I BELONG TO AN INVISIBLE CULT OF THE AIR

I BELONG TO AN INVISIBLE CULT OF THE AIR

I belong to an invisible cult of the air, a seance

of fragrances, a coven of spirits exiled like sparks and stars

from a fire they had to steal for themselves from the gods

before they could heretically burn in the flames

of their own flowering and feel at home on the thresholds

of their sky burials roaring like dragons on their deathbeds.

I’ve sat here at this desk for fifty years like a runway

of Nazca lines and tarantulan geoglyphs guiding

more advanced extraterrestrials than I am like a starmap

of power-totems I intuitively puzzled out of my shining

that keep shapeshifting like the zodiacs of mandalic sand paintings

as my colourist deserts at dusk keep going abstract on me.

Thousands of faces, dead and alive, phases of lunar apple bloom,

sages like fallen leaves, strangers I cherished once

with a familiarity that assumed I knew them, though

the longer they live with you like constellations

that follow you home to your doorstep as if it wasn’t

as much your house as already theirs inside your heart,

you realize how uncannily unknowable anyone is

whether they’re lying there in front of you in their death mask or not

waiting for you to wash their corpse in the living room by the fire

or follow you up the highway in the rear view mirror

disguised as a ballet of ball lightning showing off.

Solitude puts everything on an equal footing

like an egalitarian diaspora of gypsies around a fire

whispering to them about legends of smoke and mirrors,

and every breath I take is a vision of life

as I imagined it a moment ago, about to to expire

like a candle that’s come to the end of its tallow in the dawn

and all that’s left is this little black priestly heretic of a wick

kneeling like a forest fire in the ashes of its own starmud

having been struck by a lightning bolt of serpent fire

so it could see, like a star whose history runs ahead of it,

who it was dancing with in the dark like a firefly

to the picture-music of shadows on the far side of the moon.

As a poet, what an estranged community of misfit angels I belong to

and runaway demons who aren’t willing to take

anyone’s word for hell, without jumping from paradise first,

each in their own little cave skull in this desert of stars,

living on locusts and honey among decapitated prophets,

scapegoats driven out into the wilderness

through no fault of their own, wounded imaginations

they wear like medicine bags and bells around their necks

to let everyone know they’re coming like the black sabbath

of an evil eye warning people away from them like bad bread

as if that were the only way a pariah could respond compassionately

to the dark night of the soul that had descended upon it like a taboo

only the most obedient could break like a koan with impunity.

Poetry’s a dangerous business once you’ve finished unravelling

the conditioned chaos of the screening myth that conceals

rats behind the arras to find your own way out of the labyrinth

like the thread of a strong rope that once dangled you

like the horns of a lunar anchor over the dead seas of the moon

swaying like the metamorphic caterpillar of a butterfly

on the wind with a bird’s eye view of a vernal abyss

that might look like a kiss at a distance, but, in fact,

eats its joy on the fly like a broken promise of bliss.

Outlaws write better than sheriffs because sheriffs

have no idea of what it’s like to live your life

as if you were getting away with it like a theft of fire.

I sit down on the ground twice a day with my fellow miscreants

though we live lightyears away from one another in a thieves’ world

where we recognize each other by the constellations

that have been tattooed by barbed wire and rubber tires on our chest

and break into gales of laughter at our deepest felt alibis

like crows on the autumn boughs of enlightened haiku

breaking into blossom long after we’ve shed our eyelids

like the masks of black roses with blood on their thorns.

Not in the habit of asking for approval the path

of a heretic through life is lonelier and holier than a saint’s

living up to an example that’s easier to follow than lead,

no one’s footsteps but your own painted on the dance floor.

So, yes, it takes a rebel to see where they’re going

by their own light like a firefly off road into the dark

like someone unique among stars, exploring the face they had

before they were born like a myth of origins in Braille

they could read like a dream grammar of the Burgess Shale

with runic fingertips in an avalanche of Rocky Mountain gravestones,

the long bearded breakers of ancient oceans that long ago

washed up on these coasts of consciousness like empty lifeboats

to give the lighthouses of the imagination a purpose in life

warning seafarers to watch out for falling rocks

like Mayan calendars and the heraldry of cometary messengers

with news of astronomical catastrophes like pink mornings

on the horizons of the false dawns of evolutionary Armageddons.

Fifty years tilting at scarecrows in this unholy jihad

to uphold the honour of a blessing I was called upon to forgo

to be worthy of like a wandering warrior laying his sacred arms down

mutilated to be of no use to anyone after him

in tribute to the sacred pools of dying salmon

that swam upstream against the flow of the waterclock

like a constant beginner keeping something inestimably alive

by refusing to go along with time’s incapacity to reverse itself.

Haven’t you noticed yet out in the dark woods

how eventually even the permafrost goes soft on itself

and the most fragile of wildflowers with blue and white petals

as shy and cool as moonlight on your flesh bloom

like tiny love lyrics to life even in the cataclysmic doom

of the November duff reliving itself all over again

like the reincarnation of a poet who dropped out of death

in the early spring when the red-winged blackbirds returned?

If you listen with an imaginative heart and soul to the lachrymae rerum,

the tears deep down in things long enough to wonder why

the world’s always crying over a house it burnt to the ground,

eventually you’ll stop drying the eyes of mirages

and apprentice yourself to the long, lonely discipline

of an enlightenment path of the rain weeping behind its veils

like housewells and watersheds to ease the private hells

of other people’s root fires burning them like cedars at the stake.

You learn to kiss their burns like the head of a snake,

or dice for good luck, as you look deeply into their eyes

like a nightbird that refuses to turn into stone out of a lack of love

by denying the dragon within the use of your wings.

Show me an angel thatched with feathers that wasn’t

shingled first in scales, the lowest of the earthbound

that isn’t the quicksand foundation stone of the highest paradise

where Gabriel reveals himself as pure light

emanating from the dark eclipses of the cloaked ones

like the eyes of fluid diamonds pouring out of the wounded ore.

Sometimes you’ve got to pry the stone out of the sword

to see through the eyes of a prophetic skull

how the blind jewels of the underworld can rise up

like the Pleiades in the crowns of the black walnut trees

that have shed their leaves like posthumous love poems to the earth

by going down Orphically into a shady world of gibbering voices

and singing your heart out like a hermit thrush in a birch grove

to draw the poison out of the snakebite on their winged heels,

remembering, like the mother of muses, even among those

you cherish the most, looking back is the sacred path

in the afterlife of a holy ghost and no one returns

to the surface of their oceanic awareness like a bubble in the multiverse

of a warm-blooded mammal coming up for air, without feeling

deliriously light-headed and mysteriously empty handed

like a thief that left the new moon in the open window,

like the black pearl of an outdated calendar

illuminating gnostic annihilations of the soul

when Spica, Saturn and the moon are in spiritual syzygy

like three muses at the spring equinox of midnight and noon.

Everywhere the light getting us through the night of the mind

in a union of opposites greater than the sum

of all our hearts put together like tributaries

of the same dendritic mindstream that binds us like water to each other.

O sister I can hear you sighing like a candle in a skull

leaning on the crossbones of your arms on your windowsill

from here, wishing on a star of broken promises, and little brother,

my unfaithful alpha-male comrade, how many times

have I plucked the thorn of the moon out of the paw of Leo

like porcupine quills out of the nose of a dog that refused to learn?

Indefensibly human, homeless trolls living under the bridge

with creatures we couldn’t help becoming eventually

in transit like shepherd moons imprinted by an uninhabitable planet

from one extreme to the other as the cerulean blue of the sky gods

red-shifts into the chthonic demons that drink

libations of blood from our skulls like the crones of Kali

renewing their virginity in the birth waters of lilaceous lotus girls.

I know the wyrd of night owls practising at night in their towers

to make the carrion of dead snakes leaf again into wings

like powerful dragons sleeping in the hollows of dead trees

waking up from a dream of latent magic splitting the wishbones

of lesser songbirds like divining rods struck by lightning

over an unfathomable watershed of oceanic awareness

labouring to give birth to Venus like a pearl in a cosmic seashell.

We’re all reading the same writing on the wall,

Graffiti Botticellis all, trying to tell it like it is

to the best of our imaginations without pandering

to realistic lies that have to call on the facts to back them up

when any true delusion would have stood its ground alone,

third eye to third eye with the standard model of the universe in the way

and cataracts of rose petals would have fallen from the sky

like scales off the unarmoured visions of the blind

who can see through their veils whether you know who you are or not.

Whether you’ve triumphed over your own snakepit,

staring the Medusa down without turning into your own headstone

or realize you can sometimes milk human kindness

out of the opposite fang and breast of the moon like anti-venom

when you stop holding your shield up like a mirror to nature

you neither intend to come home carrying, nor be laid out upon

despite what mother said by way of farewell to her first born.

Do you not see the poets, how they wander into every valley

and their right hands of power do not obey their mouths

except those who remember much what there is to be grateful to

like a star you greet every night on the same long, dark road you’re on.

Ten thousand pilgrims. Eleven thousand shrines.

Not counting the temples tangled in the vines of their own lifelines

like low flying swallows in the bird nets of dream catching spider webs.

Not really so much a community as a migrant tribe of hunter-gatherers

following the herds of white buffalo stars across the sky

in a loose confederation of ghost dancers handing

the same inexhaustible peace pipe around like a talking stick

imbued with the power of thousands of songbirds

emerging out of the dark silence of the urgent morning trees.

I still tend to trust the picture-music of scratched guitars

as if their lyrics bespoke a common broken heart

to the bling and polish of more immaculately lacquered

tones of voice without any dawns or sunsets to speak of.

And I know how inconceivably far it is from one heart to the next

but I swear I would have lost my way long before this

if I hadn’t taken the wind home after a blissed-out firewalk

among the summer stars without leaving a path in my wake

anyone could snail down like the silver track of a tear on a cheek

or break like the trail of their own creative freedom

like a comet in the wilderness slagging the impurities

out of its diamond insights upon first impact with the earthbound.

Spaced out, scattered like disparate stars in an expanding universe,

introverted black dwarfs, explosive supernovas

with mercurial sensibilities and touchy detonators

that would rather blast than bless their way

through the world mountain standing in their path

like a moonrock in the old shoe of the heart

that kicked it down the road like the winged heel

they’d bruised by walking on it as far as they could

like oceanic eagles and sidereal swans out of their usual element

before flying off in all directions like arrows from the bows

of waterbirds reflected in their own snakey images.

Spiritually undulating on the waters of life like membranes in hyperspace

we twist ourselves into party balloons to welcome the prodigal

back to his homelessness like a surprise beyond

the dark doorway of a shipwrecked ark that turned the prayerwheel

of birth and death over to the pilot of a storm

to weather the sea like a prophylactic starmap

for overturned moonboats scuttled on holy mountain tops

without a commandment to show for all their trouble

or swept like dead starfish onto the shores of galactic islands

spewed out of the calderas of volcanic black holes.

The lanterns burn late in the mystic scriptoria

water-gilding the alphas and omegas of our myths of origin

in gold leaf so thin it would sublimate into a smudge of dust

like a dragonfly wing between your thumb and forefinger

if you even so much as blinked hard to see

what was written there in light and blood and tears and fire

like watercolours of the rain on caustic windowpanes

trying to heal broken-hearted stained glass

with long leaden scars of unredeemed base metal

that nevertheless keep the big picture together

long after the last philosopher’s stone has lost

the lustre of its vision of life like a Midas touch.

PATRICK WHITE