MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I'VE LIVED

MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I’VE LIVED

My words taste of the flavours of the lives I’ve lived.

I cauterize my wounds on the stars. Runes, cuneiform,

scars, I’ve even found a way to use spiderwebs

like the fridge magnets of an exoteric alphabet.

Everything’s written in sand, in water, on the wind.

In the cursive script of the Kufic treeline. So many leaves.

So many mother tongues. Ciphers of the nightcreek

whispering to itself sleepwalking through the woods.

I may hold flowers now, and the fragrances of petunias

and coleus waft down the street, polluting the carbon monoxide,

but my heartwood, though scorched, is still steeped

in the firewater of a whiskey barrel I was once

keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon for being

a drunken sailor absent without leave. I indulged

my madness in the spirit of a dragon that couldn’t

hold anything back. I didn’t smoulder like a man

who expected to be the victim of an adage, I burned.

In the perfection combustion of my inspiration

I left no soot on the wings of the discoloured butterflies.

Sincerity was wild and angry, sacrificially cruel,

the sacred thorn that rent the third eye of the rose.

If you weren’t living and dying as ferociously as you could,

you were a fool. An inquisitor with a dunce cap

in the corner, or a balancing act with a fear of heights

with your head in a noose and your feet firmly planted

on a two-legged footstool. Sorry for the roar

of overconfidence, of course, I am, most of it was bluff,

but it seemed like a necessity at the time

and a lunatic’s got to do what lunacy does

to renew its blood oath to the moon on the edge

of a sword it pulled out of the stone of its own heart.

It wasn’t about eviscerating the living on the altars of art.

It was a severe initiation into my own estrangement

into the occult mysterion of poetry that makes you feel

more unworthy the deeper it enters your bloodstream

like a dream of darkness and stars, as you bond

like a blowtorch or a comet welding your eyes

to the darkness and the stars as a rift in your skull

opens like an observatory on a lonely mountain

to the immense intensity and solitude of it all

and your mouth is pryed apart by the voice

of a wound as old as inchoate creation itself.

I look into the abyss, watershed, void, dark abundance,

bright vacancy of the emptiness ahead of me

as space accelerates locally into a starless night

and I haven’t blinked yet at the darkness growing inside

like a new moon burying the bones of its dragons

at a sky burial under the gravestone of a constellation

shining like the ashes of a firepit you won’t find

with the aid of a starmap, and I wouldn’t call it

a change of attitude, or the recantation of a false confession

I never made to ease the torment of my mean-eyed inquisitors,

(they never had a clue about what to ask me anyway)

but I approach the genius of my left-handed solitude

with more gratitude than I once did, and my sense of wonder,

though it never put on airs, gapes in humility

at the gravegoods that grace the wake of this horrific beatitude.

PATRICK WHITE

MY LITTLE BOOK'S OUT THERE BEING READ

MY LITTLE BOOK’S OUT THERE BEING READ

My little book’s out there being read by someone

I hope somewhere like the plank of a shipwreck

with my name on it, the flyleaf of an artificial coral reef,

you gotta go deep, you gotta drown your book

on the moon, an underwater, island, barrow tomb

so you can bury your death in the life it gave shelter to.

Hey, little fish, welcome to my wake. I won’t say

I sank for your sake, but, here, where my oracular bones

are being pearled at the bottom of the Sea of Tranquillity,

it’s good to see you thriving as if evolution

were a high end colourist with a mad palette of hotspots

and at night, schools of argent insights emerging

in moonlight like the leaves of the wind in

the silver, Russian olives that lyrically mentored me on earth.

And, you, squirmy worm, literrateur, you can tunnel

through me like a blind, star-nosed mole boring

black holes for what was most illuminating about me

to leak out of like the shadows of the shadows you see

as you follow the crumbs of the feast deeper into

the labyrinth you’ll never come to the end of

like a wandering scholar following its tail back to its mouth,

the spitting image of a vicious, disappointed sentimentalist.

Have a happy. The party’s on me. Knock yourself out.

Can’t you hear the moon bawling like a large mammal

from the ice age in a tarpit on the dark side of life?

My little book’s out there being read

like the poetic genome of some potentially

extinct species of some hominid who knew

it wouldn’t be long before he was the last of his kind,

and spit-painted his handprint like the negative

of a silhouette he never coloured in with lifelines

like a starmap that might have led the gypsy palmists

astray like a ghost with a candelabra in an open doorway.

My little book’s out there, indelible as hardback and ink,

sporting the vision of life I once wore like constellations

tattooed on my eyes so my tears couldn’t wash them out

like the flood myth of a watercolour I never meant.

My little book’s out there shining like a fossil

in the eyes of the graverobbers on the black market

of the Burgess Shale of my sedimentary starmud,

indexed in the Dewey Decimal System in the library

of Ashurbanipal. Cosmetic scalpels like the birdsfeet

of sandpipers scarring the lyrics of their song

in wounded clay left out to bake in the kiln of the sun.

It’s healthy to mock yourself like the fool

at the foot of a throne the peasant’s revolt in you

was always inclined to abdicate like a gravestone

after Richard the Second lied to Wat Tyler in l381.

Even if you’ve made a sacred clown of yourself

doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun

in a dans macabre with death when it takes you

way too seriously like a terminal literalist who expects

you to mean everything you express as if

you weren’t just skywriting among the stars

like a ghost declaring how much it loved so and so,

no boundary stones like the prophetic skulls

of the turf wars we make of our global evanescence.

My little book’s out there somewhere, a petal of flame

that blooms in fire once every seven thousand years

like the pine-cone pagoda of a Zen monastery

with its one good eye on enlightenment, and the other

on the shadows of God it casts like gravegoods into the abyss.

Nothing more rapturous than an heretical arsonist

being burnt at the stake of his own auto de fe

like a scapegoat on the pyre of a left-handed sacrifice

as the anti-venom to the toxic innocence of the orthodox

who purify themselves like smallpox among the natives,

guilt by infection. Better to eat your own ashes in hell

than contaminate your neighbour’s spiritual housewell

with the decaprified horns of the goatsheads

that poison the waters of life with lies about the clarity

of waterlilies festering like nuns in virgin swamps.

I’ve never had an agenda for what I wanted to achieve

when I fell in love like a hole in the road on my way

to someone else, as if I had an errand to run that

my life and death depended on arriving in time

with news of the misdiagnosis of everything

I thought was wrong with me in a gnostic moment

that turned me into a happy docetist in the urn

of old papyri buried in a cave until a goatherd came along

and woke me up like a genie in a lamp

burning like serpent fire in the snakeoil

milked from the paps of Medusan amphorae

as if there’d been a mass mastectomy of breasts

that could kill as easily as they healed the visionary fevers

of the poetically snakebit. My little book is out there

somewhere like a binary star system doing

a ghost dance around a firepit that blossoms

like the eternal flame at the sacred forks

where the sacred rivers join like the tines

of a snake’s-tongue searching the air like lightning

for someone to strike like a root-fire of revelation.

Until the autumn oak breaks into a conflagration of leaves

how else can you shake a windfall of acorns down to earth

for the wild boars to keep growing the tusks of the moon

you’ll have to pay death one night for your passageway

to the other side of your unsalvageable Orphic descents?

My little book’s out there somewhere like a liferaft

in an hourglass with nobody on it, riding the thought waves

of strange seas of awareness where the stars

go pearl diving and come up with the moon.

The same mindstream I was carried along on

like an autumn leaf, cutting through a stranger’s woods.

Flightfeather of a book in a gust of stars like Cygnus

that can open its wings and fly like a cross

or land a high dive like a wild swan on a river,

threading the eye of the needle between an eagle

and a flying horse. My little book’s nocturnal

but it’s not morose. Aesthetically infernal, but not an urn.

PATRICK WHITE

AFTER YOU LEFT

AFTER YOU LEFT

After you left your absence turned into more of a muse

than your presence seldom was. Sat at my desk

and fell on my pen over and over again like a samurai sword

until I got the knack of gutting myself properly.

Last of the summer’s late blooming poems,

black-eyed Susans and asters, monosyllabic tragedies,

dutiful domestic farces demanding a coven of doves

be sacrificed to the darkness I was remanded to,

my heart a cross between a spiny sea urchin and a voodoo doll.

And at night, the beautiful, September stars, my God

who would have thought something so distant

and impersonally uncaring could have hurt like that?

Loved you well and faithfully while you were around,

and gave you my assent when it was time

for you to go, blessings on your head and house,

you be the one who goes off down the road

to fulfil the promise of a new life without me,

and I’ll be the one, my last sacrifice, who

stayed at home and died because it would be

neo-romantically rude not to, without you.

Functioned by rote, the reflex habit

of a lifeboat drifting in the abyss. Too much

significance to everything, especially the things

your hands had touched, mythically inflated sublimities

that scorched my fragile equanimity with gamma ray bursts

to the third eye as my vision of life boiled off

like the last forgivable atmosphere

of the brutally habitable planet I was living on at the time.

I was precise and grateful for the hidden solace

in the ritual commonality of simple human chores

from feeding the dogs and the cats, to

shaving my face with a razor blade

and cutting my reflection a hair shy

of its jugular vein to see which one of us

would blink first. Freedom bound, I liberated

as many chains as I could. I kept the bird-feeders

full of sunflower seeds when colder nights

began to come on. Dusk was always the worst

between the prelude of the beginning,

with a couple of false dawns to start with,

and the epilogue at the end, like the last word

of the day in the twilight of the bardo state

in between when everything you are is behind you

and what you’re about to become is still nothing,

and you’re standing beside a leafless locust tree

that’s all thorns, and the stars are emerging

as the darkness saturates your mindscape like black lung

mining diamonds of adamantine insight

in an emotional tarpit with an occult sense of humour

that leaves you as bruised and numb as if someone

had just inoculated you against the constellation

you were born under like a pathogen that can have

a mystic effect on those who have not been exposed

to it before, and all you can do is stand like a fever

in an ice-age and gape, just gape through the gates

of separation at how immaculately lethal forever can be

when you’re still trying to cling to a relative state of mind.

Time can be ambidextrously ironic or it can

stare at you like a bad joke waiting for a laugh at the end

and all you can feel is something remotely eerie

and exhaustively incomprehensible about the way it grins

like the skull of the moon rising over the sacred groves

of unmummifying birch trees where we buried

the barn cats the fishers and coyotes got, placing

large boulders on top of their corpses to keep

the dogs from digging them up again. Bast

the cat goddess look over them and the white flowers

of the bilabiate catmint you planted for feline

and butterfly alike, keep blooming in the thickets

of the thousand small kisses you left them where they slept.

The dream’s moved on since, but one night up there,

I wept the stars out of my eyes like an ice storm

of glass splinters as if the plinths of the light

were all that was left under the brittle calyx

of the deft rose frost bit by the fangs and thorns

of the cold that sliced my lips like a paper cut.

For awhile after the last rose had died,

my solitude began to taste like blood on the snow

in a backwoods winter abattoir. And then the spring

and the long impassable roads of starmud

waiting for the rain to pack them down.

Love hurts most when it begins to thaw out

like the frozen fingers of a child with its hands to the stove.

Marrow aches like slush in the bone, the agony

leaves nothing to the imagination to play with.

Endured, it passes like the death of a favourite cat.

Meow. Hope I purred around you more than I roared

because there was always so much more

to thank you as I do than forgive you for.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOW ME THE CLOUD THAT BERATES ITSELF

SHOW ME THE CLOUD THAT BERATES ITSELF

Show me the cloud that berates itself

because it isn’t a rainbow. Sometimes

it’s a firefly sitting on the throne of the star

in your eye, sometimes it’s just a distant

farm light through the trees. Universe

in a grain of sand, one grain of sand,

the mass of the universe, who talks about

a feather’s weight of sky or two and a half

millilitres of tears when you cry? When

things turn toxic it’s often safer to drink

from the mirages than it is the water.

Illusions don’t always pollute your reflection.

And the truth doesn’t always set you free.

Sometimes it puts you under house arrest

for lightyears in a penal zodiac of required tattoos.

Ah, sweetness, this is the fourth time

in three months he’s left you half-destroyed

inside and you’re the strawdog he throws

on the pyre after the ritual reunion

when the water burns and you reach for

a magnum of fire to slake your thirst for love.

I know he fills your pillow full of doves

when you lay your head down to rest at night

but, child, every time you wake up you’re

alone again in a snakepit, flapping like a lapwing

to distract the danger from the fledglings

he’s already swallowed like a dragon the moon

to bring on the rain. You, weeping in despair.

All the songbirds of your most tender emotions

detected in a no fly zone of dove-seeking missiles

fired from a nuclear birthday cake offshore.

You’ve given him a lot more than much,

and he forgot you were born. What does that tell you?

His heart isn’t on you? It’s probably true

to judge by the watercolours streaming from your eyes.

I’m your older, groovy, mentor-friend, whether

I like it or not and I mostly don’t because

it’s a straitjacket. I’m not a bird net meant to catch you

on the fly when you fall out the nightsky

like an asterisk from the starmap where you’re

trying, Sisyphus would have been proud of you,

to shine like a constellation of votive candles

you were born under like the wing of a prayerwheel.

You’re a pudgy teen age girl but that’s just

patches of snow in the spring of global warming

and they’re dwindling like ice floes in the Arctic.

You’ll be a glassblower with an hourglass figure

by the time you get out of the kiln. You don’t

have to take a blowtorch to the roots of the rose

you’re becoming to thaw them out before their time.

You don’t have to take a crowbar to the petals of the flowers

to get them to bloom any faster. Summer’s coming

and the wild grapes won’t be too fat on the vine.

Leave him. Abandon his shrine to the scorpions

and snakes. Let the wind whine like a ghost

through that portcullis with lockjaw he bared

like iron teeth at your idea of turning him into

a rose arbour over a passageway that didn’t snarl

like thorns in the mouth of a siege skull.

Yes, pain for awhile, separation, severance, ordeal,

arbitrary lightning strikes that have nothing

to do with karmic retribution, but stop

standing like a phoenix in an urn of your own ashes

as if your heart were guilty of some hidden heresy

every time he accused you of witchcraft

for jumping naked through your own fire

like a tigress in a circus act with a ringmaster

who likes the sound of his tongue cracking like a whip.

In the unified field theory of love, men are relative

but women are still the high priestesses of the absolute.

Introduce him to your absence. Quit revising yourself

like the endless re-write of the first draft

of the loveletter between the bed sheets

of the empty envelope you’ve been inspired

to approach like a muse who thinks it’s dishonest

if she doesn’t offer the whole of her mystery up

like a feast of the harvest moon to the famine

of the seven lean kine that prefer their own

scorched earth policy, cooking in their own juices,

to the plenty you put on the altar like a bad bet

on your best ideals. Don’t you know yet, little moon,

love is subliminally darkest when it’s new,

and he’s suppose to make the sacrifice to you?

I’m not an artificial lung, but I’ve been

sleepwalking like a poet through this

long dreamtime of love like a poet lingering

in the doorway of several houses of life

that took my precession of the equinoxes in

like a zodiac of women who kept the porchlight on

for me to wander in out of my dazed homelessness

like a Luna moth crazed with a desire to singe

the witching wands of my antennae off

like burnt matchsticks in a raging forest fire.

That might not make any sense to you now,

but trust my scars when I say, inspiration is

the merest taste of your dark abundance,

the remote cachet of a nocturnal rose as

dangerously intriguing as the ocean of an afterthought.

Love isn’t a sunami. It’s an undertow,

the whisper of a distant nightstream that promises

to show you a way out of the woods like Beatrice

or a pagan water sylph that isn’t salmon farming

mermaids in the sacred pools love dies in

wholly gratified in the eyes of its own interior vision

like those who have been summoned to swim

through stone to the summits of the highest

from the depths of the lowest the mountain

casts like the shadow of the valley of it flows

down into from the source to the roots of itself.

So you’ve been rejected by a cult of indifference

like the rerun of a power play from the early sixties

that’s made it like the half-life of a radioactive element

as far as your generation to turn the milk of human kindness

green with jealousy you haven’t been curdled yet

by the b.s. that soured the cow that jumped over the moon

and ran away with the coke spoon? Everybody’s

going to fake the moment was more dramatic

than it was, if they were there, and you were not.

Generation after generation, the ingenues age

like waterclocks all on the same wavelength

as they make their way back to the sea like fingerlings.

As with love, what’s culpable about life

isn’t that slander about original sin, but

the perennial spontaneity of its innocence.

A dream without precedent, authority or experience,

strangers from the first encounter to the last,

no history of solitude to consult, no hagiographies

of the embodiments of the mystery when it takes a form.

Love is foolish to the wise, wisdom to the clowns,

a chemical to the biologist, a white plague to the cynic,

inspiration to the poet, prophecy for the blind,

Love moves, sometimes mountains, but it’s not a motive

anymore than a river is. Even less an alibi

for the criminal negligence of a negligible heart

or even one as full as yours is, that vow of apple bloom

you made to the windfall to come, punishment

for trying to love someone so much you believe

their sins of omission are the faults and errors

you’re deceived by in the mirrors of the nightmares

you’re playing solitaire with in an isolation cell

as if the terrors of paradise were your only solace in hell.

PATRICK WHITE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling

through my own immensities here at my desk,

one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.

My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.

I’m on the dark side of my eyes.

No one’s ever been here before.

No window, no wall, no door,

I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.

I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.

I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.

Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself

but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.

I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute

that didn’t step back from the edge in time.

No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion

when you feel like a rock with a message

someone just threw like the moon through a mirror

disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial

if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.

Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke

before you came. And these words that are saying me here

have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.

Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?

Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away

from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.

Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,

or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out

by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open

with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s

time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock

and see how the stars emerge out of nothing

as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing

that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.

Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams

that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman

keeping his third eye on you in the shadows

like a theft of fire you can get away with

this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And if you did, whining about it in your sleep

isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days

to stash the fox under their tunic to keep

from being caught while it eats them alive?

If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn

to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,

without wincing. The stars don’t come out

like emergency candles you’ve been saving

for exactly this kind of situation. And if

you really want to know the truth about illumination,

try and blow one out. Quick, now, look

and see immediately into the clear light of the void

what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak

of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in

but give nothing back like the second hand clothes

of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all

like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds

dazzled by how much a single eye can contain

whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall

or going down the drain in spring. I know

you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace

and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is

as unique among billions as you think you are,

there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

HOLDING IT IN, THE PAIN, THE DOUBT, THE SOLITUDE

Holding it in, the pain, the doubt, the solitude.

Caging my wild heart out in the open where the stars live,

and the bars are all on the inside like toppled pillars

still holding up the friezes of a few high ideals as much

out of habit, as to show a lot of class

in the way you fall to your knees like a bull

in a tauromachia of the zodiac with seven sunbeams

like acupuncture needles or porcupine quills in your back,

as your ear is cut off like Van Gogh’s and thrown

like a rose of blood to a lady in the crowd.

Living in the lunar half light of all my uncertainties.

Trying to see things I’ve been dying for most of my life

not as expiring consolations on a terminal night ward,

night lights in the morgue, flowers beside the bed,

soft, white shoes whispering down the polished halls of the dead

so they could get a good night’s sleep, knowing

there were more nightmares in their lives

than the hard pillows of the world

they lay their heads down on as if

they were getting used to their gravestones.

Stripped of meaning like the frayed ends

of my thinning neuronic synapses pared to the bone

without any insulation to bear up to the next lightning strike,

that would make even the weathervanes shriek like rust

with the pain, the pain I’m holding in, on trust

it’s going to transmogrify itself into something

death-defyingly creative, the art of a noble calling,

like a snakepit of gamma ray bursts as if space and time

were hemorrhaging like a miscarriage of the heart.

Biting the bullet, eating the pain like an organic vegetable

that’s good for you, hoping the character it builds

isn’t Frankenstein, or the missing link in the madness

of some other species of suffering keeping its distance

because it can’t believe it’s descended from you.

My heart numbed by laughing gas, an ice age of novocaine,

I’m still trying to pull the thorns out with my teeth

like a physician who knows how to heal himself

but if the truth be told, feels more like a toxin

than an antidote milked from the fang of the moon,

a junkie slumped in an abandoned back alley easy chair

like a lotus-eater among the feral cats inclusively alone

to nurse his despair into dreaming of no better life than this one.

I’m still trying to pull the sword out of the stone,

a syringe out of the arm of a lion, the last hinge of the door

that’s hanging like a lapwing without a wingspan anymore.

Down on myself like a meteor shower trying to exchange

one hundred and thirty-five million years of dinosaurs

for just one warm-blooded moment with a mammal.

As new a day to me as it is to a baby, and I’m doing my best

to live wholly and now in the moment,

without losing my appetite for time

or letting the starfields be overgrown by underbrush,

but when there are more scars and skeletons on your dance card

than there are wounded new moons making a recovery

on the rebound, you can feel like the abandoned ark of a barn

scuttled on Mt. Ararat like a love cruise that wants its money back.

And time is just a snake-oil salesman that heals nothing.

Space turning to glass. Time in convulsions

having tasted a little of its own medicine

and the light that broke this morning like a halo of hope

around the rim of the black hole that had swallowed me live

I was being so cooly detached about, though my heart,

voodoo doll it may have been in the past, beat as fast

as the rain stitching up the seams of the mirrors on the street

as if they were on the same wavelength as a surgical sewing machine,

until it realized this false dawn was as dark as the last

and all it was doing was patching up the ghosts of the past

with clouds of unknowing that had no secrets to reveal

and pathetic fallacy aside, knew nothing about the way I feel.

Trying to be a human who healed more than he wounded.

Trying to be a man that his jeans aren’t ashamed to wear.

Trying to be a Zen hard rock strong enough to climb the mountain

than come down on everyone like an avalanche of cornerstones

giving up like Sisyphus on pushing another moonrise up the hill

even when I’m swimming through quicksand

or paving a way that others might follow as lost as I’ve been

on this long, dark, strange, radiant road

that isn’t just another starmap with pit stops,

that isn’t the asphalt of spiritual La Brea Tarpits,

or a labyrinth that ends in a cul de sac of glass ceilings

like the crumbs of the dreams of a habitable planet

I saved like a rosary of near-earth asteroids

just a few fly-bys outside the Van Allen Radiation Belts

I wore like a bodhisattvic warrior without any scalps

to bring things back together that have been too long apart.

PATRICK WHITE  

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE