WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

What I have become and did not intend.

Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?

Glum when I should be shining, bright

when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints

my constellations were. Still, I worked like a firefly

with the shadows of the insights I had to go by.

Some nights there’s not a dot of Braille

on a blind starmap eyeless in the east.

I try to stare these ice-age windows into thawing

in the heat of my vision but only an eddy of air

has been weeping along with the lament of my candle

like a stray thread unravelling the atmosphere,

a ghost at the loom of a flying carpet

that never got off the ground. Obviously, down,

I’m rooted like a flower in an urn of starmud.

I don’t fight the shadows. I don’t exalt the light.

I don’t try to embroider my death shroud

with finely stitched vetch. I don’t white wash

my nightmares with the upbeat needlepoint

of sweeter dreams than my prophetic skull can summon.

I offer my absence entire to the enlargement of a space

where the stars are growing further apart

and time is slowly running out of lovers and friends.

I don’t compare my ashes to the fires I could have been.

I don’t ask the lamps of my genies to preside

at the death of dragons. I don’t bear false witness

staring into the firepits of their eyes like niches

in a skull that can see better in the dark than I can

at the end of their wicks like spinal cords tethered to a flame,

something eternal that proved transitory as rain.

I have a seasonal mind. I take the weather as it comes.

Just past the winter solstice now, the days are getting longer.

Last night Jupiter and the full moon so clear

it cut my eyes like the facets of a jewel

in the abyss of a mystery that called out to my soul

with a longing that’s almost more than I can bear to hear

its voice is so impersonal, I’m alienated from the intimacy

of a solitude where I used to entertain a self

with how dazzling everything is when there’s nothing of value

to hang on to. Not an I. Not a They. Not a You.

I can swim like the comet of a Siamese fighting fish

in a cloven hoofprint of rain forever but heave myself

up over the gunwales of an empty lifeboat in any attempt

to save myself from drifting alone in the interminable depths

of another graveyard shift on an infinite sea of awareness,

and I drown like the moon in the undertow

of my own shadows looking for where I’ve gone.

I derive a strange joy from the pain I suffer through in life

like a risk I shouldn’t have taken, but did, and rejoice

in the counter-intuitive act of macrocosmic emotions

that my laughter is a mountain that can sing almost

as deeply as the bird drenched voices in the valleys of my sorrow.

The dead branch where the rivers used to meet

might break under the weight of my sacred song

but I’m not out witching for wishing wells

from the blisters of the stars on my lips to atone

for having tasted the light for myself to know

if it were sweet or acrid. Merely illuminating

or more convincingly fruitive. Bright vacancy

or dark abundance, or a dynamic equilibrium of both

for those of you still foolish enough to conceive

of yourselves as pilgrims on a middle way

mapped out by lightning no one’s ever set foot upon,

the journey’s that abrupt. A Milky Way of fireflies

signalling like ships far out at sea like the spiritual life

of shore-huggers burning their dead on driftwood pyres

that washed up onto the beach. The fire god

comes looking for fire and there’s isn’t a star

that’s out of reach. Make your oblations of ashes and smoke

and snakes will climb the burning fire ladders to heaven

like lunar spinal cords long before the elect of your matchbook

fake their way out of hell. Their candles snuffed by their bells.

Brutal clarities. Homeless thresholds. Unhinged gates

hanging on like the broken wing of a prayer

nobody bothers to close or open anymore

like the last exit out of the labyrinth of yourself

before you enter the starfields like an eye in the dark

to give the light something to focus on

like an over-exuberant loveletter from the wildflowers

wondering why they haven’t heard from you in lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU'VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

YOU’VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

You’ve been gone such a long time.

Do the dead share their absence

with the hearts of those who miss them

or is the scope of the moon diminished

by its lack of a credible atmosphere?

After the flood, I believed in the covenant

the rainbows made with the disquieting day,

but late at night among the moondogs

I heard them weeping like watercolours

left out in the rain that washes their promises away

like false dawns in the third eye of the sea.

Where did you go? And why? Were you

a failure that went unnoticed? Did I let you down

in some unforgivable way and this is how

I pay by having to grow galactic to embrace you,

to close the abyss between us with oceanic forays

into time and space to say I’m sorry when

I feel you near, if I harmed you in any way

I wasn’t aware of, though never out of a lack of love?

Night after night, my heart drifts like a lifeboat

lowered from the moonset in the west

to look for you without a starmap to anywhere

only to be washed up on shore in the morning

as empty as I left. My waterclocks trying

to turn back time like a widow walk

around a lighthouse with no habitable planets.

It’s not the light of candles that I follow

it’s the wend of the smoke when they go out

that reveals the paths of the dead unravelling

like a road of ghosts dispersed among the stars.

My heart’s become a bone-box of your eyes,

your lips, your hair, your fingertips,

the nocturnal fragrance of the orchid of your sex.

I carry the ashes of your shining in a medicine-bag

around my neck in the indefensibly

dangerous human hope that one night

you’ll be attracted back to the relics you left behind

in a kind of sympathetic magic with the blind

so they might see you again, one last time

just to know that you’re ok with your disappearance

like a sundial at noon overwhelmed by its shadows

boarding the flowers up like coffins in a total eclipse.

It’s white outside right now. No topography to the snow.

Silt of the moon. A photographic positive

of the oblivion I don’t imagine you inhabit anymore

now that you’ve crossed the burning bridge

of your last threshold to make an indwelling

of the black hole you’ve left in so many galactic hearts

they’re wheeling like Sufis seeking annihilation

among the dust devils that arise at their heels

like the oldest messengers of the stars

to the mud we’re made of, some, clay bricks in a wall.

Some, dry creekbeds trying to decipher

their own crackling like pictographs

on the shattered ostrakons of a cosmic eggshell

someone got out of like the canary of a buried miner

to see how big the sky was when no one else was looking.

Is it bigger than pain? Is it the freedom of the forsaken?

Does it advance the cause of life to dance

even when you’re weeping over a purple passage

in a suicide note that was meant for your eyes only?

Can you see your reflection on the back of a mirror,

or is it enough that we abuse our tears for that,

lightyear after lightyear, trying to turn them inside out

as if the stars were always on the other side

of where we were for the night, looking out at the snow

making it all seem so irrevocably easy to let go

when you’re staring through an expressionless window

weary of trying to second guess the long view

of what you’ve had to live your way through anymore,

your grief a frozen nightbird in an aviary of razor-wire

entangling your heart in the strings of a harp

looping like the helical orbits of your retrograde descents

into Orphic modes of empty-handed, esoteric thought,

regardless of whether things eventually

come clear of their own spontaneous accord or not.

PATRICK WHITE