TIME TO MYSELF

TIME TO MYSELF

Time to myself.

The first half hour feels

as if I’m sitting at a bus-stop

waiting for something that’s never going to come.

Thoughts like stray threads of hair on my shoulder.

Old love affairs that have gone grey in my absence.

After the last flashflood I scuttled the ark of my heart

on the moon, like a dog far enough into the country

it couldn’t find its way home again.

Love’s always a mystically unique reality

but the cosmic urgencies of the pain

I endured demonically in the name

of things that were too feeble to believe in,

eventually came to hum like white noise

in the background of a boring curse

where all you could do was dogpaddle

in the flotsam and jetsam of incredible trivia

that floats up to the surface of a shipwreck on the bottom

waiting for the next lifeboat.

No one locks their doors in the country

unless they’re living a field away

from a hobby-farm, hillbilly crackhouse

that’s been handed down like the story

of a body in a lost housewell somewhere on the property,

so if someone were to step in out of the night,

I wouldn’t stand my ground like a ten point, white-tailed buck

on a hill that’s been posted against hunting

with grenades, and feel too sure of myself,

but just the same, I’d watch from a distance for awhile.

Like a wolf made shy by intelligence,

I wouldn’t come down from the timberline

until I was convinced by the probable concourse of events

there was no bounty on my head

and no judas-goat was pleading in a leg-hold trap.

Sounds brutal when I say it, but not to those

who’ve been shot at by shepherd moons

trying to cull the pack like asteroids into extinction

whenever it tried to snatch the golden calf by the throat

and bleed it like a rose of transubstantiation in the snow.

The most insane things I’ve ever done

in a world that specializes in absurdity

I’ve done for the beauty of the madness

that overtook me like the acids of a Venus fly-trap.

Sometimes love can be a lighthouse on the moon

with no one to give a warning to, it may be a mermaid

but it’s been singing the same old song on the rocks too long

and I’m poet enough to go down with the ship

but not as a creature of habit. The scratched guitar

with a warped neck in the corner

that made a benign hobby out of a way of life

that was once the death call of the music

that only endangered species could hear and dance to.

Love needs a wide screen to feature

the wingspans of its emotions so any sky

you might find yourself flying in fits you like skin.

But me? I can see a masterpiece in the paint rag of a parrot.

And there are worlds within worlds within worlds

so unanimously unconcerned with us

they have to read ancient history just to prove

that we exist as an unexplained anomaly

of the cosmic background hiss of radiant annihilation

deconstructing into the echoes of its original inspiration

like birds crying in the throat of a valley

that holds its notes too long

to keep time with the pace and passage of life.

Love’s a melodic state of mind with a percussive heartbeat

and no one’s ever really missing from the band

on the road like religious icons of democracy,

even when they get homesick for their girlfriends

and the drummer is moved in his heart of hearts

more by paranoia and lust than he is love and music

to end his calling in a bus station with a broken phone,

trying to make sure his girlfriend’s there

when he gets home at two in the morning.

Not especially bitter, and only occasionally longing,

but I remember the happy day my Greek chef friend announced

he no longer worshipped at the feet of the great goddess sex,

and died of cancer five months later, and how

even Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t pacify the hydra

of his sexual desires by lighting little fires

all around him when he slept on a pyre of women.

Worse than celibacy is abstracting the flesh into a hungry ghost.

To damn the body with the faint praise

of a sin of omission that denigrates its earthly excellence

as an instrument of God in the hands of rank amateurs

trying to weave flying carpets on the loom of a guitar

to add their wavelength of lament to the disappointed stars.

Where the bullet comes to rest

in a cosmic game of Russian roulette

is forensically irrelevant. Who

got it through the heart and who

got it through their head can go on arguing forever

who suffered the deepest death

when the daffodils began behaving like periscopes

intent on torpedoing the love boat

zigzaging through the sealanes of a wolfpack.

Open-armed as the bay of a seaworthy sailor,

I embrace love these days lightly with a kiss

like a ticket in a lottery I’m not expecting to win

but revel in like a Zen poet dancing with the moon

as if he were water, and it was taking its sail down

over the treetops, to stay awhile on his enchanted island

where delusion is not an obstruction to bliss,

and enlightenment isn’t anymore of a seer

than the scars of the star that stripmined your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

Dying young in autumn,

the ideal death of a flower or a star

whose beauty’s still as obvious

as a door that’s been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties

out looking for someone

who’s made an escape through the woods,

or they’re lamp lighting deer

out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance

works its ghost to death

Doppler-shifting its lament

into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes

of the recurring storm of the trees,

flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons

to burn for the sheer delight of it.

I make my way through a labyrinth

of foliage and moonlit shadows

to nowhere in particular

with a rocky slope glacially graded

down to what the locals say

is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods

were ever deep enough to plumb.

I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth

and I can feel it drawing

all the fever out of me like the effluvium

of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams

I’ve become osmotically enculturated to

like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.

The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.

I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird

on a limb that’s healing like the rafter of a house

that broke under the weight of what it upheld

when a three alarm fire in the heart

sought sanctuary from an ice storm

and it was nobody’s fault but my own

that I didn’t let it go out like a flagging comet

with the rest of the daylilies

that died in harness like parachutes.

I’ve kept it alive for lightyears

like a book of the occult in an industrial library.

I’ve cupped its light in my hands

like an ancestral offering

to the enlightenment of my peers

and though the clouds have raved

and the wind turned vicious

it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,

a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,

a genie in an old lamp, a female demon

that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily

with nothing to fear from the new moon.

Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.

PATRICK WHITE