IT’S GOOD TO KNOW

It’s good to know you’re there;

though the world is a diatribe

of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it’s good to know

a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,

a bell waits like a nipple of silence

and your blood waits like a language,

a rose of rain in a starfield,

that my mouth alone can say to the night

in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,

sipping from a chalice of water

spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky

and buries itself like a meteor

at the cornerstone of a sightless temple

pillared by faithless candles

that flirt with the shadows

of the fire in their eyes,

and I’m bridges beyond any way back the way I came,

my wake the scar of a vapour trail

in yesterday’s cherry sunset,

and I still catch myself at my worst

whenever I’m good;

there’s always a thread of blood on the water,

and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror

scrawled in manic lipstick,

and a gravestone

I carry around on my shoulders like a skull

that feels like the weight of the world,

and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death

that is often afraid of me,

and a ferocity of freedom

that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,

and bleaches every feeling like a wound

in the antiseptic of the sun

that bites like a mystic arrow

that was feathered with a message

before I was born to find me;

but it’s good to know

your fury and your gentleness,

the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,

your altars of wind and smoke

spuming across the vastness of the solitude

like blood and chalk

and lines written after school

on the blackboard shale of my river skin

still trying to reform its way to the sea;

it’s good to look at the moon

through your passionate windows

and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness

attuning the tines of my tongue

to a fork in the road of your body,

to the delta of an unknown civilization,

to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words

that have sought me out

like blood vessels and burning bushes

and the blossoming fingers of someone

kneading a face

out of the huge volume,

the pure space of my unattainability:

o you have said things to me

in ink and water and brandy and fire,

in night and moonlight and poppies and tears

that have made the hardest rocks

on the highest slopes

of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed

to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter

by the tenderness of your knives again and again,

urgent with beauty and joy

to be overthrown

by the whisper of your voice in the valley

triggering this skyborn avalanche

of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases

and the vases into urns

and the urns back into the wombs

of a thousand terminal exiles

tolling like a heartbeat

with a passport and a threshold,

and though I am no longer

the leaf of hope

that aspired to rudder

the firestream of these volcanic transformations,

it’s good to drift awhile

in the dreamtime of this endless night

like recoverable salvage

among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats

and the reaping eyes

of your eloquent islands of light.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN’T THAT I’M LOOKING

It isn’t that I’m looking for eagles in a barnyard

or a phoenix in a match-head

when I observe

by the number of wrecks on the rocks

how few lighthouses there are these days

among so many flashlights.

What can the hair say about the horn

or the feather teach the wind

or quicksand preach

for the edification of the cornerstone?

And must I put a healthy leg

at the service of a broken crutch

to limp along with the mob

at the end of a dying culture

that insists that all roads end

in a cult of cripples?

If I’m walking alone to the stars

on a pilgrimage of one

finding my way in the going,

my heart aligned like the needle of a compass

to a darkness brighter than the light,

and the only map the clarity of my eyes,

why should those

who weep in their ashes like rain,

trying to put glasses on a fly,

who have never dipped

the thorn of the moon

in the night of their blood

and written a love poem

to a skull in a desert,

care if I want to roam

in the hills and valleys of myself

like some homeless shepherd of the wind

taking the stone of the earth for a pillow to dream on

in the high grasslands

where the stars walk

whispering eternal intimacies like black swans

barging the ores of a vacant throne

through my bloodstream,

as all along the shores of my flowing

ancient flowers wake mysteriously

like candles in an eclipse?

If I take the sky for the walls of my house

and leave the rest

like an autumn of junkmail

looking for a door and a last known address,

if I choose not to contrive a world

to accommodate my absence

in the available dimension of the future,

wiping my shadows and ghosts

like mirrors off at the threshold,

even letting go of the door

to enter empty-handed

as the applause

for an understudy of the dawn

that never got over its stage-fright

in the abyss of an abandoned theater,

happy to let the river pan itself for gold,

not laying a claim to anything,

making sure the gate-latch

clamps down like a dog on a bone

when I close it up

like a straitjacket in its own thoughts,

not stringing my spinal court to a wishbone

or the warped neck

of an obvious guitar,

but taking my voice with me

like a wounded bird in my hands,

a star struck from a stone,

moonlight in an empty boat,

the taste of silence

in the mouth of a mask,

my name a rainmark

on the eyelid of a dusty bell

I’ve left to the dream it keeps returning to;

why should it matter to anyone

who lies to the bleeding door

that is wounded by their entrance

everytime they say it’s just me

as if a pillar answered?

I can’t find anything

less than everything to call a self

and there are no mirrors

in an abyss more naked than the sky

to consult like the oracular flights of words

that litter the windowsill of this seeing

like flies that spent themselves,

flints on an empty lighter,

wicks on a glass candle,

consuming the ferocity

of their lives against the illusion of the world outside

they brain themselves against again and again

like small meteors

doused like torches in the eye

of the upper atmosphere

just above the open window.

When everything is absurd as this,

and even the tuning forks of the rain

are an era off in their pitch,

and music is merely

the coming and going of ants

in an abandoned syrinx,

and the drum of the heart alone

isn’t enough to start a band,

and the only melody

is a road the wind blew away

like a hair off the shoulder of the night,

and everyone’s trying

to unmarrow the moon like a fortune-cookie,

and every snowflake in the furnace

of this dark fire

thinks it dies like a galaxy

when it’s only an inflection of tears,

am I not free to walk in harmony

with the savage senselessness of it all,

without hanging a bell of advice over my head

like the only corpse

on an island full of gravediggers

who can’t get out of the holes they’ve dug

to bury me in?

I don’t want to live waiting for yesterday

like the light of a star

that’s already gone,

or dream like a seed of constellations to come

like a roll of the dice,

or watch the surplus of your smile

rotting on the docks of a famine.

And don’t think these harvests I leave you

like a trail of breadcrumbs and dead flies

out of this wilderness of thought

are any more than stars

caught in the throat of the labyrinth

that follows itself like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

trying to find a way out of itself

by eating its own head.

And by some chance

if you ever make it out this far,

I’ve mailed back

the same map of fireflies

with its legend of smoke,

three lifetimes a lightyear,

you once handed me to find you

and marked every place I’m not

with a black hole.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE