A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A SCAFFOLDING TO CLIMB UP ON AND PAINT THE WORLDS

A scaffolding to climb up on

and paint the worlds, my bones.

I climb the ladder of my ribs

like the hull of a scuttled shipwreck

on the moon, to highlight the stars.

And I sing as I work as if

I were being unsaid by everything

I’ve ever meant and I’m grateful

in a wary way because freedom

from all constraints, the golden chains,

the iron straitjackets of expertise

in residence like the Great Barrier Reef,

is always a work in progress

I never want to take for granted.

I’m not in love. Nor do I long to be

and I’m still more ingenuously grateful

than bitter for the poignancy

of the women I’ve loved like a pilgrimage

to a shrine in a holy war for my liberation.

I remember the nights the apricots froze

in a flash frost, but comes the dawn

of your next afterlife and things thaw out.

As you get older everything goes more crimson

than grey, Betelgeuse in Orion,

and the thresholds you once leapt across

like a photon jumping orbitals, feel more

like sway-back stairs you’ve worn down

on your knees, carrying crutches to Cavalry

like relics of the true cross returning like skeletons

to the Hill of Skulls, the unfeathered wings

of birds that crash-landed in an early attempt

at the transmigration of souls in the bone-boxes

of the aviaries they were buried in.

There are only so many bells in the world,

so many swans and moons and lion gates,

so many superlatives you can compare

the body of a woman to, and even fewer

the mystery of the starmaps of her mind

she binds you to like a firefly

in a labyrinth of night before she

elevates you into a constellation

and lifts her veils like Isis to show you

what her face looks like in your own light.

If I’ve had a quarrel with life at times

it’s been like a cloud of sheet lightning

rooting its lightning in the air like a dragon

in defence of all the wildflowers it remembers

drinking from the hidden watersheds of its tears.

In this life, less is a lot more grateful than more

for small things that happen in the microworlds

like off-handed miracles of a sort

that aren’t trying to convert you to anything

you weren’t already like the mirage

of your own creation myth as you gather

the waters of life up in both your hands

and drink deep from the wellsprings of your eyes.

Elixirs and potions of seeing and being,

eddies and currents, tidal surges and undertows

in the nightstreams of space we’re

white-water rafting like the spring run off

of the Milky Way. It doesn’t matter as much

to me whether it’s a dream or not as it used to.

Whether I wake up or I don’t. The gate’s open

or closed, or hanging on like a lapwing by a hinge.

In joy or sorrow, there’s only so much time

and then there is forever. No one ever arrives

completely. No one ever departs without leaving

something of themselves behind, be it a heart

that holds you dear as the ashes in the urn

of an old love affair, or just a sign carved

by a boy on the rafter of an abandoned barn

you were up here once when your daring

was an eagle that lacked the foresight

to keep its feet on the ground like poultry

that’s had its flightfeathers plucked for convenience.

Go ask the iron rooster that got fried

like a weathervane by the lightning

the other night. All my life, daring

has said feathers and falling has taken flight.

I’ve been a cinder of a crow

in the third eye of the storm

that washed me out as if it had been

crying all night without knowing why.

I’ve been the larynx of a waterbird caught

in the throat of a telescope that gorges on stars

to sweeten the picture-music of its voice

as Cygnus and Aquila rise in the east

of indelible summers ago that still taste

like the eyelids of the ocean in a mystic rose

in a deep sleep I once bent down to kiss

for dreaming of me as if I actually exist.

PATRICK WHITE