I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I CAN REMEMBER YOU SCREAMING

I can remember you screaming

like a shattered crack house window

something obscene to the last john on death row

you railed like a comet in passing.

Your mind was a mirror

that had suffered one too many exorcisms

not to weep on the dark side

like an exhausted eclipse

when you cracked like a wishbone for the boys

and I could never imagine

what you said to yourself

when you picked yourself up after them like toys

they had forgotten they had wished for.

When you pulled the shower curtain closed

like a bruise on a nun

were you in a cloister or a confessional

or are there other vows

that can only be broken by a professional?

You were all gates to everyone

but no matter how many they passed through

they never made it as far as the garden.

But I can remember one night with you

before we both grew up through the concrete

when the angel with the flaming sword

blew herself out like a candle

and there was more to the beginning

than just a word.

Everything sprang up like mushrooms

and in every one

I could taste you like the moon.

And San Francisco in the sixties

showed us both what the world could have been like

if it had been created by a woman

but it was you alone

in the silence of our mystic complicity

that revealed what could be revealed

of your plans for paradise.

Are you in it now?

Are you dabbling your toes

in the salmon-enchanted rivers of the dawn

or leaping over the obvious rainbows upstream

to heal your urgency in the sacred pools of Goldstream

as if the sea depended on it?

The last time I saw you

the drugs had made you so thin

you looked like a ladder going down into a deep hole

and there were no demons or angels on it rungs

and the stars in your eyes had turned their dance floors

into the heads of tiny pins and celestial syringes

at the other end of the telescope that makes things small.

And then the ferry pulled away from the wharf like a planet

and left me standing dwarfed in its wake

and I remembered you, so unafraid and golden

insisting I push you higher and higher

with every return of the swing

as if you couldn’t do anything

without coming full circle,

and then you jumped like a stone from a sling

or a comet from its dark halo

and I saw the moon fall out of your ring

like an opal, like an eye

and by October when you left for Mexico,

the little we had of a belated childhood was over.

I wanted to call and tell you

I still loved you like that summer

you turned, and laughed, and raised your shirt

and showed me your breasts at the end of the walkway

like something of you

you wanted me to remember.

And I do. God knows I do, by the way I hurt

like a road you didn’t take

or the face you kept hidden for my sake

that still keeps on using me like tears

when you asked me in jest

but listened for the answer like a bell

if after all these years

I would still die for you

and for a few hours one afternoon

you were Josie again, happy and vain and glorious,

whenever I answered yes

and there was no chain in hell

that could bind you like a swing or a well

to the pendulous clockwork death cart axles and oxen of anything

and no pain in the silence that followed the news of your death

when I said it again

and true as a comet to its calling

or the map of a star to its falling through fire,

you streamed out forever like your hair in an exaltation of glee

lacing summer stars through the darkest places in me

screaming, higher, Patrick, higher,

push me higher than I’ve ever been

as if I could pick up where you had left off

like a kite on the wing

a girl on a swing

and the world was not dirty and mean.

PATRICK WHITE

LET ME BE WORTHY OF THE RIVER

Let me be worthy of the river

and the strange ores that glow at night,

buried like teachers in the mountain;

let my blood always taste of the moon

and my heart burn like a black rose,

like the poem in the fire

that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,

for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,

and transcend the hell that shadows the folly

of not being foolish.

May the stars,

when they gather in gardens

water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains

and the wind bleed like ink from my pen

when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror

of my helplessness.

When I am large, spacious, profound,

let me sit like the universe

on the throne of a seed

that lies in the dirt;

and when I am small, brief,

a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,

robe me in the lion skin of the night sky

and ennoble me

with delusion and enlightenment

on this road of ghosts.

Whatever befall,

let me perish or prosper as a human

who insists upon the divinity of all

and burns and rises

for the heresy and truth of it.

Let anyone born be accounted a hero,

a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard

when the seas raged in the womb

to give birth to suffering;

and may I always be entrusted

with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes

to look into the dragon’s eyes

and not be horrified

by the ferocity of the freedom

that thaws space

like an hourglass in the rain.

And should love occur

to shape the blade of the moon

on the anvil of my heart,

and a cauldron of passionate visions

scald the eyes with intimate glimpses

of myriad heavens and hells,

all truer than reason,

may my bitterness pass

like the eclipse of an hour,

a left-handed blessing,

no vinegar of injured illusion

accept the sad surrender of the wine

like the death poppy of a folded flag,

no tar of judgment and denial

feather the dream with stone pillows,

no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,

make me too petty or afraid

to dance with my skin off

engulfed like the wind

in secret sails of mystic fire.

There’s always a clown, a jester

who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,

a thoroughbred and a dray

yoked to the little red wagon of the heart

like two thieves either side

of an unwitnessed crucifixion,

two dadaphors, two torches

disposed like opposable hinges

on a door that opens like water

at the whisper of a key.

Let me be the clown-prince

of my own idiotic profundities then,

let me survive my way into the wisdom

of the inspired fools

who know that anything they ask for

from the stolen bounty of the king

is just another absurdity in disguise,

that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.

I’ve always had my heart

caught in my throat

like a bird in a chimney,

a cork in a wine-bottle,

a habitable planet in a black hole.

I have loved and befriended

almost anyone

who would let me

and seen their evanescence,

their transigence, their vagrancy, their passage

through this mansion of space

with the amazing windows and chandeliers,

the sad brevity of the things they cherished.

Blind to restorative grails,

I have not sought the meaning of life,

I have not hunted the dragon with nets,

knowing reality is meaningless

because it has no fingers,

it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,

nor bear witness in a mirror,

but I have walked in the peacock robes

of the twilight sky, all eyes,

in the gardens of the life of meaning,

past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,

and seen for myself

that there are flowers with petals of water

and roots of fire

that drink the stars like rain.

Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps

and there’s no refund on the empties.

Night puts its hands over your eyes

and asks you to guess;

and there’s no end of the mystery,

no end of the blessing

of sitting under a tree

looking up at a star

wondering what human beings,

what you are doing on earth;

what a thought is, an emotion,

the blade of grass beside you,

everything alone together

in the silent boat of the rising moon

docking at its own reflection

as if the port were always in the voyage,

understanding

merely an expression of the intensity

of our not knowing.

The answers come and go,

governments, religions, arts, 

sciences, fortune-cookies,

like parking meters, like waterbirds,

like oceans on the moon.

Life is the lock that opens the key,

the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up

talking in its sleep,

trying to remember the dreamer.

Like the fleets and caravans

of the seeds on the autumn wind

we are the purest expression

of a universe

that answers us with ourselves

when we ask for a sign.

Like cherries that ripen in the silence

of the deepening night,

turning our tears to wine,

our darkness into eyes,

may my shadows always be worthy

of the light that casts them.

Sixty-three years a human being,

sixty-three years of suffering and doubt,

of boredom and magmatic intensities,

of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,

of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,

of saying and seeing,

of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away

by deepening my ignorance

and progressing backwards

through the re-runs of old eclipses

that once gorged on the moon like dragons.

Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside

and the stars seem eras away in the cold

as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining

since I was a boy

were just another leaf torn from the tree.

It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,

to see that even the brightest fountains

of your efflorescence

are rooted in a wounded watershed

that has never known the colour of your eyes.

I don’t need to be forgiven

for being born;

and I won’t be poured

like a tidal wine

into a life that isn’t mine

however many cracks appear in the cup,

however I recede and leak out of myself,

my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,

and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,

no one’s footprints following me but my own.

How should it be otherwise

that I fall like rain

to appease this rumour of life

like a fire in my roots

and flash through the creekbeds

of my own flowing

like time returning to its hidden source

with news of nothing?

An echo of light

looking for its lost voice like a star,

I don’t need to prove myself to the night

like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger

and space is the only death mask

that is the true likeness of my face.

No more than the light and the rain

that open the seeds like love-letters,

I don’t need to know

what I will become

or what was revealed behind me in the dark,

but let me be worthy

of this wounded boat of the moment

with its cargo of eyes

enduring the burden and inspiration

of the voyage

like illegal refugees

with forged passports to Atlantis;

and if I must be accounted

one of the martyrs of absurdity,

then let me be as generous as wings

to the worms in my name

that blindly tilled the soil

of a rootless country.

PATRICK WHITE