THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

The words are merely the performers,

the jugglers and the acrobats, the fire-swallowers.

The fat lady with a moustache behind

her flap of tent. The Parsifals, the mottled clowns.

The Crips and the Bloods, the red rose and the blue,

the Mafia dons. Thought is not verbal expression.

The word, tree, can’t read. And clever’s a boor shy

of being intelligent. Keats was right when he wrote

how much superior humour is to wit though

he didn’t live to see very much of it.

And Whitman, too, when he made his exit

from the learned astronomer to witness the stars

as if the beauty of reality could speak for itself

and the science of shining had nothing to do

with starmaps. Things are words, labials of the moon.

Abstractions merely the ghosts of the senses

trying to get back to the earth before the dawn comes up.

Things teach us their names like a dynasty of kings

on the stairs of Incan temples. Generations of stars,

the demotic of light, the patois of their mother tongue.

And the way they relate to one another,

in a thousand different grammars, river reeds rooted

in tributaries all flowing into the proto-nostratic

of the one mindstream like sacred syllables of the rain.

The rain says wave, wet, water, and everybody

goes skinny-dipping in the womb of W

hanging on for dear life to an umbilical rope

at the local watering hole. Ever measure the red shift

of a consonant to determine whether it’s going away

or coming toward you? Are your vowels truly edible

or just the wax fruit that pose for your still lives?

In the Beth Luis Nion Druidic tree alphabet

apple trees ask the most questions about how

when, who, why, where, taking their Q from Latin

like a suggestion from a patron of poets. Horace,

perhaps, like a quarterhorse in the stables of Maecenas.

I can hear the windfall that drops from the tops

of the black walnut trees. I understand the semiotics

of the diadems of the stars setting fire to the hair

of the willows in winter plunging their burning tresses

in the river to put them out like matchbooks

in the hands of delinquent boys. Cruel arsonists

of their prankish joys. The fire gods come

looking for fire. The water sylphs hiss like sibilants.

Point is. As long as you’re alive there’s a conversation

going on all the time that you alone are privy to

even when you’re listening with your ear pressed hard

like a seashell to the walls of your skull. The silence

is riddled with the voices of things like space

is saturated with the red wavelengths of the heaviness

of our eyes, dying like the memory of old stars

that once considered us friends, after we finished crying.

The silence is startled by the sudden outburst

of a nightbird and the dark is seized by a longing

to step out of the shadows and reveal itself reciprocally

like a lighthouse calling out from its widow walk

to an empty lifeboat in the fog, drifting aimlessly

without the oar of a verb, or the rudder of a participle

trailing in the wake of a maritime moon, mute

as the bells of an unmoved sea to say three bells, all’s well, all’s well.

PATRICK WHITE

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

Bright blue winter Sunday in a slow town.

Eclipsed by the vivid contrast of light and dark,

watching the carcasse of a sabre-tooth in a tarpit,

cellphone by cellphone, being replaced, no app for it,

by younger minerals with an ice-age attitude

less flexible than water about finding their place in life.

Keep your Smilodons protean. Your fangs

deep and lunar as if you were the beginning

and end of things, and all phases in between,

parentheses around the full moon with a smiley face

if you don’t want to grow old plastering starmaps over a window

with one fixed star in the same place every night.

I’m not wallpapering space with wavelengths

of ticker tape in a blizzard of statistical genomes

falling like snow-globes on the triumphs of the past.

This slum isn’t riding a golden chariot past the bank.

But it’s impossible to be anything but confessional

in the twenty-first century, now my eyes change

the nature of anything I’m looking at, the observer,

the observed, no subject, no object, no experiment.

Just this dynamic equilibrium of creative experience

building bridges like oxymoronic metaphors flying in unison

like two wings on a waterbird, or labouring like an ox

to yoke both sides of the mindstream in a single pair

of lunar handcuffs. A new layer of skin has been added

to the bubble of the earth’s atmosphere like a mind

laying its reflection down upon the water

like a chameleonic simulacrum of the moon inseparable

from the undulance of the thought-waves that perceive it.

An inhumane aloofness can never justify

giving birth to Frankenstein ever again.

Things of the world are things of the mind.

Tat tvam asi. You are that. How can you tell me

you poured yourself out of the universe like a window

looking at the stars from the outside in

like an objectively flat goblet that’s never tasted

the flavour of the wine in the dark cellars of its own heart

as if there were an emotional life behind the shining

that can’t be ignored anymore than the mind

can be left out of a unified field theory inexplicably incomplete?

Add a little love to a little understanding

and wisdom’s back in vogue like a literary technique

of going without knowing where the road ends

with the whole universe as a travelling companion

as close to you as your seeing is to the stars

though you’re both lost in the mystery

of just happening to be here with no fixed plans.

My voice is the mother tongue of esoteric nightbirds.

The stars speak in the sacred syllables of my deepest secrets.

Even in the homelessness of the unknown, I am declared

a changeling on a threshold no one’s dared to cross yet without me.

You who think of yourselves as a dirty word

that has to be expurgated like a sunspot on the heart,

the womb scrubbed out by antiseptically surgical hands

that have yet to deliver you like the windfall

of the low hanging fruit of the earth, let me reach

deep into the matrix of your conception of yourselves

and turn you around so every moon rise isn’t a breach birth.

Let me return an eternal flame to the candle

that went so cold it stopped crying sincerely

after you left, like a wax mannequin in pursuit

of a more trustworthy clarity than the ambivalent probabilities

of your provisional humanity trying to take

the focus off itself like the studied indifference of a telescope.

Didn’t you notice its legs unfolded like an easel

so you could climb up on it like a scaffolding

to paint a yard of wet plaster a day until even you

stood in awe of your own creation myth

as an allegorical explanation of your troubled magnificence?

Unchain yourselves from the protocols

of an objective delusion and cultivate a starfield

of subjective correlatives that correspond

with the inexact science of remaining indefensibly human

in the name of deeper accuracy, a sweeter intimacy

with the Cepheid variables and creative singularities

painting haloes around the black holes of yourself

like the moondogs and moodrings of a tree in the rain.

How much you’ll miss about being alive

if you make the same assumptions as a windowpane

that clarity is necessarily sane. Your starmud

wasn’t meant to be squared with every other brick in the wall

even if you’re lacquered in lapis lazuli beside the Ishtar gate.

If the rivers are polluted on the outside

and all your aqueducts taste of the Via Cloacum,

what’s that if not plack on your own arteries?

All our passports are the democratized peers

of our own lack of identity in arrears to everyone.

No one’s asking you to burn your bridges like equal signs

between light and mass. It’s ok if things come and go

as they’ve always done in the absence of a mind

trying to befriend a camera as a more reliable way

of remembering things you can’t help being back stage.

Life isn’t a photo-op of fixed images and neither is poetry.

Adding a little humanity to what’s meteoric about your origins

doesn’t mean you’re going to end up kissing the Kaaba

like a black stone that’s been worn down by millions of lips.

It’s equally conceivable you’re as aniconic as an eclipse.

You’re lustrous with nothing inside. You’re rough as ore

with a gold girlfriend. The stone draws the sword out of you.

Vulcan walks with a limp like Jacob and Richard III

like the iambs of a waterclock, one leg shorter than the other.

It’s time you learned to celebrate your own creative absurdity

like a child playing intensely with her own imagination.

It’s time you got brave enough to risk your own creation

without asking someone for a starmap to misguide you.

Put the delight back in being a lighthouse full of fireflies

or a foghorn that doesn’t heed its own warning

at the mere sound of a voice clearing its throat

of a nightingale covered in creosote to say nothing

a decent chimney spark wouldn’t want the stars to over hear.

Start a fire the size of a big-hearted furnace

that can hold all the stars in and out of place at one time

like a space that embraces everything trivial and sublime

whether they mythically deflate or shine like a weather balloon

candling at high altitude like an emergency parachute

entangled in its own life lines as if that were the only way

you’re ever going to understand the afterlife of a dandelion

air lifting a time capsule to root sometime later in the future.

Surrealistic town, all eyes at the window as if

you were staring into a crystal ball while your ears

are listening to the blind prophetic skull of the moon

predict the return of a nocturnal atmosphere

bluer than a star sapphire in the eyes of a twilit peacock.

There’s not even so much the measure of an eyelash

in the distance between you and the next star.

You’re the nightbird perched like an arrow

singing on the green bough of the centaur.

Gap the abyss a little closer than you do your spark plugs

and not only your soul, but your body will achieve ignition

like two tines of the same tuning fork coming together

like two fingertips of what’s humanly divine

creatively collaborating with your own mind

like choirs of picture music on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

or the wind in the dry leaves clinging to the black walnut trees

while the stars rise in the east like the patriarchs of the fireflies

transcending their sobriety with the creative spontaneity

of burning their imaginary exemplars like effigies and strawdogs

in the gleeful heresy of making constellations up

out of the gusts of the stars that fly like enlightened dragons

that take you by surprise like the fires in their lucidly munificent eyes.

PATRICK WHITE  

LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

LONG-LEGGED REFLECTIONS OF FORESHORTENED STREETLIGHTS

Long-legged reflections of foreshortened streetlights

plunging their daggers like great blue herons

waiting with the craft shop Inuit, harpoons in hand,

above the man cover blow holes

for the occasional asphalt fish to swim by

or a crosswalk orca coming up for air

unmindful of the bleeding revelations

hemorrhaging like the tail lights and chokecherries

of baby seals being clubbed to death

all over the ice floe like a work by Jackson Pollock.

The day’s divinity. First thing you see.

But what if you wake up at night fall

as I just have, and open your eyes

like bi-valved, goose-necked barnacles

to the incoming tide of consciousness

and you’re not especially looking for miracles

but peering down through a grimy apartment window

you see this small conservative Ontario town,

with its clocktower too slow to keep up with time

and the spindly green insect of its spare watershed

elevated like the space program of a tall sputnik on stilts,

has been slumming in the Garden of Eden on mushrooms?

What kind of a sign should I mistake that for?

Is it me? Or a random paradigm of intelligent design?

Or maybe Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and the moon

are not aligned with the traffic lights

and old fashioned lampposts like nightwatchmen

glowing in the snow like the candled lanterns

they hold up on nineteen fifties Christmas cards

to show you everything’s just fine among

the beautifully snow blind and intellectually dutiful

trying to teach amputee fire hydrants

how to climb siege ladders up to my room

as if there were anyone awake enough yet to put out

like an unseasonal moonrise that went out on a limb for me.

First thing I see when I open my eyes at night

and I’m the unexpurgated prophet in the belly

of a beached futon, is the atavistic polymorphous perverse

trying to manipulate caesuras like green stick fractures

along the fault line of a zodiac that breaks

like an earthquake shaking its fieldstones of bad verse

into the emotional quicksand of stars in the eyeless dark.

If I ask for slim lifeboats, don’t send me

to the book launch of an ark after a first few

drops have fallen like dew on thin-skinned crocodiles.

Apres moi, le deluge. And the moon rising

to the surface like a white beluga through the clouds

after four hours of swimming in the brain corals

of a deep sleep dreaming of three stage harpoons

on a take off gantry for weather balloons

huffing laughing gas like dragons in dentist’s chairs

trying to put a brave face on all the mirrors in the house

that show me breaking down into tears at the sight

of the spoon running away with the moon

being cooked like moonrocks in a meteor shower

by a lab rat in a white coat that makes it look

like the plain white envelope of a loveletter

that lifts the moon’s spirits like the bubble

rising to the top of the Seattle Space Needle.

Or as Rumi said somewhere in an hallucinogenic trance

of self-annihilation, the bird of my blood

is rising into the sky of my brain. In my case,

the ecstasy of a hawk whose eyes have never

been trained to wear even so much as the night for a hood.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

SOMETIMES I LISTEN TO THE WIND

Sometimes I listen to the wind

as if it were trying to call me home again

though I don’t really know where that is anymore.

Sometimes I hear the chatter of water

exhilarated by moonlight dabbling its feet

in the birch groves and I’m possessed

by the uncanny notion I’m listening

to my own mindstream as if

I were privy to some ancient secret

about myself I were the last to be let in on.

More than likely I don’t exist except

as this protean emptiness that insists

I look upon my own formlessness

as that which was naked now clothed by the world.

Good to go skinny-dipping in your awareness

once and awhile, resilver the mirrors of your skin

in water and moonlight, swing from your spinal cord

like an old rope over a childhood swimming hole

when rapturous simians were still as innocent

as their laughter at getting away with risking it all.

I recall the night I stopped thinking in the past tense

about memory, and she proved how creative she was

by introducing me to her daughters as if

I were a member of the band on stage at the moment.

I love wandering in a labyrinth of insights

the only way out of is to devote yourself

to being as lost as a gust of back alley stars

in the space-time discontinuum of your imagination.

I trust the dream grammar of my mother tongue

to find its own equilibrium like water

left to its own resources. There’s a logic

of associative metaphor that doesn’t dispel reason

from the genetic code of the irrationally inspired.

I look out on a cold night at the stars

and I’m wholly intrigued by the messages

I’ve been asked to deliver like future memories

to the ghost of what I’m becoming. There’s

a second innocence about the world that makes

the return journey even more beautiful than the first.

So when you show up out of the void

like the fragrance of a burning rose

shedding its petals like inflammable deathmasks

on a pyre of bird bones at a sky burial

I never conceive of you as separated,

gone, dead, unfeathered, or alone, anymore

than my heart says farewell to the passage of my bloodstream.

You’re not unravelling in my mind

like a stray thread of smoke from a wick

that put out the fires of life to follow a more spiritual path.

You’re as intangibly here in every breath I take

as a poem without line breaks is to me

when I’m listening to a visionary wind

like the sound of my eyes jamming with the stars.

And there’s nothing about your true features

that are any less real than I am even after

all these lightyears of trying to repatriate

this avalanche of asteroidal Orphic skulls

to a home planet that wouldn’t tear us apart again.

O what a joy it is to still love you as if

I’d never stopped sword dancing

with the thorns of the heart life strews on the paths

we do and don’t take sowing the past

with the first and last crescent moons

of the long nights we spent together

like lovers opening and closing their eyelids

at dawn and dusk to reassure themselves

the mystery of the other was still there,

Venus lingering in the darkness long after sunset

or getting up in the early morning

to turn the curtains back like the pages

on a calendar of last year’s constellations

as you are now, your eyes rising to the astonishment

of an old nightwatchman of the zodiac

spotting you looking out of a window to the east.

PATRICK WHITE  

TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

Too intense, too depressing, my third eye

the monocle of a Cyclops, a three hundred year old

methane hurricane rose exfoliating on Jupiter,

a gravitationally warped contact lens

that fits like a jellyfish on the mirrors

of the Hubble Telescope in a decaying orbit.

I’m willing to put up with a few thorns

to kiss a rose wearing black lipstick to mass

or sit under a blooming locust tree in the morning

that’s got bigger stingers than the bees that swarm it

ever thought possible, and from a crucifix

so forbidding, watch the honey humming sweeter

than the mellifluous light of a thousand sunsets

that alloyed themselves to copper back in the Bronze Age.

The moon can be the blossom of an apricot.

The moon can be a switchblade. Nobody

likes a real dragon for the same reasons

the tribes were afraid of their shamans.

There’s nothing altruistic about their wisdom.

The apple tree doesn’t look upon its windfall

in late September as a hamper on someone’s doorstep.

Some days I’m as sensitive as a sledge hammer

on the horns of a garden snail. Others

I could fine tune a spider web to the stars

or charm my way out of a snakepit

with the metronomic swaying of the suspension bridge

running up my spine between mutually supportive extremes.

As above so below. Sometimes I fall

from such erotic heights it makes even

the trembling lip of a precipice feel nervous

as I plunge by like a comet with its feet

on the handlebars of a Harley on fire

trying to blow the flames out by opening it up

on the highway like the mobile pyre of a sky burial.

I see blood on the snow and a savaged pheasant.

I don’t see a scarlet ribbon falling from your hair

as if the wind were unwrapping a present.

There’s starmud clotted on the inside

of my prophetic skull but that doesn’t tempt me

to turn it into a flowerpot on a birdcage of a balcony

overlooking the hanging gardens of Babylon

and I’ve never enjoyed popping anyone’s

supersensible iridescent multiversal soap bubble

buoyantly traversing the muck of the swamp

like the spiritual afterlife of a waterlily

that’s cut all ties to what the living are rooted in.

You can stuff your pillowcase with leaking hand grenades

as far as I care if it helps you get a good night’s sleep

and keeps you intrigued with the quality of your dreams.

A hard stone under your head at the side of the road

is often softer than a wet pillow that’s been crying all night.

Too intense, you bray? You sure as hell aren’t.

Took me twenty years to learn to say that with conviction.

I know pyramids with a greater sense of urgency than you have.

Befriend your own death. You’ll wax intense.

You’ll ghost dance with lunatics under the full moon

rising like a white buffalo mother over the seance of your fires.

You can afford to lavish an emergency or two

on the onceness of your life without putting snow chains

on the ambulance in a firestorm of ice-age fireflies.

As for depressing? So’s half of every wavelength.

The valley’s as deep as the mountain is high.

The way things usually go if you don’t see me

with a nose bleed, I’ve probably got the bends

and there are little bubbles of euphoric nitrogen

breaking in my blood stream like my narcotic relations

with laughing gas that would remind me of you in a way

if it weren’t for that long wake of broken mirrors

trailing away behind you like Halley’s comet

when it fizzled in 1986, or Isadora Duncan’s scarf

caught up in the wheel of birth and death

like a loose thread of fate or a snake unspooled

from the axis mundi of a voodoo doll in the arms

of an unlucky world turning over a new card.

Depressing? I’d rather be a sincere disease

than one of the spin doctors of a breezy happiness.

The dragons are unbearable enough

but the fireflies can be just as terrifying

if they don’t understand the nature of their own enlightenment.

My eyes aren’t deranged by the things they see,

though my heart might scream and my dreams

might be painted on the inside of my skull

in carbon, blood and red ochre, my hunting magic

tucked away at the back of a cave where I bury my dead

under the hearthstones, their bones,

symbolic kindling for a fire that never goes out,

and the shadows of all this might have

a thicker skin that you do, but long ago

I discovered the best place to hide was out in the open

and the longest guarantee of making sure

no one knows what you’re up to, is stand before them naked.

They see what they see as far as they’ve

been given a light to go by. Some have optic nerves

wired to their hearts, and they celebrate

the gentle fireworks of life like fireflies.

And some have the eyes of dragons

soldered to the motherboards of their brains

and they’ve been looking at things for such a long time

from a sidereal point of view, they’ve turned

into constellations, cold, beautiful, old, and vast.

PATRICK WHITE  

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A grey music hovers over the town.

No people on the streets. Background drone

of furnaces working overtime against the cold.

Space and time on the nightshift and fossils

of bootprints like prehistoric ferns

and the beautiful arcs of tire tracks

frozen into shales of brown Pre-Cambrian snow.

Unlike the stars, there’s no twinkle in the eyes

of the streetlights who just look down and stare.

There’s a desolate window across the street,

facing south directly across from my apartment

I’ve been peering into night after night

like the eye-socket of a blue-black anthracite skull,

waiting to see some ghost or star or the first small flame

of a pilot light come on in the dragon’s lair

as if it could breathe fire out of its eyes

and tonight the last full moon of the old year

slowly appears like seeing out of the darkness

or the return of an apparitional apple blossom to a dead branch.

The air’s got an edge that plays like a switchblade

with the most exposed parts of me,

and the silence brazes my face in glacial acetylene

as my skin goes into shock electrocuted by the cold.

My breath one exorcism after another

I had no idea I had been possessed by so many.

I wander in a fog of exiles and ghosts

like a mystic cloud of unknowing, the rag

of an impoverished atmosphere that aspires

to break into stars shuddering with insight.

Orion and the dog star of Osiris, and Jupiter,

a little further down the road from the moon

than last night. Further into the frozen river groves

a strange, brittle quiet waits for something to happen to it.

I am too far from home to make it back in time.

I have made and unmade my own way through life

like this river whether my end is in my beginning or not

or if there’s a sea of shadows on the moon

I’m trying to make my way to by flowing upward

like the bridges of the trees that burned in the fall behind me

after I’d crossed over to the other side of everywhere.

Myriad stars and the unoccupied emptiness

that’s forms the quixotic inconceivability

of my shapeshifting mind takes them in like fireflies

through the open window of a lantern that embodies the light

the way a candle wraps a spinal cord in flesh like beeswax

then adds a touch of fire to enliven the flame of life within.

My heart gathers them together like tribes

around their council fires and recites from memory

such resplendent myths of origin they shine

like constellations on a bitterly cold night

to keep themselves warm on the inside

by banking the flames with last year’s lack luster starmaps.

Cosmologies come and go like the leaves,

turn brown and go flakey thinking of themselves

as retroactive prophecies in the canopic jars

of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran

led out of the darkness by a messianic goatherd

thinking of kindling his morning fires with them

as he would later burn an autumn of Gnostic Gospels

like portable cave paintings surrounded by hearthstones.

Was the smoke any holier than that of a distant farmhouse?

Was there a fragrance of burning loveletters in the air?

Did fiery doves descend like cherubim and ice-age comets

cast out like flawed jewels from their black halo

beyond Neptune or the aura of the dark Oort cloud

catching the sun out in the open like a sudden hail storm

in Sodom and Gomorrah? Pillars of Dead Sea salt,

those who looked back, weak-kneed birches

buckled by snow. Footprints in the volcanic ash

of the first man to set foot on the virgin moon

like the hymen of this trail that breaks behind me

like poetry putting its foot through a window of ice

on this shadow-stained mirror of immaculate misconception

breeding a second nature to replace the first through repetition.

My mind wanders off into transformations

that always take me by surprise and I let it

follow the deer paths down to the river

to drink from the galactic reflections of migrating stars

like elixirs of hunting magic that drive the wolves crazy.

Every step I take, the creature I am morphs

into the one I’m becoming by mere association.

I’m a bestiary of arcane symbols and totems

I’ve stacked up like stones and skulls

into a dolmen of self I’ll leave as a sign

of residential abandonment to the next traveller

to pass this way and wonder who I was

and much more engagingly who I wasn’t.

I wasn’t a man who wouldn’t take a risk

at some peril to his eyes to get a better view of the stars.

I didn’t stand at a window for the whole of my life

to wish it away until I was numb with longing

on one grimy star descending into a night sea

of tarpaper rooftops writing their memoirs in snow.

I survived by not taking shelter from the storm.

I propped my elbows like the legs of a telescope

on the windowsills and event horizons of the world

and got out of my house of the zodiac

like a wandering planet through a lens.

I never took direction from my aftermath.

I was as fierce and lucid and clear as a star

and all paths led away from me enlightened

from the beginning like a future memory of the past.

Love was a kind of nebular confusion that didn’t last

though out of it grew the wild-eyed irises of the Pleiades

and the blue fires that bloom along these banks in the summer

when I remember some transitory detail

about the spirit of a lost lover that still haunts me

like a willow that used to rinse her hair

of stars and dragonflies in a river that passed her by.

If truth was the salt of the earth, beauty

was a dangerous sugar I was always bee enough

not to resist like a golden coke junkie dealing in flowers.

Though I didn’t indulge in happy endings,

I found it improbably possible to remain grateful

for more than I could comprehend of the gifts

I was given to lay like poppies and wheat

I’d gathered from the starfields by the heartful

on the evanescent stairs of the unattainable

as I hid like a secret I couldn’t tell to anyone else

to see who came out when no one was looking to receive them.

Wisdom when it managed to achieve me

always emanated a bouquet of seasoned ignorance

with a twist of crazy that often made me want

to smash it on a dancing floor at a Greek wedding

and dance in glee at my delinquency until my feet bled

with the blood of the grapes they tread the wine from.

Some people’s heels are winged in doves’ feathers.

Mine were spurred on by the wings and talons of hawks

plunging across the full moon like nocturnal arrowheads.

And when the time came to empty the lifeboat of my likeness

like the frozen wombs of the gaping milk weed pods

gaping as if they’d just given birth to a million ghosts

that are going to take root in the hills that live after them,

I could honestly say in words that politely ignored me

like a pyramid doesn’t make an impression on a sand dune,

even in a sea of radical pearl makers and resurgent stars,

mirages of water in the waterclock of a mindstream

in flood both sides of an imagination silting the light with starmud,

I knew the mermaids. And I knew the rocks.

I was a complete sailor. I dropped anchor

like a shipwreck in the moonset of my blood.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

The stars keep happening faster than I can remember them.

So is everything else, exponentially. Memory makes me

a continuum I’m always creating and calling myself.

Memory cross-references its matrix like the web of a spider

and soon I mistake the habit of the web for me, continuously.

I’m attached like a badge or a bird to the strings of my own guitar.

The seeing isn’t in my eyes. Neither is the music in the instrument.

I keep giving the stars new names every night

just to keep up with the possibilities of what they’re becoming.

Nor have they ever shone down upon the same man

looking up at them two nights in a row. I rearrange them

into different constellations and give them symbolic meanings

they never knew they had before. I step through the door

and every house in the zodiac changes. The sun

is less lucid at dawn than when it started the nightshift.

There isn’t a point on the ecliptic that isn’t the equinox

of a prayer bead that gets its way by not asking for anything.

Watching the world, I witness my own creation

as it’s happening. The star becomes aware of the eye

that’s observing it and it begins to see things

as if it had its own imagination. We celebrate

each other’s possibilities and awareness is born

of the binary of you and me, so we can dance,

not two, like a happy secret that can’t be known

by anyone else. No one has ever lifted the veils of Isis,

not even unity, which is to say, if you see her face covered

it means you haven’t opened your eyes far enough

to realize the Queen of Heaven is the shining

you’ve been looking for her with. Astronomy for fireflies.

This world is so interdependently originated

I’m the lifework of a star. I’m the masterpiece

of a bacterium. Starmud, I garden among the galaxies

that blow like the dishevelled heads of flowers in the wind.

My work done. I’m the only weed that’s been uprooted.

The pulse of my bloodstream is the waterclock of the stars.

The moon is in the corals having sex. I’m listening

to discrete variations on a theme of discontinuity

my ears are turning into music like the rain on the plectra

of the thorns and the leaves that ping like the G-spots

of the roses in heat that want to go on blooming forever.

PATRICK WHITE