A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A good day and night on earth for me would be

hurling paint at an eight by four foot canvas

propped up on a rusty hay rake for an easel

on top of a hill by the soft basswood trees in late September.

A thin thread of blue smoke rising from the farmhouse

down below, somebody home and a satisfied ghost,

rising idly like a spirit from the heartwood of a log

of two year old maple I cut and split and stacked myself,

ten cubic cords of habitable planet to make it through the winter.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

like the early Muslims under Umar ibn al-Khattab’s caliphate,

knowing the angels were going to visit the town

around four in the morning, knowing everyone on earth

were given bread and flowers enough not to go to bed hungry tonight, 

that everyone had something they wanted to get up for in the morning

that made it easy and exhilarating to be alive, wild asters

saturated with sunlight and the humming of clumsy honey bees

just below the window apprenticed to a telescope.

Short focal length, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector

on an equatorial mount with a clock drive synchronized

to the wheeling of the earth like a moonrise in Virgo.

A good day and night on earth for me wouldn’t be

knowing I was loved, but looking back over the tree rings

in my heart like the history of rain that left its mark on me

like every woman I’ve ever loved, sad, mad, bad, beatific

or indifferent to the fact she could make a locust tree bloom

as if it were enraptured by its own crucifixion, the crowns

and stigmata of the thorns it wore with prophetic distinction

like the first heretic ever burned by the new moon

who could taste the mystery of life in the ashes on his lips

when she kissed him one last time, and to steal a line

from Jim Morrison, turned his blood to mystic-heated wine.

Not to assess how well I was loved, but to feel extinct

knowing I gave everything I had to love and still fear

it wasn’t enough. It’s an indelibly memorable mode of madness

I may have fallen into like a habit that stuck like the La Brea Tarpit

somewhere along my antediluvian way, but I hold

the onceness of forever as lovers step away from each other

like an abyss on the downside of a dangerous precipice

up to my jugular vein a razorblade away from where Allah says

he is when I have no reason to disbelieve him. Love

is a sword dance with a waterclock in three four time so

a good day and night on earth for me would be

out walking with the stars alone through the high summer fields

quilted by wildflowers as the moon came up like a water-gilder

and breathed a skin of gold around every one of the tears

they’ve ever shed in joy when some cosmic egg cracked

like a koan in a dragon’s jaw and they were set free

like a winged horse beside Aquila and Cygnus to ride

their own eyebeams in the free range of the sky anywhere they liked,

when the wind throws off its chains like the rain

and I feel forgiven like a starmap for the times

they stubbed their hearts on my life like an asteroid belt

they couldn’t see in the dark on their way to the black market

of a species exchange on earth for something completely different.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

advancing backwards through all the stations of my childhood

and father myself like the man I always wanted to be

like some kind of playful wizard who knew he was

a great fool to squander his life on joy, but knew how

to stop the bleeding in a boy by uncuffing his life from a bike chain

or at least, when the lifeboat goes down, keep him

from feeling like salvage that should have stayed aboard to bail.

I want to mend that wound in every adolescent heart with gold

like the midnight sun smiling on good starwheat in the siloes

of a radiant end to a dark start. That what I sow outlives me well.

Like morning glory in the lobby of the Hollyhock Hotel.

If it were a good day and night on earth for me, it would

have to be for everyone else as well. I’d have to see

the homeless wearing new thresholds on their feet

that welcomed them at the door like prodigal sons and daughters

that didn’t want a black sheep slaughtered in their honour,

and every young girl weeping in the corner of a restaurant

right now so her friends don’t see her nursing a broken heart

like a voodoo doll gored on the horns of a heavy curse

might rise from her gloom like the moon-rise

of a Minoan bull leaper vaulting through the crescents

of her dilemma and landing on her own two feet on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

Time grieves in me, autumn in the apple.

Warm sugars in the dusk, my body mourns

the flowering farewells of what has passed,

the eerie twilight smiles of ghosts at the gate

I haven’t seen in lightyears, heraldic seabirds

this far off the coast of an approaching landfall

where I’ll step out of the lifeboat claiming

nothing in the name of anyone who doesn’t

already live there like the private diary of a sundial,

whether they cast a shadow or not, or time

loses its sense of direction in eternity between

one thought-moment and the next, and the waterclock

I was will say out of what I remember of being human,

no destination, you’re free to drift as you wish.

Or if the arrows’s broken for good, the weathervane

doesn’t crow anymore like a cast iron rooster

in a dawn that doesn’t distinguish its voice

from the silence of the darkness that absorbs it

like the white noise of the mute and the dumb

as back up singers to the background cosmic hiss,

let space do the flowing as a change of pace.

Sit on your hands. Unborn. Unperishing.

Embrace your own stillness like a starmap

making plans not to do anything more for the night,

knowing space is as important as timing used to be

to content, when you were all creation myth

in the beginning, and untimely allegory of perishing

at the end. And the young? How you baffled them

lingering in the doorway of an abandoned house of life

they ran to for sanctuary like an old man with nothing

but room on his hands. Be a sea to the waterbirds.

Be a sky to the stars. Death the measure

of how far we’ve walked together without ever

coming to a fork in the roads where we parted company

and birth, the second innocence of the return journey,

better than the first, because, like the flowers of earth,

didn’t we always cherish those most that bloom last?

Oceans ago. When we took the height of starfish

to know how far we’d sunk, and plumbed the eyes

of blackholes with galactic irises for haloes

to determine how long it would take for a shipwreck

to rise again on the event horizon of our next port of call.

Black sail, white sail, same photograph

flying the colours of a country not our own.

Cool bliss I’m beginning to trust, and lust,

God bless lust, taking its time like a slow cologne,

savouring what it used to gulp as if it were

trying to make an ice-cream cone last. Self-sufficiently

mad enough to be gainfully-unemployed finishing

the long labour of destroying my life creatively

I’ll go down into the underworld with my tortoise-shell

abalone Chinese voice-box within a voice-box,

that’s saved every echo of the sirens and muses I’ve ever listened to,

and death or no death, I won’t waste my futility on

trying to make sense of it all, crying over

the vaporous nature of tears. Death is no business

of mine. And life’s a long holiday I took in the flesh.

But I’ll ask her to come with me just the same.

She’ll look back on everything and her hand

will slip from mine like a loveletter of lifelines

out an envelope that hasn’t got anything

to look forward to but what’s been left behind

like a name traced in an afterthought of dust

on a windowsill, an old threshold of seeing

like a bird with a message, a star, a housefly,

the tuning fork of a mosquito, a lightning strike,

a firefly, the wind before a veil of rain, a firefly

that looked down upon the rooftops of a small town

with tears in its eyes for what transpires here,

and a telescope with a hand-painted lens of what it wants to see

when the mirages I crossed starless deserts for

are too near, far too near to my heart to be believed.

Never tell anybody the truth about the causes

and conditions of suffering, and love that asserts

it doesn’t have any, unless there’s enough

mercy in your heart to remember that we

are all humans, expressions, not definitions of ourselves.

But I’ll praise her in such sad, hermetic songs

the great secret of love and life and art

can’t help but speak for itself through her eyes alone,

neither true to the sunset she shines in, nor

false, when she rises before it, to the dawn.

PATRICK WHITE

HOME-THOUGHTS

HOME-THOUGHTS

Earth created lavishly here, spread out,

a canvas gessoed with ice-ages of snow,

glacial cataracts covering the third eye

that dreams in the seed underneath the eyelid

of a pine-cone, tacky with fire, of a mindscape

slashed and hacked out of thick paint

with trowels and knives and the double-bladed

lumberjack axe that deforested the moon. Quick,

violent gestures of life clinging in the interlude

of great ages clashing like continental ice-floes

grinding their teeth in their sleep off the coasts

of an unsalvageable consciousness crushed

like the masts of a matchstick flotilla of lifeboats.

Dark ores of a dream brought to the surface

for refinement from the underworld

of a jewellery box in the form of a coffin,

everybody survives by not looking back

like a fox in retrograde hunting a pheasant

that doesn’t cover its tracks in the snow

in the wake of its feather dusting tail

under the ochre smudge of the winter sun,

the yoke of a smashed egg at the foot of a tree

where the birds return like bush pilots

every year to the shattered mirrors of the lakes

like the sacred syllables of unpronounceable native tongues,

the silence still vast enough to be intruded upon

by engines and chainsaws snarling in the wilderness

in an unholy ghost of blue fumes infernally reeking

like motherless demons shadow dancing

around an angry campfire that scatters the stars

like evangelists of greater conflagrations yet to come.

We gouge and we wound. We die with the sun

and revive like the wraiths of thin atmospheres

that wail like the banshees of the northern lights

outside the frozen windows feathered in ice ferns

we look through darkly like albinos at the moon.

Our cultural life has pink eye. Morning here

is a bad fisherman that doesn’t take its own advice

and heed the warning of how nice the weather always is

whenever there’s a false dawn on the horizon

sailing under the colours of another country

that doesn’t take the black sail of the night down

or shroud the dead they bury at sea in the aniconic flags

that navigate by the starmaps of a neighbouring galaxy.

In this arcane darkness you learn to shine

by your own lights or you die in the cold

like an asteroid belt of boundary stones around

the firepit of the hearths and hardware stores

you’re buried under like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

that went out like a chimney fire of daylilies

rooted in creosote, smothered in a seance of smoke.

Human immensities dwarfed like the afterthoughts

of inhospitable harmonies reconciling the savage discord

of impersonal energies still shaping the world

like turtle blood and starmud in the abyss

of a cosmic medicine bag where the waters of life

break like a northern river out of a birth sac

that chews through its own umbilical cord

like a leg hold trap beside of a rose of blood on the snow.

Creation is always the first draft of an inspiration

that’s never finished revising the tree rings

in its heartwood as if the rain were never sure

of the genre of things it was working in

on a loose scaffolding of dead trees uprooted

on a mountainslope better thatched by snow

than water trying to walk across its own land bridge.

Coming home from an alien space

like a prodigal exile from a foreign land

is always like entering a new continent

where the large mammals of the Pleistocene

haven’t disappeared yet, and you can

instinctually feel the lethal glee of the moon

sword dancing with the sabres of a crouching Smilodon

when you relinquish the comfortable airport

of your arrivals and departures, and cross

the dangerous threshold of your homelessness

like a spiritual materialist with a knack for survival,

tricks on how to live like a snow hare in winter

that smokes the unprepared magician out of the hat

like the cherry red stovepipe of a Napoleon airtight

roaring like the ringmaster of a mammoth hunt

in a surrealistic circus of extinct species

that can trace their lifelines all the way back

to the mountainous watersheds of the Burgess Shale,

the Book of Life written in the fossilized hieroglyphs

of starfish patched like the angelic death’s-heads

emblazoned like coats of arms on the Canadian Shield.

Tradition just a path someone broke in the snow

like an offroad short cut through the woods

that wasn’t expecting to be followed by a cult

of snowshoes woven from the sinews of wild deer

like dreamcatchers in a web of empowering mandalas

that hang on every word you say like the suspension bridges

of community support groups across the Capilano River

of their vertiginous disbelief. We sway like silk

in the heights of our ionized ideals, aurorally,

and even when we don’t shed a lot of light on

what’s real at the end of a long winter, and what is not,

most people think we’re beautiful for the way

we treat our apparitions like the fair-minded history

written by the referees of the victors too polite

to crow in the dawn like Chanticleer in the windows

of another culture being exorcised by the teaching nuns

of another genocidal day at native school. The dominion

of Pandemonium where the fallen angels settle

like big, wet kisses of early April snowflakes

on the lips of the crocuses opening like the mouths

of baby birds in the abandoned nests of the great blue herons.

Goose-down and fur. We’re insulated by the covers

of books that were bred for the purpose

on a fox farm of eternal flames to wrap around our necks

and get us through the winter at the expense

of someone else’s nakedness trembling like a death sentence

in a purple passage of frozen poetic prose.

The cold cuts like a Medusa head of whips

biting you in the third eye of your peripheral vision

like the thorns of something toxic that wants,

not out of spite, but reflex, to lay you out

like a comatose junkie shooting burnt out comets

in a morgue full of falling stars and flash in the pan meteors

you can wish upon with one hand on the shoulder

of St. Peter, martyred upside down like a foundation stone

upon which you can build a church or cube the Kaaba

with a little dirt from outer space washed out

of the god’s-eye of a hurricane of razorblades

railing starclusters of cocaine up their nose

like the C.P.R. in the nasal passages of the Rocky Mountains.

There she blows like a narwhale in the Arctic.

Burial huts of gangrenous crustaceans in lobster pots

enflamed by the seaworthy dawn that hauls them up

like stars caught in the net of Indra, mark one jewel

and you mark them all, over the gunwales

of a waning moonboat that will disappear

like a bar of greasy soap left too long in the water

before it reaches the zenith of its swan dive

and goes the way of all snow like a Martian ice-cap

on a globally warming bald spot in the ozone.

Ancestral elephants carved in ivory like the tusks

of a moon that never forgets, iced like collateral damage

in the turf wars of multicultural gangland glaciers

marking the limitless borders of where everyone

came from in the first place like post cards and passports

from the edge of dispossessed nowhere stamped

by the monarchial wavelengths of a bureaucratic blood oath

that approves of your living and dying here

on the dark side of the moon, six months of the year.

Fewer Canadians commit suicide than Scandinavians

because of light deprivation. The raccoons wear

outlaw masks to keep from going snow blind

in semi-hibernation hiding out in the time locked

cryonic vaults in the suspended animation of a dream

where the only safe place is in a house that’s burnt to the ground

when the birds are falling out of the frigid air

in mid January like a Hitchcock movie made

in Hollywood North that couldn’t keep

the medicine wheels of its own spiritual flightfeathers up

let alone the lapwings of the alarmist divas

in the immaculate choirs of shadowless noon.

PATRICK WHITE

I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I LIVE IN OBSCURITY WITH THE NIGHTBIRDS AND NO ONE SIGNS THE AIR

I live in obscurity with the nightbirds and no one signs the air.

I listen to the click languages of pebbles on the riptarian shore

as one thought washes over another, hand over hand,

as if they were making a pact with one another they meant to keep

this time, one corpse washing the back of the other,

a flowering of hands on the heft of a sword-dancing vow.

It’s difficult to take your silence seriously in a crowd

and not be estranged by it. So many voices looking for a home,

so many gleeman to the king of the oildrum booming

like a bullfrog under the overpass of a careless city

where the poets are more venal than the middle class they castigate

like the sins of their parents visited upon them. Scare someone

meaningfully enough and they’ll atavistically return

to what they know best. Boo! But take it in jest.

Maybe never to have been born is best after all

has been said and said and said and said as Sophocles did

and so little done to make a difference to the tragi-comical

starfish drowning in the tidal pools of their own eyes

depending on the prescription they’re wearing at the time,

oceans in the rose, puddles of turbulent starmud,

or the Hubble wowing us like the rainbow body

of a one-eyed guru born without lachrymal glands,

visions of life lining the highway like roadkill

or moon-toothed muskie dying of thirst in a freshwater lake.

May the anguished eyes of starving children eat your poems

like the junkfood you went bobbing for in the dumpsters

of literary tradition. Gag them on the mouthy paint rags

of your genetically modified masterpieces. Too outlaw

by nature, not inclination, to feel at home in the 4-H Club

poetry’s become, where the cutest piglet wins a blue ribbon,

and a quarter hind of bullshit has its horns manicured

like the fingernails of the moon, so the roses

aren’t gored on their thorns, and everyone clarifies

the creosote clinging like polyps to the strings

of their cardboard voice-box guitars to sing like starlings

caught in the throat of a cold chimney in spring,

I live out here like a hermit thrush untroubled

by the peripheral visions of co-habitable women

who make no bones, like muses, of what they do

and do not want. It’s good to give as good as you get

and a bit beside if you’re trying to make a spiritual point

to somebody’s lies, but, in private, in savage solitude,

I howl at the moonrise on my own terms like a bush wolf

and the hills reiterate the forms my longing takes

when something deeply wounded inside, opens my mouth

like a waterlily in a nunnery of muses when the pain of what

it’s gangrenously rooted in breaks its vow of silence

like the oracular fortune-cookie of a madwoman

losing her virginity to the godhead of a koan

that possesses her faculties like the oxymoron of a unitive life

reconciling opposites in a coincidence of trivial profundities

and the Longinean lacunae in the anonymous lives of the sublimely absurd

as if she were trying to put the pagan back in the cult and coven of the word.

I look up at the night, sometimes, in a wanderlust of wonder

among the willows down by the river, and I name

the constellations I remember like bubble-gum space cards

from my childhood, and I swear I can read the occult tattoos

on the flesh of a blue Pictish witch jumping naked

through fire of the Pleiades as if there were no urns to be afraid of

but the ones that choke on the ashes and smoke

of the expiry date of their smouldering desires

trying to smudge their ghosts with sweetgrass

like astroturf above the flower arrangements

of their matchbook pyres, like undertakers

at a careerist impasse for words synonymous with love

as they have, like the Inuit vocabulary for snow,

read backward in the breathless mirrors

that pronounce them enigmatically dead

as the paradigmatic da Vinci code deciphered

like a loveletter they were afraid to throw into the flames

for fear of depriving literary culture of twenty six ways

of avoiding a word for their fear of death, as fluently

as the sacred seed syllables that can be derived

from the alpha and omega at the beginning and end

of a work of love, not self enhancement, deep in the woods,

in the vernal shadows of the moon, under the catkins of the aspens

because long before the leaves started publishing

their spring and autumnal memoirs, poetry, like the love of life

depended upon nothing, not even the occasional hermit thrush

in a black walnut tree, pouring its solitary heart out to the Pleiades.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE CANDLE'S SPENT AND THE STAR IS ASH IN YOUR EYES

WHEN THE CANDLE’S SPENT AND THE STAR IS ASH IN YOUR EYES

When the candle’s spent and the star is ash in your eyes,

the bell of your heart, an urn of midnight sunflowers,

to the darkness within, say, yes, I was a friend of the fireflies.

When love picks a fool and makes him wise;

when beauty’s a flash in the pan, and a false dawn, hours,

when the candle’s spent and the star is ash in your eyes

be the pivot of the stillness that swings the nightskies.

Be the unsung radiant of resurgent meteor showers.

To the darkness within say, yes, I was a friend of the fireflies.

Comets may buzz the sun; dragons, the moonrise,

lovers fall from the ladders of their fire-towers

when the candle’s spent and the star is ash in your eyes

may love and Lucifer remain enlightened allies,

your heart, a starmap to the blind wildflowers.

To the darkness within, say, yes, I was a friend of the fireflies.

When the furnace is cold, the chimney’s rife with magpies.

May the light feather you in its fledgling powers.

When the candle’s spent and the star is ash in your eyes,

to the darkness within, say, yes, I was a friend of the fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ATTRITION OF POETS IS NOT LIKE THE AUTUMN LEAVES

THE ATTRITION OF POETS IS NOT LIKE THE AUTUMN LEAVES

The attrition of poets is not like the autumn leaves.

Troubled lives. Holding a torch of burning roses

up to the corners of their eyes where the spiders live,

making up flood myths of their sorrows to keep

the deep, lunar watershed of their skull cups full,

happy, sometimes, as an exception to the rule,

but on edge, metallurgists in the Bronze Age

running a sword like the hour hand of a water clock

down their tongues like wavelengths witching for lightning.

Inadequacy, emptiness, abysmal solitude

of undertakers trying to bury corpses on the moon

to put their ghosts to rest under a mythically inflated gravestone

that doesn’t keep the wolf away that isn’t a friend to man.

Poetry is the most compassionate sister spirit

of all the sciences of suffering. It lays a cool, silver herb

on your forehead where the first draft of your fate is written

and the fever abates awhile, and the dream that

boiled in your blood like Japanese seawater

in the nuclear miscarriage of a hurricane rose,

throws snake oil on venomous waters in a toxic mirage

of kingfishers skimming the thought waves of a heart

momentarily at peace with itself. I used to sit

on a precipitious rocky ledge when I was sixteen,

alone with the stars nobody in that neighbourhood

had soiled with their fingerprints yet and at that

remote distance from the world I knew

like a garden that had made a slum of paradise as if

there was nothing original about sin that hadn’t been

plagiarized from the brutal banality of human nature,

poetry whispered to me in an immensely liberated voice

like the rush of the nightwind in the oceanic Douglas firs,

cool waters of life on the peeling skin

of the sunburnt arbutus trees, I am freedom,

I am the horrific beatitude of love within reach of the flesh,

I am the picture music of the mindstream flowing

through the woods at night as if no one were listening

but the nightbirds for the apparitions of their longing

to pierce the apprehensive air with reciprocal urgency.

I am the way out of here for those among the lost

whose path is not blocked by the lifemask they wear

like an identity that hides its face in someone else’s hands.

I speak my secrets to the dead and the living respond

as if they thought they recognized their own voice

calling to them out of the fog like a lamp in a lifeboat

on the moon, so far have they wandered from home.

Eternal sadness in the infinite tenderness

of an immortally wounded muse, I fell in love

with the mystery that made me the nightwatchman of her eyes.

And relativity damned, there’s absolutely no doubt

it’s so much harder to pursue a lunar life to the full

than it is to cut your wrist at the first crescent

when the wheat is green, and the apples are bitter,

and the seed has no faith in the sincerity of the harvest,

and your first step up in a world of artful loveletters

is the stone-faced altar you’re sacrificed upon.

What else in life is there for you to tear your heart out over

and hold it up like a new born as an offering

to the unattainable in the pursuit of an earthly excellence

that doesn’t defame the mediocrities who weren’t

self-destructive enough to risk it all, unendowed

by the white noise of their cosmic backgrounds

to go supernova when galactic occasion called for it.

They weren’t disciplined by disobedience enough

like heretics with fire-breathing principles

to stand up for things that have been burnt to the ground

yet poetry looks over them like a safety net

in a surrealistic circus tent, and one day, shot

out of the chrysalis of the cannon they’re asleep in

they’ll have the courage of dragonflies to fall toward paradise.

Or they’ll cry real tears of gratitude like sacred clowns

who’ve wiped their facepaint off in a green room

without any mirrors to cast more indelible shadows

than the ink of long memories that blacken their hands

like the sooty candelabras of winter trees at dusk.

What’s the point of adding more feathers to your topknot

than the original three, if all you want to be is a chief

in a tribe without fellowship or trust? Poetry

is as meaningless as the night to those who never dream

the inconceivable is talking to them in their sleep.

Do the elders suffer writer’s block when they’re asked

to name the children, each according to their totems?

Who cages the effulgent plumage of the morning

in their voice box and tries to teach it to sing after it

like a fire-hydrant that’s all thumbs on a burning guitar?

Fifty years, a lighthouse on the moon, and the shipwrecks

to prove it, fifty years of lingering in doorways

in this house of life, not knowing whether they were

entrances or exits, but marking the days

like a bone calendar of thresholds and crosswalks

carved on the bars of a penal chop shop

until the incommensurable Sisyphean day I’m released

to join the birds and the stars on the other side of my eyes

where everyone keeps their vow of a omerta

in a house of playing card angels where every saint’s

a martyr to the ungratified desires that drove them

out into the wilderness with a laurel of thorns

hooked on the horns of a scapegoat for what ails the heart,

a grail full of ashes greening this desert of stars,

a dream grammar of ancient mirages

the waters of life call upon to express the evanescence

of the quicksand foundation stones and sand dune pyramids

life is built on like something not meant to last

a starfish longer than literary immortality in an hourglass.

Death and sex. Myriad ghosts at the death

of the imagination that claims maternity by virtue

of the pregnable medium she works in like a procreatrix

fluent in the mother tongues she calls like spirits to a seance,

autumn to a plum, blood and snow to the scarlet letter

of the defrocked cardinal on the dead branch of a tree alphabet,

that endures the immaculate deceptions of renewable virgins

bathing alone in the moonlight of an ice-age that doesn’t prevaricate.

Poetry in the course of time. Like riding in the back

of a pick-up against the current of the aerial perspective

of yellow lines and telephone poles disappearing like the past

into focusing on the void as if there were a point to all this

somewhere far behind you like a destination that kept

receding from you like the light of a star you’ve been following

into the available dimensions of the future not much further ahead

as if it were more illuminating to go along with it than labour

to understand a life in art you’re never going to get used to

though it’s crucial to thank those who stopped for you,

as if you were one of them, and life, like art and love, were on their way.

Dangerous to forestall your life to achieve something

that will either make or break you like third man

on the short straw of a firing squad of nine bullets

certain, and one imaginal blank of doubt that takes

a long shot at the stars in your eyes like a ricochet of light

in the dark we’re all blindfolded by to keep us

from seeing it coming before we have time to duck.

Fifty years of militant farewells to the casualties

of an undeclared holy war between the genies and demons

of what we wish we were born to die for, and the death wish

in the heart of the fire we’re consumed by like a thief

chained to a rock in the Caucasus, like a stem cell

of the eternally recurring madness of repeating the same offence

as if genius were a kind of creative, criminal negligence

that seizes the moment like a spark of life that enlightens

the strawdog of a scarecrow with stars in its eyes.

A shrine for the unrepentant that isn’t a jail or a church.

A school of enlightenment that doesn’t maintain a teacher.

A death lament for the early windfall of unripe bells.

A spider in the niche of a wall after the lamp’s gone out.

So many suicides, burnt offerings to unacceptable gods.

Nothing left to regret or forgive. A lifeboat full of leaves

only the wind on a cold, neurotic night in late November

reads as escapist literature under an erotic brown cover.

Gone. From the light, the dark. The mournful murmuring

of a punctured heart. The cyanotically blue fulfilment

of the second born moon of the month. Crows and worms,

making a living on the gleanings of harvest after

the cattle corn has been shucked and husked with gaps

in the toothy smile on the flyleaf of an undistinguished skeleton.

I lay a sword of moonlight in tribute on the waters of their lives

they have no need to fall upon again or draw

from a stone like a blade stained with coagulant roses of blood.

I cast no aspersions on the failure of pain

to intensify the darkness in their eyes into diamonds

the light passes right through without leaving so much

as cut or a scar. I people their absence with my solitude.

I voice their presence with the silence of poems

written in the expiration of my breath on a broken window.

I embed my eyes like frozen tears in the night skies

of their crystal skulls and I weep like an ice-age of mirrors

that shatter like an uninhabitable vision of life

that can’t be mended once it’s been fully realized

we’re either doomed to succeed, or bound

by the book of life to grandiloquently fail

and how much imagination it takes to write

the Burgess Shale like the natural history

of someone chaotically adaptable enough to the piebald mystery

of the dark abundance, bright vacancy of the shadows and light not to.

PATRICK WHITE