AND IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE I'M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

AND IT’S NOT HARD TO SEE I’M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

And it’s not hard to see I’m wandering in a dry abyss

trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert

that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.

Don’t know if I’m talking to a mirage, a reflection of some

aspect of the dark side of the moon I can’t see from here,

an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection

of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space

and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire

I’m sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox

beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.

Matters a lot, but that’s ok. I’ve had visitations before

and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate

and sometimes, though it’s a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.

If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph

in a housewell full of stars, who’s to say that isn’t

my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further

than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them

like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes

I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they’ll root and bloom.

I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,

and the fact that there’s vanity even in that. No matter.

As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.

I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see

come to me spontaneously in the early morning

before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night

when I’m haunting the Tay River with the willows,

or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.

And more than once I’ve talked my ghost

back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both

like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising

like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.

Within me, where the universe lives, you’re a muse

of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,

and I’m growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,

and I’m digging up my own fossils in the bone pits

on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,

and I’m adding a new shrine to my visual lobe

to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,

and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,

like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,

or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.

Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,

a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars

like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me

to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you

like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal

in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds

as tongue-tied for awhile as the gargoyles and ghouls

on a Gothic cathedral. Wanted to be an archaeologist

when I was a kid and ever since I got waylaid by poetic cosmology,

I’ve been brushing the leaves away like the wind

from the ribs and the vertebrae of the trees

in the late Cretaceous of autumn just to get down to essentials,

and see what kind of utensils they took to the grave with them

for eras now. You see how it is with me, all oxymoronic metaphors

trying to bridge duality into a unified field theory

that includes the spiritual like a prodigal wavelength

that might make a difference to the dark matter at hand

as well as the light in the other. I’m an ambidextrous nightbird.

A discipline of longing and renewal that isn’t for petty people

terrified of the truths that sting and sing within them

like dragons of rage and bliss who don’t need a voice coach,

a mentor, a guru, a nightschool, an intercessor or a crutch

to be told how to hold a note like a bird disappearing into the nightsky.

An hourglass, even when it’s filled with the sands of Mars,

gets bored with its own lies over the years, and I’m intrigued

by the earthly candour and sidereal wonder in the way you look at life.

Your ferociously indignant compassion for people, and the passion

to translate the mysticism of contemplation into action,

and the savagery of the solitude that snarls at them to go away

when you need to lick your own wounds, and mix up

a new potion of stem cells with starmaps so they can get

to the furthest parts of your body and mind, those outposts

on the borders between sanity and crazy wisdom

where the silence won’t divulge whether everyone died

in the last assault, or just ran out of ammunition.

And I’ve seen your eyes narrow like crescent moons

in the eyes of a cat that wants to get to the point like a pencil-sharpener.

You’re hydra-headed, sapiosexual, as you’ve said

and your face is as chameleonic as the birthmark of a black Isis

from Merovingian France seven centuries before

the troubadours of Occitania. You’re the Aquitaine.

You’re Eleanor. You’re the yellow planta genesta

that grew wild all over the hills like a stubborn field fire

of radical sunshine that burns all the way down to the roots.

Then you’re foxfire potted in the ashes of the urns

of your old lovers transplanted to an open windowsill where

you can give them some air and some light

and you get a chance to bloom again in your own right.

I’m a dragon, a wolf, a warrior son of Virgo,

a demonic familiar doomed to do good despite himself

by trying to lead other people away from me toward themselves,

though I admit it’s an ironic sacrifice to be

so gift-wrapped with flesh that few have torn my lifemasks away

to see how I burn in excruciating immolations like a root-fire inside.

Boo hoo, for me, if the moon cuts its finger and doesn’t

ask me to kiss it better. Fire doesn’t burn itself and the blade

is never sharp enough to make the distinction

between the moon on the waters and its reflection,

between creative annihilation and its extinction.

I’ve seen swords cry like dew at the tips

of the sabres of stargrass bent towards the earth

like the hands of a clock commemorating the ravages of time

saluting its purple hearts on review in a parade-ground of flowers.

I can see deadly nightshade in you, the palette of a witch,

and the orchids you mix into the brew like the petals

of a new moon, like a lonely wish against hope,

some warlock with gravitational eyes who can bend the light

like water, is going to see the masterpiece of the mandala

that could empower his darkness like the first sight of Venus

over the occluded hills of Lanark where these shadows

only want to serve your lustre to enhance its radiance,

to make you the threshold and gold standard

of his prodigal homelessness parsecs across

at the narrowest ford in my mindstream beyond

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

where Morpheus bends the river like a flight of crows and doves

like a zodiacal, shape-shifting Etruscan king releasing them

from an aviary of fixed stars, to let the constellations

assume whatever paradigm and legend of shining they want

into the perennially true meaning of

here, here, here, altogether here and now.

Venus approaching Regulus in Leo

and a torch of burning starwheat like Spica in Virgo.

PATRICK WHITE