LOOKING AT THE SKY

Looking at the sky from the bottom of a well,

midnight at noon, a firefly

or a musical note deep in a flute

waiting to be played, ore in the mine,

I can see like a painter

holding up a mirror

to check for flaws in a portrait,

I’ve got all my stars on backwards,

I’m wearing my eyes inside out,

the punchline happens before the joke,

and there’s a corpse at the bus-stop

waiting for a coffin

draped in a patchwork flag of advertising.

The mind is the world,

my passions nest in trees,

my insights shatter

on the hard eyelids of the water,

and my heart is a succession

of boundary stones

that groove like sullen planets,

heritage jewels in antique gold.

The pathetic fallacy is not a fallacy

so when I cry

it’s not just my roots

that are drunk with emotion,

or the dykes of a deepening darkness

that haemorrhage on the moon.

There’s something sad about being a human,

an old sorrow,

as if the heart were a rock

recast by breakers of blood

into a bell that can no longer tell the difference

between a wedding and a funeral

one pulse to the next. Marginal seabirds,

humans live off the coast of everything,

continents, God, reality, ourselves.

Generation after generation,

we drag our dreams to the grave

like chains and withered lilies,

and there is so much longing in a hole,

an ocean in the vulva

of a dawn-coloured shell

turned like galaxies and sunflower seeds,

one golden ratio for all,

grief comes in like a tide

with a pod of misdirected killer whales

who will die nobly

under their own weight

like a religion, or a brotherhood

of tonsured priests, Jesuits

banished from the ear of the king.

Some days I’m a logger with a chainsaw

snarling through the trunk

of the tree of knowledge

despite the spikes of the protestors; others

I’m handcuffed in the upper branches

like a shaman in a cradle

nursed by flying serpents. But there’s no point

in clear-cutting the slope

of the mountainous library,

intercollating the growth rings of the heartwood

or raging through paper like fire,

an environmentally approved arsonist,

lightning flicked from the flint of a zippo.

I’ve read all the poets,

I had a mother and I know

there are swallows under the eaves,

wild poppies along the highway,

and a beautiful face

singing in the sunshine

that poses for everyone

like the moon on a lake,

that love and friendship sway the world

like powerlines and suspension bridges,

and goodness exists like oxygen,

the silent partner of the flame.

You needn’t try to convince me of the wonder,

I’m a savage mystic

who’s been washed up with more dead starfish

on the shipwrecked shores

of the eerie islands of night

than there are the names of lost lovers

in the dead letters of a sacred alphabet.

It’s just that the pain

of averaging out the crises

and astronomical catastrophes

into the sea-worn roundness

of a planet I can live on

sometimes overwhelms me

with a morning, a thought, a spear

that pierces my heart

like the axis of a wheel

that keeps coming home,

a seasoned traveller,

to the beginning

of a journey, a road, a voyage

that always ends in the going,

the flowing away,

right where it stands

in the shadowless afterlife

of a sundial in the moment,

this passage of waters

from abyss to abyss, mouth to mouth

neap and ebb,

and the paper boats that fail them

like drowned sailors

poured out of the urn, the amphora,

cinders from the eye of the sea

like the ashes and wine

of abandoned poems

that always lead back to me.

PATRICK WHITE