SOMEONE TO REJOICE IN

SOMEONE TO REJOICE IN

Someone to rejoice in. Foolish thought.

Epiphanous absurdity. My interminable longing

for a treasure, a happiness, a companion

I’m not even sure I deserve, is agitating

oceans of emotion again,

and wants to run before the wind,

wants to raise up apple blossoms

like sails with the skull and crossbones on them

and skirt the rocky coasts of extinct volcanoes

that once served as lighthouses in the distance

when I was island-hopping

like an infidel among the angel fleets.

The dragon’s howl in the dead skull.

Moments when my heart shrieks with life

like a red-tailed hawk falling upon a snake.

I am a ravenous man who wants to eat the light.

The night flows into my bloodstream

like an atlas of arteries.

As time has passed, the pain in me

has shifted wavelengths from the ultra violet

to the infra-red of a less lethal frequency.

I’m at the wide-eyed end of the hourglass,

but I can still bare my fangs

like the moon when I need to.

I can still come down off the mountain

like a hashashim and run the shadow of my knife

like an eclipse across the dreamscape of anyone

who takes too much for granted in their sleep.

So why is it after refueling and buying

a well-upholstered cheesey sandwhich in plastic skin

at the all night Kingston Esso just before you cross the 401

at one thirty in the morning, and begin to enter

the long, dark way home up the old Perth road to Westport,

did I begin to miss you

as if you had sat beside me my whole life?

And I pondered your absence like a hitch hiker

I had just picked up for the first time

and the impact of the encounter

left an indelible impression on my emptiness

as if someone had written something

so eloquent and intriguing as a ribbon of blood

letting its hair down in the water

I couldn’t help but feel like a flying carpet

that was unravelling mile by mile of asphalt

like a glacier that couldn’t wait to get back to you,

thawing time into rivers to speed things up?

And the night sang as I hadn’t heard it in a while.

And the stars flew in through the window like fireflies.

And I rode the road like a rat snake past Devil’s Lake

where we agreed to paint en plain air

when the waterlilies were in bloom

like huge starmaps laid upon the water.

Are you the tuning fork that tames the lightning?

Are you the power of silence that shames the word?

Are you the thread of blood on the sword that blesses it?

And I wanted to kiss you good night.

I wanted to embrace you like a nebula

of blue-hearted hydrogen and the dust of dead stars

just to see if I could make you shine or not,

but I thought it was too early in the year,

too premature for the Pleiades to break into light

and I might scare you with the intensity

of what was ingathering out of

the immensities of the last million light-years

of crossing these homeless thresholds

without a star to go by, alone and unconvinced

I hadn’t missed the turn several lifetimes back.

Now I sit upright in my bones at my desk

like dice with their eyes fully opened like blackholes

wondering if I should chide my skeleton for cowardice

or alea iacta, risked my luck, and crossed the Rubicon

like an event horizon that’s never known a compass or a guide.

And I’m looking under every leaf and stone

and heart I’ve ever worn upon my sleeve

like a fresh strawberry in a field of burning scarecrows

that started out as potential messiahs

but ended up being immolated as faithful heretics

true to the fire that consumed them from within.

And you, their felix culpa, their happy sin.

The one forbidden thing you must risk your life for to live.

I’m dogpaddling in space and time like a shipwreck.

I’m holding my breath like a lungful of stars

trying to stay afloat long enough

not to see my life flash before my eyes

like a lantern whose last remaining firefly’s gone out

like the solar flare of an s.o.s. that bloomed to no effect,

until your lifeboat returns like the moon for survivors.

A swallow again lost in a hurricane of volcanic ashes?

A simian in a cage with a piece of coloured glass

that transfixes it with vulnerable awe and wonder?

The aura of a woman who doesn’t know yet

quite how beautiful she is, lingering in the air

like the smell of wild roses when you’re out

painting alone in the fields of abandoned farms

and you can feel the uncanny chill of another person

walk right through you like the moon through a summer window.

And o to worry about so many little things again

the world pivots on moment by moment

as if it were a privilege and an honour to cherish them

like signs of love in a Druidic tree alphabet

that whispered coniferous prophecies to the moon

but held a few sacred syllables back under its tongue

that were just meant for one alone to hear

like a secret message between a butterfly and a star.

Or this woman who’s just summoned me

like a nightbird to the moonrise of her smile

as if I’d never flown to the end of my longing before

without finding a noose to hang myself with.

But as I do, I do again with less fear than before

and though the shadows in the valley of death

are just as intense, the warmth of a sprightly optimism

that keeps this firefly of insight alive in my heart

to want to see this all the way through

as if it were a rite of passage

that proved the comets true

or the rush of a wild northern river

with a rudder and a sail and a hull

going over a waterfall like the Milky Way,

or a moonboat panning for gold in the mountains.

The rustic pauper prince of Perth, I hadn’t

realized what an undernourished bush wolf I had become

after all these years of living in the wilderness

until I understood someone had baited the trapline

with kindness I had forgotten the taste of in my exile.

And though I don’t travel with a begging bowl,

by god, I’ll hold my skull out to her next time

if I have to, just to taste a sheaf of light

from that harvest again, as if the dark side of the moon

had just broken its long vow of silence and darkness

and she were lingering in space like the aura

of an atmosphere I had lived too long without.

As if a dakini, an elixir of light, had appeared

like the planet Venus in the dusk again

and I could feel an updraft of stars

wheeling under my wings

like a winding stairwell of serpent fire

threading through all nine open chakras

and eleven dimensions of a sky wide third eye

in an easy rapture of something unearthly, ascending

to sterling altitudes of blissful vertigo

that whirl me in a wind of fire at the crossroads

of everywhere and here

like the ashes of a mad Sufi

ghost dancing on his funeral pyre for rain

as the first few drops wash his fate from his forehead

like the sheet music of an old song

perched like aging birds on a downed powerline

returning its energy like lightning to the earth

she walks upon in the flowing raiment of fireflies

and the hydrogen negligees of the blue star clusters

embroidered with the harvest gold of the sun

seasoning the grain with the bright vacancy

and dark abundance of the light

still warm in the lunar locket of her heart

as if she’d just put a loaf of bread

out on the windowsill to cool for a moment or two.

And how can I, this famine in an hourglass

beside this silo of the plenum void full of manna

resist whatever befalls me in this desert of stars

whether it be vipers or wheat fields

along the way to the unpromised land of milk and honey,

barefoot on thorns, or walking on soft petals

like the dunes and waves of the ocean in the rose?

Flammable poet, sacred clown of the holy mirage,

mad monk alone in your hermitage, dragon seed

of island pirates wearing the night like an eye-patch

to navigate the stars like a canning jar of fireflies

burning on the inside of their eyelids like starmaps

to the cherished singularities I buried

at the bottom of the fathomless blackholes

firing up the galaxies all over again like the wellsprings

of a muse renewing her wings like starfish and birds

in the fountainmouth of the mountain at a loss for words.

Or as the poet said, what’s madness

but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

And did you not say, I heard you as if my life

depended on it, you were attracted to crazy people,

and did I not ask, if crazy wisdom were close enough,

and you replied, yes, and my heart freefell

a thousand feet without a parachute

when space bent like a longbow into flight.

And I shuddered like a witching wand in ecstasy

over the watershed that swelled under me

when I divined what that could mean to a sailor

lost at sea on the moon as far from shore

as any lunatic has ever been out of his asylum

his heart his mind his body soul and spirit

without dying like a message for the sake of the medium

it was delivered in like longing in the song of a nightbird.

Love in the sound of a word.

PATRICK WHITE