I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses

and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows

weeping rivers of acid rain that hang

like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains

or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life

is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,

and the wolf that came once a week

to teach me to sing underwater grew old

and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.

I don’t know what I want from the walls

I’ve designated heritage battlefields

with an array of awards and degrees

and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,

but everything I ask for seems to make

terrorists of the lamps

and the single moth

knocking himself out trying to crash into flames

against the vanilla fez of the shade

is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter

my eyes have congealed into a still-life

with antique ax-handles, a menagerie

of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon

humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,

I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras

I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes

discuss what they have in common, hoping

for a marriage of convenience,

the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web

looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed

longing to avoid this one

like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.

Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes

and petty thieves have stolen

the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror

that keeps telling me

I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,

the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,

the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.

And how am I to understand my loneliness

and the fools I deploy to deface it

except as one more yearning octopus

with arms like hollyhocks

trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?

I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral

than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,

and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,

unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove

through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows

of strategic brothels, I should stand up

to the apostrophes of Armageddon

and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks

and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards

until my voice is released from isolation, my blood

from intensive care, my mind from death row,

and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.

When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison

and the charcoal women burn their tongues

like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,

their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,

I should have the metal to drop

depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,

and depose the cult of scorpions marching south

that tried to brainwash me into believing

I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm

and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat;

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if

I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up

and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying

to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;

if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,

back into that night you drew the blade of the moon

across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting

it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling

like a drop of shadow-flavoured water

from the tip of a spear of stargrass

for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,

a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire

that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,

consuming its way without flame

through the long valley of the sorrows and years

where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword

of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash

of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,

I could green it with daylilies and vetch

and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.

I could stop meaning what I say when I say

crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured

like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun

waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light

like coins from a one-armed bandit

that gashed the vein of its motherlode

to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,

than the strange loneliness of the losers

who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.

I could mean something else other than heroin,

I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft

of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,

brighter constellations than the needle tracks

that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs

with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms

tying you off with the spinal cord

you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,

I could put the fire out, I could look at your death

square in the eyes

and haul in a god to answer it

like you did me that last night

when I asked for signs of life

and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade

revealed to you alone on your holy mountain

before you dumped on paradise

like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,

an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand

and fill your absence in

with things that begin. I could scrawl

a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick

and marry you in our honeymoon coffin

behind closed doors

in a downpour of wedding rings

I stole from the dead.

O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,

you could be my candle-holder

and angel-food for good

if only I could cry again,

as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE