I UNBURDEN MY HEART AND MIND TO THE RIVER AND THE NIGHT

I UNBURDEN MY HEART AND MIND TO THE RIVER AND THE NIGHT

I unburden my heart and mind to the river and the night.

Stars in the spring run off of the urgent waters

breaking like a rush of passion over the skulls of the rocks

that have felt all this before like a recurring prophecy,

young watersnakes hunting juvenile frogs along the shore,

colonies of unknown waterbugs sprawling across

the thin skinned surface of a black mirror as the water

glints off their backs in the moonlight like tiny jewels

lost without a setting to embed themselves in

except for the occasional corona of light a wave

crowns them in only for a moment in passing their way.

I keep the stars close. Immensity near at hand

like a kind of back up wisdom when mine’s too narrowed

by some local concern and I forget how oceanic

awareness is once it’s disentangled from the nets

and the starmaps, the flypaper and the spider webs,

the separatist ego drapes it in like the bling of a pimp.

Sometimes I walk the rounds of the whole zodiac

like a nightwatchman holding his hokey lantern up

like a heart to look into their eyes through a dark window

into my own soul and see as deeply as I can

whether their bemused regality is sitting on

the lower terraces of this Colosseum I often feel

closing in around me like a slow garotte,

witness to this blood sport of human being

against human being, the savagery of our elaborate sentience.

And I can feel the febrile contagion of my own vehemence

arising within me like a volcanic vent

at the bottom of the lunar sea of my subconscious

trying to thrive in the depths of myself like a species

that’s never been touched by the light

and I need the vastness, I need the herbs

of the silence and awe of the illimitable vastness

to cool the ferocity of the nuclear wounds

that burn like white phosphorus marrowed

in the pipe bombs of my bones. I look beyond the stars

into the huge impersonality of an eyeless abyss

and its indifference is morphine and heavy water

to the meltdown in my heart that’s boiling me alive

in my mother’s milk like the kids by Capella in Auriga

or another blackhole in the Via Galactica.

I stop hemorrhaging like a lifeboat in a bad dream.

I fill in the black hole in my heart like an avalanche

on the spade of a gravedigger patting down the earth

with the ironwork of a few words to help

the medicinal enormity of the mountainous void

I’m buried in settle into the grave of its own dark valley

like these hills into the long barrows and bone-boxes

of the broken birch groves toppled like the masts

of a ghost fleet caught sleeping in Cadiz while still in port

like a ruinous victory snatched from the defeat

of everything it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever believe in again,

though, of course, I’ll endorse the probable concourse

of good second guesses it’s necessary to live your way through

into a solitude you have no doubt has abandoned you

to your own inner resources as my mother would say.

I looked for beauty in suffering and I’ve seen it

clear enough through my tears and the tears of others

like fireflies breaking through the night fog

after the storm has passed, haphazard miracles of light

no one could have anticipated on the darkest night

of their soul spitting lightning on the ground

like the downed power-line of a severed spinal cord

writhing like a wounded snake unravelling itself

like a Celtic knot in agony not knowing what to strike at.

I’ve seen the hand of a dying man reach up

and rest an open palm against the shoulder of a friend

leaning over him, desperately trying to staunch

the stars and the roses and their emergency ladder of thorns

from bleeding out of him like music from a funeral bell

as if this last human gesture of farewell said it all

more eloquently than the ageless silence that followed

his hand sliding down the slope of his friend’s arm

like the last caress of the companionable dead

toward the unassuageable dread of the living

gaping well beyond sorrow into an emptiness

that’s never been disturbed by a whisper of eternity or time.

It means what it means. It is what it is. Fair enough,

as far as it goes, but when does suffering become a blessing,

how is life exonerated from the pain it inflicts

upon itself in the name of keeping the show on the road,

eating its young and old, its best and worst in the same breath,

death, death, death, death, death, the erosive pain

of everyday’s little bit less, little bit less, until we’re

so used to the pervasiveness of what’s lacking

it seldom occurs to us we’re even hurt, or anything

is missing though we mourn the more obvious atrocities

it’s living with a sorrow so unfathomable, the lachrymae rerum

the tears deep down things like housewells

of the wounded watersheds where our spirits

are blunted like swords we lay down like light

upon our own mindstreams in tribute and surrender

to why it has to be this way at all, we can’t explain,

and why, if I can imagine a world without pain,

awareness without an error of perception, without damage,

where we progress from bliss to bliss without

the intervening abyss that shadows us like sorrow,

where hunger and eating don’t exist because

they’re neither self-sustainable nor functional,

because there’s nothing malicious about chaos,

could not life have evolved so there was no alternative,

no indispensable right and wrong path to the proliferant joy

that revels like a starling in the fountains and the willows

of just being alive with no notion of mortality

but the ongoing mystery that perennially

roots and blooms in us like an unknown wildflower

we keep coming up with names for according

to the way it changes, interdependently emanating

out of the same awareness by which we see it

like that star through the burgundy branches of the willows

so much closer to me than my eyes are,

it’s rising like a firefly on a wind like seeing,

like being, that has no within or without, no gap

between the wonder of its creation and mine,

as we arc into existence simultaneously

in the context of this prophetic medium of mind

that remembers yesterday like a future it never leaves behind.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

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

LIFE'S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

LIFE’S A SLOPPY BUSINESS, DAUGHTER

Life’s a sloppy business, daughter. You

average out the crucials, adjust your motives to the stars

that have been tinkering with you since childbirth,

flutter your eyelashes like butterflies over the ruins

of last year’s flowers as if you were dropping pamphlets

over a subjugate nation, exhorting the weeds to ideals

promoting horrid compromises with common sense

and the general viciousness of the world embodied

in the dispassionate vengeance of corporate profit margins

to deny a foreign national four year old girl

whose amateurism still trusts people’s eyes

food, medicine, school, water, rights to the rain

freedom from from life as a silk worm

in a garment factory run by the most loathesome of men

in the finest clothes economic slavery’s got to offer

as if you could wash the sewer of a soul off

in a shower of gold that gilds you like a maggot

in an Armani suit, or a political tapeworm elected to public office

to feed off the poor as if it were for their own good,

to promote prosperity in a graveyard with mineral rights

to your bones. A Via Cloacum of dry-eyed evil in the world

emptying into a dead sea of consciousness like the swill

of trivialized krill, the bread and circuses

of engineered distractions with sunshades unfolded

like the parasols of the Roman navy as the gutted mob

gluts on the entrails of victims unluckier than they were

when the wasp came to lay its egg on their forehead

and eat them less engagingly from the inside out like worms

in their eyes and their hearts. O savage evolution

I won’t smear sparkles on the eyelids of the dead

you desecrate like the flesh of your own flesh

to get on with life like an imperial starmap of client constellations.

I suppose I should be offering you more rounded wisdom

than this thornapple of insight into inhuman nature,

more of a sweet-natured sunset than this nasty false dawn

where every new beginning by acclamation means

the death of sentience in someone else, by the millions

throughout history, where the truth is always deeply indebted

to the ingratiating co-sponsors of the capitulant facts.

But I abhor sloughing the suffering of the world off

like a soft, old man whose eyelids have wrinkled

like the withered skin of daylilies, who’d rather

blur and blunt his vision of life like broken glass

sand-blasted in the gentrifying tides of sea stars

he doesn’t want to cut his feet on firewalking the Road of Ghosts.

I’m repulsed by the geriatric deathmasks of strategic kindness

defrauding their own wisdom like a gnostic gospel of cataracts

in their eyes, mystic flowers in the sky, buffing the toxicity

of the crescents of the moon, because the bad fang fell out

and the only one they’ve got left they’re trying to pass off,

sensing they’re too weak to hurt anyone anymore,

as anti-venom to the same kind of people they’ve been

biting all their life for their place at the table above the salt

in a snakepit cannibalizing their wavelengths like black holes

harmonizing with the music of their uninhabitable celestial spheres

attuned to their own background universal hiss. Frog-swallowers

and nest-robbers trying to bury their thorns like

the hands of a clock in the foliage of roses that smell

like the embroidered pillowcases they no longer dream on.

Dozy, rosey, barnboard frames, picturing the punk and pulp

of rotten heartwood trying to rinse the bathtub rings

the rain left like the sediment of a dry creekbed

running through their veins like cracked starmud

waiting for a flashflood of the shining waters of life

to lower their blood pressure like the first

heart attack of the spring to wake the toads up from hibernation.

What travesties of human excellence I’ve witnessed

in the hearts of men and women who settled for less

than the lives they’ve been given to live randomly

out of the blue, blue sky like an accidental gift

of inestimable value they kept appraising like fool’s gold

by the light of a full moon that never came to harvest.

The mind is an artist and it is able to paint the worlds

with great skill and subtle hues of technical cunning

that can transform the opacity of the solid

into the myriad translucencies of the unimaginably real.

But, remember, you’re whole life’s nothing

but a portrait you’re working on from the inside.

A solitary figure in a mindscape listening

to the picture-music of a dream grammar

that keeps shape-shifting like the palette of a voice

trying to catch the atmospherics of whatever mirage

you’re rendering in the watercolours of your tears at the time

before the light in your heart changes and your bones

are laid in a grave like the field easel you’ve

been packing around with you all your life

like the stick people you drew in childhood.

Make an art of them. A masterpiece of heart,

eye, hand, and mind. Flesh the world out

in your own humanity and cherish it like a life study

you modelled for yourself in the mirror you peered into

without turning to stone at what you saw

or asking who’s the most beautiful of all,

but remaining true to your own eyes

like the creative bounty of a nightsky

whatever uplifts, whatever befalls your starmud

like the nocturnal waterlilies of the Pleiades in a low place,

or that whisper of heretical silence in the heart

that resonates throughout the whole of space

like the curse and the blessing of a habitable planet

bound to the stake of a star for remembering what it is

to be indefensibly radical about remaining compassionately human.

PATRICK WHITE  

CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

CALM. COOL. THE FAN ON. THE WINDOWS OPEN

Calm. Cool. The fan on. The windows open.

The cat on the windowsill and the last yahoo

yeehawing his way out of town on his bad ass bike

as he opens the throttle to startle the people

sitting in doorways like candles in niches

up and down the street he’s the clown of frowns,

a legend of gossip when there’s nothing else to talk about.

Trying to write my way mutatatively out of the shadow

of a bell of sadness being lowered over my heart

like a Mason jar over a spider or a bee, depending

on how you look at it and which you fear the most.

Life a strange elixir of toxins and honey running

through my veins, it’s funny how even

the sweetest things in life always involve stingers.

Consider the secret destinies going on in upstairs apartments,

illicit lovers, dope deals, crushed hearts and dreams

waiting for someone to come and dig them out of the avalanche,

Severe solitudes letting the stars erode in the dust bowls

that lie silent, unmoving, and old on the moon

because nothing grows there but these intense shadows

I’ve been swimming through like a star caught

like a black dwarf on flypaper in the tar

of black matter in the irisless eye of a black hole

that wasn’t on any starmap but my own a few minutes ago.

Think of how much despair has been overcome

by the false dawn of hope in the windows

of all those rooms indicting the light of their lives

when they realize in each other’s eyes love

is a dream grammar of mirages and shadows

and the heart, for the most part, to judge from my own,

is semi-literate when it comes to reading its own signs.

The crazy sly don’t know where their lies begin and end

and call their falsehoods, axiomatic. The crazy wise

don’t know whether to laugh out loud from the hara

of their cosmic center between their loins and belly-button

like a trickster god that mocks their alibis

with the enlightened compassion of an heretical crow

or cry, cry, cry like an old sixties song that slashes

the heart open like a waterclock that fell upon its own sword

like the hour hand of era indifferent to the dignity of time.

Can you guess how much fear and terror, anxiety, paranoia,

grief, resignation, betrayal, and self-effacement

as if somebody threw acid in the eyes of a mirror

that could read them like a book, have been endured

like the coils of the nightmares that must have swallowed them whole

for there to be so little evidence left of them now,

and the parties and the sex-fests, the cloney, intellectual dens

of the confrontationally obnoxious adolescents

looking at the world through the eclipse in the eyes

of black match heads that burnt out well before they bloomed?

The broken promises of youth. The unpredictable disappointments

of old age made trivial by the absence of family,

and a backyard to grow cucumbers and geraniums in.

If I were a Cyclops and not a poet I would definitely

look at everything from a one-eyed positive point of view,

but as it happens I’ve got two eyes in the dark to see with

and I’m not blinded by my own blazing when it comes

to shining a light on the way things are binarily true

like galactic waltzes and the ghost dances of most stars.

Nor am I in the habit of mistaking a new moon

for a total eclipse, so, yes, I can see happy children

going to bed at night in the finger-painted bedrooms

of these converted office spaces, lightyears from here

looking back at them reflectively like a watershed

of the extraordinary ordinary themes of life that found

a place for themselves in the world like threads of fate

on the woof and weft of the waxing and waning loom of the moon.

For all the locked horns that gore the heart

on arguments that would rather be right than loved,

I can see the new moon in the arms of the old

like lovers on the sly getting away with each other.

I can see how beautiful the lilacs must have been

in the spring of so many years ago by counting

the tree rings under the eyes and in the heartwood

of an old woman who revelled in the rain

when joy was till coyly deciduous and the passage

of time and the tears deep down in things

not so solemn and evergreen at the approach of eternity

in the presence of the lilacs foaming over the fence.

PATRICK WHITE

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings

were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time

where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline

of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath

its waterclock after the house had burned down,

the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow

frosting the streets outside and my rage

at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,

weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,

hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars

for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence

that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,

knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted

as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes

an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,

meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat

like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,

I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time

as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword

I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces

like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light

on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute

like the falling of the snow, and remember

when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep

so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down

like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have

sweetened over time like the labour of a human

that tried like the light and the rain

to add an element of heart to the mix

before the work were taken out of his hands

and returned to the root as he must be soon

with a little more love, a little more beauty,

a little more compassion in the visionary tastes

of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams

this passion for life can seem sometimes,

and how strange the vows of the fireflies

we once exchanged, pledging ourselves

to each other’s stars as if they’d forever

remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.

Dream-figures in passage who don’t always

wake up with us when we do and so much

torn like a purple passage out of the book of life

like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do

is share your memories with your solitude

like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,

autumn burning in her green eyes and the council

of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips

where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs

that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now

it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,

all the mystic details conserved like data

in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates

that once banged in the wind like applause,

unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,

and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls

we consulted like new moons every spring,

thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath

gone from the windows we used to draw in

trying to get the light right on our tears

when the sun came out after a lightning storm

and watergilded the rain that dripped from the leaves

like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,

and gently restored the direction of prayer

to the deranged fields, standing the goblets

of the poppies upright on their altars again,

combing the hairknots out of the dishevelled grass,

coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings

to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines

as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill

for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE