a seabottom, every ark,

the shipwreck of the lifeboat that saved us

from drowning on the inundated flood plains

of our own depths. And it isn’t relevant

whether the heavy bells on the nightwatch

envy the buoyancy of the moon or not,

they’re all adagios of the same picture-music

emerging like waterbirds from the same well spring

as if everything broke like the sacred syllable

of one prolonged note of a hidden voice

resonating like an empty grave beside an open coffin

in a guitar-shaped universe singing to itself

like the ocean in its own seashell, or a bee

in a big yellow rose with just a touch of sunset.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE

I HAVE BEFRIENDED MY SOLITUDE

I have befriended my solitude

and even the luster of the empty stone

I wing side-arm skipping out over the lake

like a waterbird trying to take off

is enough of a moon for me, though it sink.

Dead, wet leaves, flat as maps, almost

the scales of a fish or a snake,

or the slicked backed fur of an otter

plastered like a poultice of leeches

matting the pages of a damp book

over a glacial crack in a granite skull.

Sedimented histories of dead rivers

raised from the bottom by disjointed cliff sides.

Love lyrics of lichen and mildew.

Scalps of moss torn from the rock

by a thousand tiny root nerves

that sound like velcro being ripped apart.

Decay. Rot. Duff. Detritus. Amputated limbs

pulped into soft rungs of arboreal gangrene,

there are no burning ladders to heaven

around here, but the stars, so purely unattainable,

Orion in the leafless alders, the red spider

constellation of the Sioux, brave mother,

blazes down through its abysmal patinas of time,

like alchemists at the putrefaction and suppuration

of this earthly matrix of mortal disaster,

the air saturate with the lingering pungency

of something tragic that once happened here.

Ages of gold degenerating into base matter.

I am growing old. My thoughts walk

among notable eternities discussing my succession.

I will be driven out like a deposed wolf.

Already I wander these woods alone.

Everything says what it pretends it does not know.

Yet something whole and of its own accord

like sweetness come to the apple

still blooms within me like a moonrise

partially obscured like a pearl glowing

in a bed of clouds. Suffusions

of a pale lunar glare tempered by compassion

for the foolishness of having lived immensely

without taking down sail running before the stars

for the sheer infernal joy in the thrill

of daring the nightwatchmen

not to let me get away with it.

I stole fire, blood, love and light.

I stole my freedom back as my own birthright.

Always a star ahead of myself

I weathered the firestorms out

and lived vividly under siege in the doldrums.

I flint knapped the new moon

of my heart like obsidian

and phalanged my anger like a Clovis point

into an art of arrowheads shaped to fit the prey.

With the effortless effort of a mastered discipline,

I hit the mark like a hawk of the feathers

I was fletched in like the war bonnet of a comet

in a raid off the reservation for wild game

worthy of a warrior with the courage of a lost cause.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

THE NIGHT IS NOT A FRIEND

The night is not a friend. The stars

are far too fierce. The clarity of the air,

the absence in a small room where someone died

in a cold tone of voice reflected in the mirror.

Even the snow is mean. Things are crushed

and broken that yesterday were supple.

The river reeds have stiffened their wavelengths

that used to go with the flow into hippies

that want to stab you to death with a tuning fork.

Ice scalds my face. A deathmask of glacial acids.

All the close-knit intimacies have migrated south

and there are bearfuls of berries sleeping it off

like body fat blacked out in sensory deprivation tanks

in the grottoes and crevasses of the hills nearby,

waiting for spring to wake up in a recovery room

as the raccoons plunder gap-toothed cattle corn,

semi-hibernating to keep things cheap and low profile.

Life rationed. The earth on food stamps.

The pike idling like paramilitary razor wire

under ghostly encampments of the snow

closing its iron locks like jaws on the river,

eyelids of depression glass ice placking

one of the main arteries of the mindstream

that’s lost heart for awhile with its own resurgence.

Wood chips and burlap on the roots of the roses

brutalized by the permafrost. I cup my hands

around a small poppy of blood I’m keeping alive

in a lantern of goose-down feathers

like a petty theft of Promethean fire

more existentially pragmatic, considering the hour,

than the eternal flame the occasional drunk

huddles around in front of the Parliament Buildings.

Hunger unmarrows my fingertips

like an amputated candelabra gnawed on

by the ghostly feeling I still possess my digits

and they’re not lying on the ground

like the skeletal twigs of a leftover scarecrow

that’s lost the use of its excruciating hands.

Bush wolves and muskrat abound. The blue jays

still turn upside down upon the hour

to peck out the skunk-striped eyes

of the humbled cuckoo clocks of the sunflowers

at their prayers like old ladies bowing

their desiccated heads in a reign of terror

looking toward the earth for sanctuary

in the tomb barrows of the star-nosed moles

among the chthonic gods of their ice-age ancestors.

Juniper shrieks like a bird in a flash freeze

of its evergreen plumage in the snow

and the deer mice thwart the fox

under its prickly wings. The frozen swamp

thatched by abandoned herons’ nests,

is trying on dead trees like the peg legs

and crooked crutches of a piratical age

of prosthetic miracles. My breath steams

out of my mouth like shelter for the night

over the heating grates on the sidewalks

of Old Montreal, mother of many homeless men.

And the stars, the stars so viciously clear

I can feel their abysmal impersonality

even light years away, growing nearer and nearer to me

from the inside out like a crystal chandelier

in an ice-storm I wasn’t invited to

though I firewalk on the enlightened splinters

and glass thorns of their shattered plinths

like a one-legged man learning to dance

the pain away as I shadow waltz with myself

in the void bound snow palaces of the shining.

How cold the dead must be tonight

under their blue-lipped gravestones.

The severity of the wind toys with my jugular

like the switchblade my father tested me with

to see if I were as inhuman as his fearless genes

to be worthy of them when I was three.

The willows scourge themselves with knotted whips.

The anti-rabid hawthorn lacerates the mind

with psychotic antidotes crusading against

the contagion of mad skunks and bats,

the improprieties of blind drunk foxes

that don’t observe the subtle protocols

of paranoid slyness and nuanced cunning

and approach you like the writing on the wall.

Subliminally guilty as long as I can remember,

for reasons too abstrusely adult for me to recall,

asking for forgiveness from an indifferent intelligence

I don’t believe exists for having been born without it

like a question without an answer looking

for a graceful exit without culpability or repentance

from this labyrinth of cul de sacs my heart’s

been twisted into like an emotional escape artist,

playing kick the can with the grails

the ladies of the night offer up to the moon on meds,

as they weep like dew on the webs of the relationships

they’ve woven out of their straitjackets and chains.

I’ve taken grim chances and subjective risks in life

that made the dice themselves close their eyes

and not want to look. I ventured everything,

and I saw it all. The losing was always more intriguing

than the boredom of anything I ever won.

I was disciplined by a strict code of disobedience

and though I could wear an eyeless life mask of albino marble

long before the paint wore off the lower Apollonic orders,

sooner or later the wild irises of my moondogs

began to give me away like the dark haloes

of my heretical upbringing and everyone saw

I didn’t wear rose-tinted contact lenses like those

they took out like phases of the moon at night

only when they wanted to close their third eyes.

The reptilian shutter of my orbiting telescope

blinked like a lizard with interchangeable mirrors

at the dancing stars that came into focus

like radiant wildflowers rooted in my field of view.

Came the rain and the fire, the tears and the desire

of the dragons of dark energy that looked at the world

for what it is and what it seems, the vertiginous precipice

of dangerous raptures where lovers throw themselves

like fledglings on the rocks below, and the unassailable valleys

that slashed through the mountains as deeply as they were high

like a razor mutilating a young beauty’s thighs,

trying to cut the pain out like a sacred syllable of lies

embedded in her flesh like a starmap without any eyes.

May the changing life themes of your own mindstreams

stitch them up in time for you to follow the scars and the stars

of your own contiguous narrative back

to the lost innocence of your efflorescent moonbeams.

Sweet dreams in the madhouse, ladies, sweet dreams.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW TO SPEAK WHEN NO WORD CAN BE SPOKEN

HOW TO SPEAK WHEN NO WORD CAN BE SPOKEN

for Newtown

How to speak when no word can be spoken.

How to grieve when even the bells are broken.

How to shriek one note so high and pure

at the implacable heavens, even space cracks

the wine-goblet of the silence with a flash

of black lightning like a tuning fork where the roads

unravel like strong ropes, and the rivers

that were joined like one journey on the same bloodstream

at their sacred meeting place, put out their fires

and mourn the murdered children like an apple

the death of its seeds in late autumn. And the six doors

of the teachers and parents they were meant

to walk through without any locks on their thresholds.

How to comfort the inconsolable. How to heal

the expanding darkness of the eyeless starless abyss

of an open wound in the tangible absence of the flesh within

no scar of the moon will ever close. No candle

will ever cry hard enough to catch up to,

its single feather of a flame beating against

the impervious windows veiled in black drapery

for the fall of so many sparrows. Does God know?

Does God keep up with her songbirds so intimately

she knows them like an elementary school teacher

knows them like the lullabies and stories of her own childhood

she can sing in a closet to keep the horrors at bay?

Knows them by their smiles and the pink shrimp

of their fingers, knows them like the myriad centers

of the magic circles she draws around them

like rain and haloes on the ground she embraces

within the boundless folds of herself to protect them

like a lapwing from the snake that strikes at the nest.

Treachery come to the blessed. Blood

on the broken Easter eggs the sun

doesn’t rise from anymore like gold

from the albino ore of our highest hopes

fallen like fledglings from the dead boughs

of a false dawn the children sang to nevertheless

not caring whether it was true or not, knowing

that their praise was the only way to prove it otherwise.

Twenty buddhas and six enlightenment paths.

Six planets and twenty shepherd moons

smashed like lightbulbs and streetlamps

by a madman on a delinquent joy ride with death

shooting out the stars with a semi-automatic Bushmaster

when the pilot light went out on the furnace of his brain

and the cold crept in to a vacant space

where no fire burned in the ice-age of his blood

and the waterclocks of his tears stopped dead like glaciers.

We know the holiness of our children by the sanctity

we pour into them like homegrown wine distilled

from the vineyards of our own hearts, and we know it, too,

by the desecrations of the pariahs cloaked in darkness

like an eclipse had been pulled over their eyes like a stone

rolled over a tomb, come in the night to poison them

like housewells, to destroy all signs of the innocence

they weren’t brave enough to let master everything

they were afraid of bringing into the light like spiders

hanging rosaries of flies like trophy lines from the webs

of the ruptured safety nets of their neuronic constellations.

I bring wheat. I bring poppies. I bring chicory and asters.

I bring the crickets and grasshoppers of the field.

I bring maple keys. I bring cedar boughs. I bring

dolorous resins of pine and lunar goblets of morning glory

buzzing with honey, to entwine in their hair like a Milky Way

you can touch to your lips like the skin of their eyelids as they sleep.

I bring human sorrow, confusion, anger, shock, horror

at the insanity of the unsymbolic inanity of the event

that enshrines the absurd in the vicious indifference of the void.

I bring a sense of empathy osmotically saturated with grief

so that a stranger’s tears can run in the same creekbeds as mine

toward the same sea that binds us like the tendrils of grapevines

on the skeletal trellises and scaffolding of our own human divinity

trying to climb up and paint roses in the wine of our creation myths.

I bring my eyes and my voice and my blood

and this encrusted paint rag of a heart that’s been

wiping mirages off my brushes for lightyears

like a bouquet of brooms in a desert, hoping

to keep it clean for deeper mirrors to see

the same stars in the dark shining after me

that I once spoke to in an interrogative language

that had to be translated into the answers of my mother-tongue

before I could understand who I was listening to.

I bring a raw apple of love that isn’t soiled by polishing

to the graves of the nascent heroes and heroines

who trusted their dreams enough to achieve great things

even within the limitless confines of such small bodies,

great victories of life in everyone of their cells,

cosmic imaginations with room for stray dogs

and wounded butterflies, grail searching light swords

among the galaxies where even the black holes

looked forward to a happy ending with a cool drink

of something garish from the watering hole of a local fridge

and vowed to show up the next day with their homework half done

to begin the dance all over again. Nothing hidden. Nothing sought.

I bring the same secrets we all know but cannot say to anyone

because our voices have not grown into them yet,

and the silence is too small to contain our most sacred syllables.

I bring wisdom in the stern of an empty lifeboat

and love in the figurehead of a dauntless maiden at the bow.

I bring the same numbness of grief that will no doubt

later thaw like frost-bit fingers into ten triggers of vengeance

when the pain begins to flow like a volcano

instead of an ice-berg nine-tenths subliminally submerged.

Off in the distance, I bring a small, tender wind-chime of a child’s voice

like a shy nightstream whispering through the woods

like a stray wavelength that fell from the stars like a ribbon

undone on a gift of light, as if she were puzzling out her wonderment

like a weathervane trying to align herself

with all directions of prayer at once as she asks me

how is it possible to hold a human accountable

for things that God can’t even explain to herself.

And I place a sheathed sword of enlightenment at her feet

and refuse to mar the waters of her mindstream

with more bloodshed, until eye for eye, we all go blind.

Sometimes the insight of a firefly is enough to astonish the stars.

Or a chimney spark from the hearth of the human heart

a whole new spontaneous order of things beginning with itself.

Let us be fire on the water. Let us make the darkness whole again

with the humility of our shining filling the empty begging bowls

of our hearts pouring even the smallest grains of our light

like a harvest of stars into the empty siloes of space and time.

Let the death of our children who have fallen from us

like the fruits of our flesh, teach us to love as they did

when the whole earth was a windfall of small miracles

and the most amazing of all, them, who saw what we did not.

Let us ask from each other the same aspirations

we request from God, and let us rejoice in the labour

of meaning as much to each other as we try to mean

to our ideas of what we’re all doing walking around on the earth,

looking up at the stars, wondering if they can hear us way down here

or see their own reflections like fireflies burning in our wishing wells.

I bring my solitude to a communal place among trees.

I bring my doubt like a stranger I befriended along the way.

I bring a lost pilgrimage of children fired up like spark plugs

to go the rest of the way on their own, as if the training wheels

had just come off their mountain bikes, and they

were flying among the contrails of the stars

with streamers flowing like comets over the whitewater mane

of the Great Square Of Pegasus running the rapids

of their creative energies heeling it bareback but unbroken

through the surf of the Milky Way as if in all ten directions

of the nightsky the universe were one horse wide,

and time were nothing but the wingspan of the ride.

Child by child, life grows at its own pace

like a celebration that’s always just getting under way

like horse-drawn floats of apple bloom in a spring parade

or when winter carves crystal chandeliers out of ice

the coals in the eyes of the snowman by the mailbox

catching fire like diamonds caught in the highbeams of the stars

because some child stared at it from the living room window

to keep it from feeling all alone by itself in the front yard.

There may be universal laws that abstrusely govern here

as if one size fits all, but it’s the mystic specifics

we abide by like the fragrance of light on a child’s hair

when a mother is drying it like a comet in the rain

after a cucumber-coconut-apricot bath wash

she just had to try like a new flavour of candy on her skin.

Or a boy being brave as his father about a bruise.

The paradigms of the constellations might go out

like a candelabra in the firestorm of an apocalypse,

and the petals of the daisy chains huddle close

to one another holding their hands together like buds again

to ward off the eerie perils of a per-emptive eclipse,

but it’s the life we store like dreams in the corners of our eyes

as we glance by a child among her crayons on the floor

proud to teach her chaos to colour inside the lines,

delighted with the dawn if it should bring the sun back

like a ball in the mouth of a slobbering mongrel

that licks her face like a salt block

just to hear her squeal with delight as she

throws it over hand without expecting it

to ever come down again like a childhood

in a solar system organized by helium balloons.

Improbable concourses and course corrections of happenstance,

alarms and guards and gates and small arms licensed to kill

and what was visionary about the way we saw one another

all singing in the same lifeboat together rowing for shore,

not knowing whether we’d make it past the reefs and rocks

like salvage or salvation, now a narrowing of our field of view

into a mistrustful invigilation of our own kind as we learn

to live in the shadows of the black holes and haloes

of trap door spiders that don’t want to be recognized

like strangers in the light of our street cameras with eyes just like us.

Let the loss of our children empty our arms of the things we were

mistakenly carrying like burdens we took upon ourselves

into a wider embrace of the new moon in the old moon’s arms

like a disparate reunion of opposites in the circumpolar bear hugs

we give each other in tears around the graves of the very young

who bring us together to weep like bells in unison

for the kyrie eleisons and consolation dawns

in the swelling clarions of our clear-eyed grief.

Let us remember that it is our eyes, purged of ashes,

though constellations appear and disappear like mirages

on a starmap in an hourglass of pyramids and quicksand,

that keep the fires of the stars alight on the nightwatch

that looks in on a sleeping child, and leaves the door ajar

where the intimate mystery of life embodied in flesh and blood

goes on dreaming like growth rings we can understand

the infinite measure of by the enlargements of our heartwood

marked like a calendar of full moons rising in the doorway

like the floodwaters of love overflowing the starmud of our mindstreams

as if there were oceans of awareness ahead that only a child,

one hand after another, could guide us through together

like blind prophets and despairing oracles fearful of our own weather.

Let the house of life not be dismantled by inclement elements

or lowered into the grave like an orphanage for dead children

and even if the wolf huffs enough to blow it down

let us raise it again like the strong rafters of our children

blooming like the crocuses of pup tents all over the back lawn.

Let us follow them through a hole in a fence a child wide

that can’t keep us out of paradise for any longer than it takes

to be the last to enter like twenty six bodhisattvas

rising like the starcluster of the Pleiades in the east

to mark the trail of what they didn’t hesitate to reveal to us

like fireflies in a telescope with eyes full of wonder at both ends,

unborn, unperishing like the flight of hinges on an open gate

as if our exits and our entrances were two wings on the same bird

singing on the dead bough, singing on the green,

of things as there are, seen and unseen, like the blossom

of a moonrise in the orchards of spring, like leaves

in the autumn summoned like a choir to a seance

of inner fires that burn like distant stars without smoke

by the dancing masters and singing coaches of the wind

that knows each by the dawn they’ve come to rejoice in

and at nightfall, the unique inflections of the bells in their voice.

PATRICK WHITE