THE HIGHS ARE FEWER AS I'VE GROWN

THE HIGHS ARE FEWER AS I’VE GROWN

The highs are fewer as I’ve grown from stars

to the superclustering of galaxies in a more spacious

frame of reference trying fit the heartwood to the cambium

but they’re brighter against an emptier, darker background

and infinitely more intense. And as for the lows,

they don’t wear out as many shovels trying to dig me up

from the depths of the avalanche of mountain peaks

I’ve been so deeply buried under

with a stone so great placed on my chest

to make sure I’d never rise from the depths again

even the diamonds were wearing pressure suits

as they slowly rose to the top for fear of getting the bends

like bubbles of methane in thermophilic bathyspheres.

Death tries to scare me but I jump in my grave

and pull the dirt down over my body and smile

when I tell it you’re a little too late. I couldn’t wait.

I left without you. I’m a star you can’t catch up to

and my light has always fallen a little shy of my shining.

I’ve been sitting at this desk for the better part of fifty years,

going snowblind in the glare of staring

at a white sheet of paper blowing like laundry

on a clothesline in hyperspace where

the M-theories are hung out to dry like albino membranes

with no visible birthmarks until I ink one in like a prison tat.

Or a black and white photograph emerging

out of its cocoon in a visionary dark room

where the butterflies dry their wings pinned to clothes pegs.

I’ve always been intrigued by the mystery

of the way the mindstream bends like a wavelength

around the next corner of its own going

and what seemingly appears out of nothing

like poppies full of dreams in the blood

that never know what to do next, and yet

perfectly unfold like the flames of a hidden fire.

Poetry is the only embassy that’s taken me in

whenever I’ve been seeking sanctuary from myself.

Poetry is oxygen with an extraterrestrial origin,

a gift of meteors and comets, and, young,

I used to marvel for hours at a time

at how crucial phlogiston was to my kind of life,

but older, came to realize, how little it does

until you get it into your lungs and fire things up.

Poetry is the spirit breathing on a cold windowpane.

And in my life, it’s been a longer running continuity

of white rapids and precipitous waterfalls

plunging into the void as if the rosary of the river

had just broken into a million separate beads

and everywhere the air was saturated with eyes

trying to see what happens to light in a black hole---

longer than love or truth or wisdom,

though beauty, imagination, and compassion

have always followed me over the edge faithfully

to explore the possibilities of life on a further shore.

I don’t really need to know why I write anymore.

Maybe it’s cost me so much over the years

to stay true to the lunacy of this circuitous blossoming

I’ve become inured to the pain of prophesying

how it’s all eventually going to turn out

like the flightpath of a waterbird evaporating

off the lake in the morning, or a dream in a mirror

poignant with stars paling into a vast moonrise

of wild swans spirally aligned with the eternal recurrence

of the golden ratio on the Road of Ghosts.

Best show in town and the ticket was free

and who so petty they wouldn’t raise their skull

and offer a toast to the unknown host

who wrote its guests into the play like understudies

of themselves. The interdependent origins of excellence.

And only the lifemasks we wear to disguise our stage fright

sweating it out like candles in the dark to remember their lines.

Celebrity’s the barking of a young dog on a short chain,

and fame’s just a longer tether. Everyone enjoys

being appreciated for what they hope they do best,

and even though I cut anchor a long time ago

on the west coast, I would say the nihilism of my ego

isn’t such a purist, that the creative aspirations

of my golden age aren’t still trying to alloy themselves

with a little tinfoil star of recognition, but

for the most part I don’t spend my time updating

a bibliography of the wildflowers my lighthouses

and sunbeams have opened like the Colossus of Rhodes

checking its fan mail like seagulls in its wake.

And besides, I’ve always been more of an outlaw

than a sheriff, and outlaws don’t like standing in line-ups

waiting to be recognized for their sparkling identities.

Something sweeter, deeper, darker than wine

seeps into the grape over the course of time

and flares like a fountain of insight into the nature of life

and you can’t help being discretely intoxicated

by the cool bliss that enhances the human dignity

of creatively collaborating in your own beginnings

with the rest of the universe taking itself at face value.

The night is not a reward, and despite our beginnings

our ends aren’t a matter of words, and I very much doubt

there’s much of a bounty to be had by turning your freedom in

to be locked up in an aviary of Byzantine mechanical birds.

PATRICK WHITE

AND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD, THIS IS THE CUL DE SAC

AND THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD, THIS IS THE CUL DE SAC

And this is the end of the road, this is the cul de sac,

and this is the white root of the black wick,

and this is the last relic in the bone-box of the heretic

who questioned what life is and went up in flames,

and this is death whispering sweetly into the ears

of the Sunday bells blooming heavy and sad

as cast iron morning glory pendulously wondering

why all the bad apples get to fall before they do,

and this is the rope at the end of its barking dog,

and this is the missing link in the daisy chain

around the hanged man’s neck, and this

that gentle daydream that comes to anyone

who’s been left out in the cold long enough

they’re freezing to death in a blizzard of razor blades

with a smile on their face only a buddha could understand.

Penury, my prince, we’ve already flogged the throne.

Poetry, my mistress, the lutes are rattling like dry gourds

dicing like snake eyes for the last few magic seeds

at the end of the tails. And the moon’s even resorted

to milking her own fangs as if she were suckling

a baby Medusa, and the ribs of the truth are competing

like empty bird cages with turkey vultures

for a scrap of roadkill in the pantries of the morgues.

The bookworms have eaten all there was to read,

and the mirages are losing weight as fast as their faith

in the ability of water to sustain them. Down

to the last blossom, the apple trees have been living

on dried bees and the begging bowls of the tapeworms

have been making snakepits of pasta out of themselves.

And this is the drydock of hollow cupboards

that have lowered their voices three octaves below

a skeleton, and the ships jump their plague rats

in a black market where Virgo grinds Spica

like the last stalk of wheat in her hand into

the dream crumbs she gleaned from a harvest of eyes.

The feast is looking for a fatter host. The famine

is cattle rustling the oneiroscopy of the seven lean kind

and Mose’s rod has just cooked the last Egyptian snake

over a burning bush like the leftover shoelace

of last night’s roast boot. Van Gogh’s licking the paint

off his canvases like batter off a wooden spoon,

and Cezanne’s making apple sauce of all his still lives.

Food for thought, and all the geniuses are mindless.

Below the salt, below the echoes of the abyss

in the nihilistic silos for bread. Sticky dregs of the light,

singularities at the bottom of the flagons of black holes

good down to the last God particle of gravity,

I’m laughing at the poetic idiocy of pursuing

an earthly excellence like a fruit fly, Drysophila,

the nectar and ambrosia of the higher things in life.

And given how few loaves and fishes are left at the foodbank,

if I must sup with the devil at the expense

of answering to the angels who don’t eat,

it’ll be the demons who come to the table

with long spoons, and me that licks my fingers clean

after gnawing on this winged foot I stuck in my mouth

like a black farce of the ouroboros I’ve already

eaten up to knot in this noose of nerves at the back

of my head I’m about to swallow like a black walnut

in a single gulp, like a wolf chewing through its limbs

in a leg hold trap that’s gone too long without meals

as it howls through five tercets of a villanelle followed

by a quatrain with two refrains and a pair of repeating rhymes

to express the pain of singing for your supper

on the lowest rungs of the foodchain hanging

the fruits of life on the dead boughs of an art

that’s dying while my heart’s still green.

PATRICK WHITE