I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

I have not forgotten

the asters that bloomed in the wake of your smile,

the torn bridal veil

you were always shaking free of the spiders

that wanted to pin themselves like badges,

like mushroom crowns

to the polygonal thrones of your web;

or the way you would walk through doors,

swim through windows

as if my life were your own personal dream

and I was the only horse on the moon

that had ever survived your thorns,

nor the way your fingers could turn into

the horns of a garden snail

or the green tendrils of imperial strawberries

that slowly colonized my skin

with small mystical villages

on the slopes of volcanic dragons,

and how you were always quicker than pyramids

to extinguish the fire

with emergency kisses

that turned the ambulance into

a newspaper tossed on the doorstep

announcing the terms of the armistice,

the swaddled folds

of a nursing iris in bud,

or the cross you swore was a bridge

between a coffin and a cocoon.

Did you ever finish painting your wings,

or that likeness of death

you said was a portrait of me?

Drifting for years

in the stone lifeboat you left me

like an island of my own

where I was the king of shadows,

the disconsolate wizard

of my own ruined magic,

and my heart was a cauldron of skulls,

I often thought of you

to keep myself from believing in love again;

the blow, the money, the music,

the secret sauce

of the Malaysian black current cheesecake

sliced into portions of the moon

robed in the folds of a regal eclipse,

of how you made everyone feel

they were better for you than me,

crazed by the panties you threw everywhere

like the fragrance of a smouldering rose

to prove you were hot and a rockstar,

and then grab me like a mike stand

and give me head in a song no one else could hear,

as if I were a hit long before you were born

and evolution hired a publicist.

I always thought you were a dangerous child,

a bouquet of fireflies

you were trying to give

to the ghost of a death that hadn’t happened yet,

a bee of blood that drowned

in the angry chalice of a broken mirror

that lied to your face about flowers.

I had to throw my heart out

like a corpse at sea to love you,

and lean back and watch as if I didn’t care

as one by one the stars o.d.’d like candles

in the black hole

that was swallowing you

like a snake with its tail in its mouth,

the eternal recurrence

of your father with you in bed.

And now it’s twenty years later

and life is a crosswalk in a dream

where we pass each other like bells on parole

from the spires that plunge through the past

like daggers through the eyes and the skies

of our isolation cells,

and it’s law not love

to go for a drink

to compare the opulence of our solitudes

like trees shedding their leaves to the bone,

and you undo your hair

like ribbons of fire at the foot of my grave

because you remember while I lived

I liked it long,

and reach across the table like wine

and take my hand in yours,

the other half of a split wishbone

that didn’t come true,

the head of a dead swan,

the last bugle of a dying civilization,

and quote from memory

a poem I wrote for you

chained by lightning

to a sacrificial rock in an old abyss

catastrophes ago

to make sure

the moon always had eyelids

when it stared into the lights

that obliterated all my faces

in the dark blaze of planets on tour with the dawn.

And I was moved like blue grasslands

as I always used to be

to witness the eerie beauty of your tears as you spoke,

sweeping out of the open window

of your abandoned heart

like curtains of rain you stood behind

to see if the wind would bring you roses again.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE

I want to write something that will impress you,

a blue virgin with a silo of hand-picked stars

for a heart that we might begin with,

the soiled velvet of my collapsed parachute

that came down like the night over everything,

the miscreant sky of an ancient descent

that keeps snuffing the candle of blood

I keep using to draft poems on the mirror

that suggests an emergency of fire and ink.

I want to write something like a pulse

that doesn’t belong to anything in existence,

the mythic inflation and collapse

of a sail or a lung or a womb

that might engender something extraordinary

among the plaster cherubs

and efflorescent gargoyles of this abandoned theatre

that no longer stages the improvised encounters

of the demons or the angels,

whose silence is the salted earth of a city

that traded its wilderness in

for a cemetery of clowns and scarecrows

and traffic jam of golden crutches. I refer,

of course, to the plastic bag

someone put over the mouth of my longing

and the cyanotic agony of trying to breathe freely

under the asphyxiating skin of the sky

that adheres to my eyes and voice like dew.

I want to write something fine and wild and exalted,

and enlighten the hinges of a vastly open door

with the raw ore of my meticulous urgencies.

Supple and eloquent, a sapphire river

flowing effortlessly through the night,

a rose of fire ashing on its own roots,

tendering its green thorns

like the fangs of an innocent moon,

I want to wash off the mud of the road with stars

that only bloom for those with the eyes to be them,

and throwing off the yoke

of all these sad windows

I collect like dogtags and discount coupons

of spiritual junkmail,

plough the moon with my tongue

and in a whisper of opening eyelids

weep like a silver tree

for the beauty of the dark-side jewels

that water my roots.

You must be in bed by now;

you must be mourning your lost lover,

lamenting the blizzard of ghosts

that coats your heart in the burlap and chainmail

of another winter that must be borne on your knees.

May I hover, may I linger,

may I spectrally request an audience,

pour this star-flavoured darkness into your ear,

can I be free without intruding

and rattle this chandelier of dragon tears

like a spell across your last shadow?

I want to astound you with the risks I take,

walking on my hands down this guitar string

keyed to the gaping annuity of the abyss;

I want to shed my skin

and stretch it like a playbill

over last year’s cancelled play;

and write you certified cheques

on the petals of luxuriant flowers

for exotic causes

only the homeless clouds could believe in.

And I don’t want to be loved for who I am,

I want to be loved for what I do;

as the wind is loved in its passing

for clarifying the sky like a rag of air,

for winnowing the grain from the chaff

after the threshing of the harvests of the dead

into feathers, waves and leaves,

for the muffled thunder of cannons and apples

going off in the distance

like a holy war of one

trying to overcome its own stratagems.

I don’t want to swing the planet like a wrecking ball

against the condemned tenements

that sweat from the pores of a selfish mirror,

and bury the poor in doorways

that exhale the nocturnal vapours of the hopeless

who rummage through hand-me-down poppies

for an affordable dream that might fit.

I only want to wear you once

in a mansion of water and moonlight

like a nakedness of space and cherries

I can’t take off,

and from the orchard of these black blossoms

that scatter like heretical doves from a fire,

this migration of the white phoenix

to a burning branch in a combustible solitude

that roots its holiest ladders

in the ashes of its own blazing divestment,

offer you the fruit of the crazy wisdom

of the fool who drinks from my eyes

as if the grail of this all night feeling

were a bar that never closed.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.

The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.

The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.

Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.

Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates

with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences

holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies

back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed

by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.

Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies

in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know

how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,

I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon

that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,

purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,

Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails

where the red-winged blackbirds sit

to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song

with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything

and requires nothing of the living but attendance.

Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness

among things as they are without trying

to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers

to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart

of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface

they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs

of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows

into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras

like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars

working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders

walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,

like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t

wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll

looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find

like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet

full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter

like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,

and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,

and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising

from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,

and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention

by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment

that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,

there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,

or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run

of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland

swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.

Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract

the wild grapevines away from her empty nest

as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection

of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze

like the more mercurial downside of itself,

and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks

like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful

of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,

trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.

And what can you say to the stars that are beginning

to look for themselves in the approaching night

except this too is the world where even the lost,

in attempting to return to themselves through

the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation

with bioluminous insights of the radiance

blazing out of the darkness of a white coma

as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically

just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows

of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord

to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud

as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites

and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers

to the currents and wavelengths, the turns

and counterturns, of thematic waters with a musical motif

that plays to its own depths from the bridge

of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water

with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE