EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

EVEN WHEN LIFE SOMETIMES SEEMS LIKE A BLACK HOLE

for Rebekah Genevieve-Dolorese Garland

Even when life sometimes seems like a black hole,

a dark furnace full of the ashes of burnt roses,

it shapes the galaxies into sunflowers and starfish

and it’s whirling with stars like a Sufi in rapture.

All my life I’ve tried so hard not to be afraid of my joy

and at home with my grief like a comfortable chair

that was beginning to take on the same airs as my body.

A holy war of one, carrying the true cross of the sixties

I thought was worth fighting for even long after

I realized I was doomed to dancing to the music

for the rest of the duration. And it’s been as true

as Jim Morrison living the afterlife of Arthur Rimbaud

in deserts so desolate even the stars were shy of the darkness.

And I have wept bitterly as the moon went down

like a toxic goat skull into the only wishing well

for light years around, and it seemed, and it’s

still dangerous to remember because time doesn’t blunt all knives,

I was witnessing an ideological madness, that had

mineralized all the best ideals into fossils, froth

like rabies at its own hydrophobic reflection.

Biting at its own wounds in vengeance upon itself

for the way the water tasted polluted and there was acid rain

in the wavelengths of its tears more venomous than a recluse spider.

I saw how people brought armfuls of poppies and wheat

to lay down on the stairs of the temple in tribute and love

like a sacrifice from the heart they gentled down

upon the grave of a loved one that had died too young

and hoped would return the blood they were missing

as a sign that the roses were mending their severed petals

like eyelids being stitched back by the very thorn

that had made them bleed in the first place.

In a schizzy world, whatever you sacrifice like a lapwing

sooner or later, because everything tends toward its opposite

like twins that weren’t anymore separated at birth

than the first and last crescents of the moon,

engenders in the nest of cosmic eggs it’s dying to protect

farce and desecration that tar and feather it like an eclipse.

But every once in awhile that comes as often as now,

you meet someone inconceivably shining

in her solitude like light through a mysterious jewel

into one of the sacred weeping pools of the mindstream

and the moon silvers your heart like a sword

you were about to fall upon to save your face the trouble

and you take the hilt and the blade in both your hands

like an autumn equinox that’s just bumped into spring

wandering off the beaten path to tend her lunar garden

and you lay it on the waters because choice isn’t an option

like the flightfeather of the other wing of the bird

that can’t take the measure of the immeasurable wingspan

of these event horizons, transits, zeniths and thresholds

I’m crossing with you like Leo and Virgo

across a heartscape of enlightened taboos

that have been singing to me all these years from a dark wood

like a lucid wavelength hidden in the ore of a particle

that only seemed so when you looked at it from afar,

that drew the sword out of the stone, the star

out of the darkness, the waterlily out of the marsh,

the heart of someone like you out of the nightsky

like a meteor with a panspermic rosary of life at its core

falling on the Fertile Crescent of a habitable planet,

or a whole new universe, with a punk version

of the Garden of Eden where the birds are all listening

to the Ramones, and Eve is raving with Adam in a mosh pit

teeming with infinite permutations and combinations

of love and life, of colour, poetry, light, energy, joy and devotion,

as if we’d both disembarked from these empty lifeboats of the heart

on the shores of this thriving island of stars

where the Milky Way meets the ocean

and all the constellations that travelled this Road of Ghosts

like the long, dark, strange radiant trip it’s been

wash the deathmasks off their faces like old myths of origin

from the starcharts of our comets and scars

that have me smiling at you in wonder like this

as if my third eye had just shed its last telescope like a cataract

and I were the mesmerized gaping witness

to the first moonrise of an avatar of dark bliss

studded with the eyes of Isis raising new pyramids

in a desert of stars, as light as feathers, as light

as the crucibles, chrysales and cocoons of the nebulae giving birth

to these poems that break into butterflies of light,

fireflies and dragons that roar like supernovas

across the firmament, waking the valley up

to the morning of a whole new creation

as I firewalk along these oceanic shores with you

like two constellations when their myriad plinths and petals open

and one flower blooms like a bird with two wings

and sings because this universe isn’t the shape of an hourglass

with dry oases and creekbeds dreaming

of solar flares behind the mystic veils

of flashfloods of the heart long over overdue,

but in every illuminated detail of the form you’ve taken

to enter my life, my love, my art, is a perfect likeness of you

that I am created again and again in the image of,

standing in the doorway of this stargate to love

without your metaphors on, so that after all these light years

of looking for you like a star through the eye of a needle

that felt it had seen enough to know when to turn around and go

a firefly like you out of the midnight blue

suddenly comes into view and ignites the air around me like the aura

of a inflammable passion without a fire extinquisher

to put it out because, at long last, as it is above so it is below.

And whether you drink it long and slow, or deep and fast,

or sip like a humming bird from your own skull

there’s an oasis at the bottom of the hourglass

that’s greening the sands like the grail of a woman

passing it to you like the love potion

of a water sylph of practising astronomical witchcraft,

standing by her well like Circe on her island on the moon

turning a man like a vapour of longing in a desiccated wasteland

into the full-blooded ocean of the black rose she holds

like the sidereal high tide of my life and my love in her hand

as the birds are singing in the roots of dark matter

like the loveletters of a punk band to the psychedelic sixties

and all the trippy, heavy metal flying fish

are swimming like cults of urgent stars

through the thorns and the crowns of the blossoming locust trees.

PATRICK WHITE

AND IT'S NOT HARD TO SEE I'M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

AND IT’S NOT HARD TO SEE I’M WANDERING IN A DRY ABYSS

And it’s not hard to see I’m wandering in a dry abyss

trying to squeeze tears as readily out of the stars as the desert

that turns everything that lives here into a chronic exile.

Don’t know if I’m talking to a mirage, a reflection of some

aspect of the dark side of the moon I can’t see from here,

an eidolon, a fractal of my self-similarity, a 3D projection

of my pineal gland emanating images into a creatively holographic space

and one of them is wearing your face like smoke from a fire

I’m sitting around like a frog at the autumnal equinox

beside a burning waterlily with a parched mouth.

Matters a lot, but that’s ok. I’ve had visitations before

and I know this kind of seance can either go ethereal or carnate

and sometimes, though it’s a lottery, not a spiritual discipline, both.

If my solitude talks to its own echo like a water sylph

in a housewell full of stars, who’s to say that isn’t

my kind of telescope? That some eyes can see further

than mirrors and lenses, and space is riddled with them

like the golden ratios behind galaxies and black holes

I keep throwing sunflower seeds into hoping they’ll root and bloom.

I am immensely aware of my inconsequence in the world,

and the fact that there’s vanity even in that. No matter.

As close to selfless as I want to get for awhile.

I paint a lot. I write even more. But the best things I see

come to me spontaneously in the early morning

before the light turns apostate at noon, and late at night

when I’m haunting the Tay River with the willows,

or watching lightning in a tantric rage above the rooftops of Perth.

And more than once I’ve talked my ghost

back into the grave before dawn evaporated us both

like morning stars in the mist on a lake rising

like the wild swans of the moon above the ragged elms.

Within me, where the universe lives, you’re a muse

of dark energy expanding the starfields like space into the unknown,

and I’m growing new eyes like the T Tauri stars in the Pleiades,

and I’m digging up my own fossils in the bone pits

on the shepherd moons of all my most sacred annihilations,

and I’m adding a new shrine to my visual lobe

to see in the dark what shape of the universe you are,

and if you look at the moon, sometimes, as I do,

like the cold stone of an enlightened skull,

or a nocturnal scar that lucidly transcended the wound.

Right now my mouth is an occult grammar of black diamonds,

a fountain at midnight, learning to articulate your stars

like the glyphs of new metaphors that are still deciphering me

to adorn the mystery of this encounter with you

like the moon in the night mirror of the Black Taj Mahal

in sacred syllables that will leave the frogs and the nightbirds

as tongue-tied for awhile as the gargoyles and ghouls

on a Gothic cathedral. Wanted to be an archaeologist

when I was a kid and ever since I got waylaid by poetic cosmology,

I’ve been brushing the leaves away like the wind

from the ribs and the vertebrae of the trees

in the late Cretaceous of autumn just to get down to essentials,

and see what kind of utensils they took to the grave with them

for eras now. You see how it is with me, all oxymoronic metaphors

trying to bridge duality into a unified field theory

that includes the spiritual like a prodigal wavelength

that might make a difference to the dark matter at hand

as well as the light in the other. I’m an ambidextrous nightbird.

A discipline of longing and renewal that isn’t for petty people

terrified of the truths that sting and sing within them

like dragons of rage and bliss who don’t need a voice coach,

a mentor, a guru, a nightschool, an intercessor or a crutch

to be told how to hold a note like a bird disappearing into the nightsky.

An hourglass, even when it’s filled with the sands of Mars,

gets bored with its own lies over the years, and I’m intrigued

by the earthly candour and sidereal wonder in the way you look at life.

Your ferociously indignant compassion for people, and the passion

to translate the mysticism of contemplation into action,

and the savagery of the solitude that snarls at them to go away

when you need to lick your own wounds, and mix up

a new potion of stem cells with starmaps so they can get

to the furthest parts of your body and mind, those outposts

on the borders between sanity and crazy wisdom

where the silence won’t divulge whether everyone died

in the last assault, or just ran out of ammunition.

And I’ve seen your eyes narrow like crescent moons

in the eyes of a cat that wants to get to the point like a pencil-sharpener.

You’re hydra-headed, sapiosexual, as you’ve said

and your face is as chameleonic as the birthmark of a black Isis

from Merovingian France seven centuries before

the troubadours of Occitania. You’re the Aquitaine.

You’re Eleanor. You’re the yellow planta genesta

that grew wild all over the hills like a stubborn field fire

of radical sunshine that burns all the way down to the roots.

Then you’re foxfire potted in the ashes of the urns

of your old lovers transplanted to an open windowsill where

you can give them some air and some light

and you get a chance to bloom again in your own right.

I’m a dragon, a wolf, a warrior son of Virgo,

a demonic familiar doomed to do good despite himself

by trying to lead other people away from me toward themselves,

though I admit it’s an ironic sacrifice to be

so gift-wrapped with flesh that few have torn my lifemasks away

to see how I burn in excruciating immolations like a root-fire inside.

Boo hoo, for me, if the moon cuts its finger and doesn’t

ask me to kiss it better. Fire doesn’t burn itself and the blade

is never sharp enough to make the distinction

between the moon on the waters and its reflection,

between creative annihilation and its extinction.

I’ve seen swords cry like dew at the tips

of the sabres of stargrass bent towards the earth

like the hands of a clock commemorating the ravages of time

saluting its purple hearts on review in a parade-ground of flowers.

I can see deadly nightshade in you, the palette of a witch,

and the orchids you mix into the brew like the petals

of a new moon, like a lonely wish against hope,

some warlock with gravitational eyes who can bend the light

like water, is going to see the masterpiece of the mandala

that could empower his darkness like the first sight of Venus

over the occluded hills of Lanark where these shadows

only want to serve your lustre to enhance its radiance,

to make you the threshold and gold standard

of his prodigal homelessness parsecs across

at the narrowest ford in my mindstream beyond

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond

where Morpheus bends the river like a flight of crows and doves

like a zodiacal, shape-shifting Etruscan king releasing them

from an aviary of fixed stars, to let the constellations

assume whatever paradigm and legend of shining they want

into the perennially true meaning of

here, here, here, altogether here and now.

Venus approaching Regulus in Leo

and a torch of burning starwheat like Spica in Virgo.

PATRICK WHITE