FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Firefly, what are you looking for

in every corner of the third eye of the world?

Are you looking for the missing children

of another realm who fell into this one

through the trapdoor of a lullaby

enigmatically enciphered in totemistic code?

Are you the star someone was following

like a spark plug that leaked out of their dreams,

a swan in an oilspill? Were you unhappy

with the constellation you fell from

like one of the crown jewels from Corona Borealis,

or are you just a vagrant like me, one

of those aligned to wandering as the next place

to shine a little light on, your life like a lantern in hand,

wondering what’s been written under the leaves,

or under a bridge, that it takes a madman to understand

or it takes a whole tree to play the mystery of its cards

so far from its chest, when they’ll all be scattered to the wind

like ancient starmaps and waterlilies soon.

Insight, synteretic spark, semaphoric lighthouse,

blackout and ignition, which phase of you

shines more intensely, the light or the dark?

Do you just have the one good eye, or two?

It would take someone just as lost at sea in their awareness

to get their bearings from you, as it would

to consult the compass of a flower like a waterclock

because time, when it’s free, like light,

expands in all directions at once like tree rings

dilating the apples of their eyes in the rain,

surrounding the lore of their heartwood with growing pains.

Metaphor, glow worm, do you find what you seek,

are you a chandelier burning in the palace

of a mason jar after the last waltz has packed away its cellos,

a tear of the sun that shines at midnight

like a canary in an underground diamond mine

or do we share the same mind, one neuron in the net

reflecting the other, an effect of the optics of thought?

Intimate familiar, little prophet, rogue planet,

singularity at the bottom of a black hole,

are you looking at me, as I am you

like a thought on the outside, an underwater welder

trying to heal the damage done to the hull of the moon

crossing the Great Barrier Reef of the brain?

Wavelengths of water and light sway the river reeds,

silver the fallen limbs of the statuesque birch

that leaned out too far over the edge of the lake

to pluck the moon from the sky like an apricot.

I watch the cults and spiritual congregations of the fireflies

gather, shape and dissolve, each with its own flight path,

and I wonder if there’s a shape-shifting constellation

that would cover us all under the roof of the same sign

like a zodiac of homeless exiles we all had the keys to

but didn’t know where the locks were hidden

until we took off our starmaps like blindfolds.

No extinctions in the gentle meteor showers

of the fireflies, nor any discernible radiant,

for them or me or the universe, given

everyone embodies the whole of the Big Bang

in and of themselves, just as the New England asters do,

everyone shining for all their worth

through the translucency of their own space,

even when they’re trying to hide from their own eyes,

like daylilies at night, or the gold of full moons

under eyelids of ore, under the overturned lifeboats

of their beached hope chests that have nothing

to look forward to anymore that isn’t any further away

than the telescope they use on top of a cold mountain

to measure the wingspan of their dreams.

The light will out as if it couldn’t keep itself a secret

from the darkness it illuminates with its own flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

WATER HAS ITS FOLLOWERS

Water has its followers

but the wind is free of an audience.

It doesn’t encourage cults of wild irises and daylilies

along the flowing of its banks.

It sows the orchards with the pollen of stars

it kicks up like dust at its heels.

But my voice isn’t the larnyx

of windmills and waterwheels

and when I speak

I’m always one among the crowd

that’s listening at the same time

to a conversation with themselves

that took the words right out of my mouth.

My voice is a seance.

The dead use it like a bus stop.

The swallows and the pigeons

drink from it as if it were a public fountain

efflorescing like an Easter lily in Florence.

It’s a guitar. But I am not

the medium, the message, or the master.

Sometimes my voice comes in the mail

like a self-addressed suicide note

I wanted to take a cheap form

of copyright out on. Be dead

by the time it got here

like the light of a star that’s gone on ahead

so I won’t need to open it to the public.

No echo. I know it’s a black hole

with nothing to say to anyone

who isn’t as singularly empty as it is

cowboying aeons of dark matter into galaxies

that won’t stray from the herd like starfish.

Still life with clown, sometimes

it finds me meditating among the pears

or half-lotus in the nunneries of the waterlilies

praying for something important to come down

like Jesus or a ufo and take me away

just take me away for good from this alien place.

When it talks as if it’s been insulted

I’m the one who loses face when it decides

it would be more honourable for me to die

facing in the direction of my chi,

gutting myself on a compass needle

that’s been in the family ancestrally,

than waste my death as I have my life on poetry.

And when it’s in a less ceremonious mood

it holds a broken beer bottle up to my throat

and threatens to cut my heart out

like a bird stuck in a chimney

putting wings on its jugular like a one-stringed harp.

PATRICK WHITE

MY FINGER ON THE TRIGGER

My finger on the trigger of the crescent moon

I hold like a gun to my head,

or should I offer my throat to its blade,

unbind the flag of my blood from its pulley,

pull down the poppy

that exalts in the wind and the light

from this sad station of passing shadows

that mourns the death of the night like birds

in a burnt-out forest of blossoms and ashes?

I have the emotional life of a bell

rooted in rock like the columbines

that have mastered a silence I aspire to,

lamenting the metal in my blood

that rusts like the afterlife of iron,

defeated pollen no bee will gather, hive, or honey.

I am passionate dust,

not the powdered auburn

that stains the stamens on the stargazer lilies,

I bleed like a metal,

and I am leafless year round,

my seeing does not follow the sun like a heliotrope;

I am a bowl full of stars, a radio dish

listening for signs of life,

one word to startle the ancient hiss of creation

that keeps returning me to this moment

to cross swords with the clock,

even knowing how time will pierce my heart.

What folly to expect a horn to flower,

what madness to weed the stars

and expect a harvest

to fill the waiting silo of the railroad granary

that funnels nothing but air and echoes

into an abyss that lingers like a famine.

There are no more fortune-cookies in my kisses,

the constellations that once slid across my eyes

like an escalator approaching zenith

all look like punctuation marks without a text,

kells without an inaugural scripture

that isn’t a sigh of miscarried beginnings,

the desiccated afterbirth

of a pen with wings

that wasn’t strong enough

to crack its way out of the cosmic egg and sing, just sing

for the celestial fuck of it.

Caw. Chirp. Caw. Chirp. Caw.

Blank. Loaded. Blank. Loaded. Blank.

The hammer I was using

to build a palace of light and water,

to be able to nail my coffin shut with the truth,

coming down

on the anvil of the heart like the pulse

of a stagestruck bullet.

PATRICK WHITE