I'VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’ve grown old remembering you when you were young.

How much wiser we were then though we didn’t know it

than I am now, or you would have been, had you lived.

Ignorant of the outcome of desire, sometimes it’s better

to drown, than learn to keep your head above water, or swim.

I made a liferaft of my bones to get to the other side

of my heart. Like the moon, one half bright, the other, dark.

I’ve knocked on so many doors the past left ajar,

but for a long time you never answered.

Looked into so many eyes so far from home,

hoping to catch a glimpse of your shadow

moving past the window like a waterbird backlit by the moon,

and though some of them had your mouth, some, your hair,

some your earlobes hung with silver chandeliers of rain

falling from your wings like a broken rosary of waterdroplets,

none of them had your soul, none were as lost

and inimitable as you unanswerably were.

Street rose, how is it my tears are still pierced by your thorns

after all these years? Out of the midnight blue,

without warning, idling among the river reeds,

or rooted in the wavelengths of the mindstream, some star

spears me through the heart like a fish on the barb of the moon

and I have to sit down among the rocks at the water’s edge

with a vision of beauty and love and the passage of time

too unbearably immense for flesh and blood to carry

like so many other empty buckets and sad bells back

from the abandoned wishing wells where the ghosts gather

to recall what it was like to want something once.

Long for someone so badly you would gladly

have endured a thousand spiritual deaths and metaphoric rebirths

as I have done, for one life of being wounded and healed,

exalted and terrified by the mystery of what or who

you truly loved like the eclipse of a moonrise in your blood

more indelibly than death itself appears in the black mirror

when you look deeply into it like a starmap of music

as your last futile hope of bringing someone back

and your eyes freeze like star sapphires deep underground

with what they see like fireflies and lightning in the sockets

of prophetic skulls whose eyes are the jewels of the dead.

Perpetual muse, you, unnamed, who distinguish my words still

with the intimacy of your absence, daughter of the abyss

I was left with when you lost your nerve and collapsed

like a suspension bridge over the moonlit thread

of your spine below when the safety web broke like the illusion

of a dreamcatcher, like the beads of the constellation

the sun belonged to when we first encountered each other

like alien planets driven out like black sheep of the solar system

and looked back at its dwindling light from a long way off

and knew of a certainty, you were, as was I,

alone in this remote space with each other,

estranged companions for life. Was it not so,

and has it not always been in its own unique way as it is now?

Between your silence and my voice have we not evolved

a dream grammar by which the living can speak to the dead?

Do I not hear you in the broken-hearted train whistle

mourning into the distance with no help for its sorrow

and in the long mantra of the wind in the aspens

and the gaping mouths of the waterlilies awed

by the symmetrical similarity of their astonished silence

to that of the stars looking ahead in wonder

at what they’ve been flowering into for lightyears.

Long after your ashes were scattered with beautiful sentiments

mingled like rose water in every one’s tears

to bless the flightpath of a fire bird’s return to the elements

from a precipitous cliff out over the sea at night

as if we weren’t saying farewell to a woman who had lived

like one of us, but were attending the sky burial of a comet

who had made a Tunguskan impact on everyone she encountered,

was it not me, when all the other listeners

thought they’d heard the whole of the message you had to say

and left you alone in the dark in an empty hall

that first perplexing night of being dead among the stars,

who went on listening to your omens as if there

could never be an end of the flames and feathers of meaning

that unfolded in the wake of your passage across

the desolate seas and annulled atmospheres of my lunar heart?

What pain, what joy, grief, loss, enlightenment,

life in death and death in life have I not endured,

what loneliness not embraced as if it were

more deeply exiled from everything it had ever known

than I was when I blew out the last candle of votive fire

like a broken dragon missing one its own in its reclusive solitude?

Even the ashen sages weep like urns of wisdom

for the extinction of the light that taught them

to see in the dark with a compassionate heart

that insight walks the same path delusion does

and attachment, too, is another paling of moonlight

on an open gate that all humans must pass through

to pay homage to the fountains and watersheds

love brings to flower in their gardens and cemeteries alike.

Many times I’ve sensed your tenderness in the sensitivities

of the carillons of wild columbine that rang

discretely in the silence like rain chimes in the spring

and I came to understand it was you, whenever

I wandered along the river like a troubled sleepwalker

through the mystic cults of the woods at night

into a clearing like the third eye of the torrent

that roared all around me like a wounded black hole,

it was you in the sanctuary of your concealment who revealed

that thoughts and emotions like the unsanctified oceans

of tormented stars I wanted to drown in, weren’t

static states of mind where space turns brittle

as the looking glass you get locked into,

but dynamic events of the heart that shatter

our crystal skulls into unknown configurations of light

rising like new constellations out of the regenerative chaos

that watered the old gardens of our starmaps

with the splinters of broken chandeliers that cut our eyes

like tears in an early spring thaw. It was you

as surely as it was the clear light of the void within me

who whispered to me that night I was on the verge

of liberating the past from the future of a bad precedent

that we don’t live separately from the dead,

that each of us is the embodiment of the longing

of unnumbered myriads who released their hopes

and dreams and prayers like smoke and birds

and cedar boughs of incense on the wind

knowing they probably wouldn’t be there

to hear the answer if one ever did come back again.

Where else but now is the future made manifest

by the summons of the past in a voice

we recognize as everyone’s including yours and mine?

Just as I see your eyes in this insight like the occult bliss

of the dawn at midnight writing immanental love lyrics

in the journals of nocturnal wildflowers confiding in the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE GONE ON THRESHING WHEATFIELDS ON THE MOON

I’VE GONE ON THRESHING WHEATFIELDS ON THE MOON

I’ve gone on threshing wheatfields on the moon

with the last crescent of the smile you left me,

closing the gate behind you as if you never wanted

me to get out of the high starfields where you put me out

to stud and pasture like the Great Square of Pegasus.

And for awhile, after you, it’s true, it wasn’t important

if I knew the name of any woman I made love to.

But slowly, my emptiness adapted to your absence,

and who knows, if it had been written for us to know,

two nothings might have made something of themselves.

Shadowyears with intermittent crossroads of light

Sufi dancing with the starmud dust devils

like the three of swords with its wands and cups

full of feeling as you were at the approaching darkness

as if you couldn’t take anything seriously that wasn’t occult.

You were the raven witch, the herbal beast mistress,

the mysterious singularity at the bottom of the housewells

after the light bulbs had gone out and an ice age

had striated your eyes like big, black, plastic

long playing records, as if you were a widowed queen

sleepwalking through a famished eclipse on the mean side

of what must have been a beautiful dream once,

one lonely nightbird of that sad, sad song in your voice

that always seemed to be calling out to the dead

on some ancient night in a timeless abyss

when you were happier than you’ve ever been since.

Once, like a French executioner with the moon

for an axe, precise, neat, surgical, absolute

when you go under the knives of the clock

for a hydra-headed brain transplant, scalpels

in the oarlocks of the lifeboat you’re adrift in

like the remnants of a supernova shapeshifting through space,

once, for everything, the continuum of an overachieving event

that doesn’t know when to call it quits.

Ignorance tries to understand what wisdom ignores,

and why not play the fool against the sage

like a long shot you have to be crazy to take,

impugn your mirroring awareness for making a mistake

when your eyes turn around and you begin to realize

things caught in the doe-glare of your highbeams

frozen in time, indelible as a razor-blade in a loveletter.

Samsara is nirvana. Cosmology a psychic reading of the stars.

Noumena, phenomena. As with love, so

with the shadows of dreams past we cast

on the wildflowers we’ve forgotten how

to walk naked through without shame

as the willows turn away from our libidinous sorrows

and the shedding leaves, be they poems or the moonset

of your eyelids, begin to compile the laborious history,

the magnum opus, of the posthumous victories

of all those insurgent tomorrows we put to the sword,

once, like a bloodoath we took to heal

the broken vows scarred on our hearts,

the magic runes on the stones and ostrakons

of glacial ice sheets retreating north like the curtains

rising on the last act, the white noise of a record

that’s been repeating itself all night like the cosmic hiss

of the afterbirth of the Big Bang that began all this.

Late in the light eras of my mind when it’s as big as the white ox

of the full moon left to graze among the stars

as it will, on its own, I’ve regressively come to understand

love is looping like everything else through space

like a red tailed hawk carrying a candle

up the stairwell of a thermal of eternal recurrence

where it disappears helically into the third eye of the setting sun

and once is the burning stargate of an afterlife

born of your creative immolation on a pyre

of lightning and fireflies, insights and compassionate lies,

creation myths, legends of your shining

etched like Braille starmaps in the Burgess Shale

as fault by fault, we groped our way up the mountainside

like kings and queens of the hills we were buried in,

looking to get back to our graves like ghosts before dawn

so we could rise like the moon from the corals

on the bottom of our lunar seabeds again.

May the smoke of a sacred cedar fire smudge

the savage silence of the pain that makes oblations

to the night at a seance of constellations love can still read

like a hunter-gatherer, the signage of extinct zodiacs,

as if life were always a valley ahead of death,

like the light of a star, forever a journey behind

where you are when the darkness of love

brings you to enlightenment like a firefly

to the face of a sleeping child that’s just jumped out

of the dream of her favourite hiding place

as if there were still something in the eyes of love

that urgently wanted to be found like a surprise

no one’s ever had any notion of before or after

they stopped looking like a lamplighter in the woods at night

for the muse of the wild white-tailed doe, with her big, sad eyes,

warily breaking cover in the full glare of the moonlight

as if she were taking her lachrymose deathmask off

to drink from her own reflection like the Queen of Cups

from the river of life that pours out of her where

time meets the timeless like a root fire flowering

like a bouquet of blue roses gathered from the Pleiades

floating like a flood myth on the mindstream

coursing into a lunar sea of oceanic consciousness

as the shipwrecks disembark like sailors absent without leave

and the stowaways are lowering lifeboats to answer

the death laments in the s.o.s. of the mermaids on the rocks,

beguiled like seafaring dragons with the subliminal lyrics

of the unbroken circles and recurring bracelets of the rain.

Wounded by love in the depths of a fathomless nightsea,

everything after that’s a matchbook scratching for light

like a galactic starfish trying to make something beautiful

like a chandelier out of an ice storm or a waterproof starmap

out of the pain that opens like an umbrella at a wake

or love on the nightwatch of a flower at daybreak.

PATRICK WHITE  

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

SPOTS ON A PAINT RAG

Spots on a paint rag trying to figure out

if they’re part of a larger picture.

Daubs and smudges and smears of black and red.

Topographies of dry thick ridges of blue acrylic,

peach-coloured mesas bruised

by the encroaching violets of dusk in a painted desert.

Are these the wanna-be windows of life

who failed to achieve a whole and harmonious view

of what they’re doing here swiping off knives

thick with the gore of cadmium red,

cleaning off brushes that get to go out

on the field to caress and poke

stars and trees into being? Waterboys, not players.

I say the word, life, and I feel tonight like

the heaviness of a bell that’s supplanted my heart.

The right root, but the wrong blossom.

Even though I’d melt that bell

back down into raucous cannon

to defend the concept to my very last breath.

But tonight I’m tunnelling under the foundations

of the cornerstones of life to bring

the walls down on top of my head,

like an avalanche of prophetic skulls

to just get a peek inside the grand paradigm,

the white light of the gessoed underpainting.

The secret garden with low-hanging fruit

on easy street with the sacred whores of Babylon.

An existential sadness, deep as a death-wound,

as if I’d just been stabbed in the heart

by the hands of a clock that mistook me for an intruder,

undermines me from below, a pyramid built on quicksand.

As if all those who had drowned in life

like fish up over their gills in water

were swimming in the watershed of every tear

that almost makes it up over the top of the dam

I try to throw up like a manly front to what

I know I won’t be able to hold back for long.

And there go the villages in the flooded valley

I tried to live among like a neighbourly mountain

come to Muhammad on the way up and down.

It’s cold and lonely and the air is thin

at the peaks of experience, with only

a star and a cloud for company.

The hard diamond in the rough I used to be

has grown mushy over the years. Tears.

Imagine that. Warm, salt seas with undulant tides

of emotion coursing in and out,

the way we breathe, the way we live and die,

unite and separate, pour our shining

down an inexhaustible black hole

like Parthian gold into Crassus’ mouth

in the hope of efflorescing like the bird fountain

of a better world on the other side of hyperspace.

Armed with some decent human attitudes,

and a few that are wholly out of bounds,

no reason my mind can catalyse out of chaos

that I should feel the sorrows of the discarded colours

on a paint rag like the afterbirth of the universe

that’s gone on to greater things than road kill.

I feel the deep grief of widowed eclipses

and the creeping shame of sunspots

that were born into a maculate caste

of estranged birthmarks on the forehead of a lighthouse.

Space is warped like water by some unknown

disturbance in the pond. And I can’t discern from here

whether it’s a crack in the dam

or a birth sac ripe enough for its waters to break

and wash me out to sea like

the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked lifeboat.

I hear the lilac whispering into blossom.

I see the starlings building their nests

in the corners of my third eye and the spiders

weaving mandalas between the witching wands

of the aspen saplings trying to transcend their roots.

Still, time seems studiously impersonal

and more matter-of-fact about suffering

than perhaps it really is. The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds. As they say in Zen.

And I can see so clearly even through this cloud of unknowing

the kind of world I’d love to live in,

giving it my full assent in peace and contentment,

as long as I never lost the hunger that desires these things

and no one else had to live like a ratty old towel

abused as a paint rag by the shroud of Tourin.

Yet I can’t help feeling I’ve spent

my whole life trying to piece a lost constellation

back together again from leftover stars

that don’t have a clue what they’re shining amounts to.

In the stained, marked for life, castaway things of the world,

in the eyeless dreams of aborted inspirations,

in the twenty million dollars an hour we waste on war,

in the eyes of the twenty-five million children a year

who are starving to death globally in civilizations

based upon agriculture, I’m looking

for the trashed masterpiece of a paint rag

soaked in the blood of hemorrhaging roses

that might have parted our eyelids like the Red Sea

or a gallery on opening night to a vision

of what they might have done had they lived

to do things differently and their genius and beauty

not been squandered like blood for oil

or the waters of life learned to mingle more olaceously

with oil slicks in the womb of the dark mother

like an alternate medium of creative expression

that wasn’t shunned like the evil skin of a shedding rat snake.

There’s an expanding emptiness in my heart,

a vacuum nature abhors like a miscarriage

of what I hoped to wake up to the day after tomorrow

like the smile of an enigmatic Mona Lisa

that didn’t die in childbirth married to a banker.

What faces reside in a paint rag

I might have fallen in love with at first sight,

what mind, moon, sea, sky and landscapes

might have sat on my easel like windows in space

that might have shown me a way out of here

like the eye of a hurricane at the end of a telescope

that made things at a great distance appear

larger and more astronomically intimate than they seem

when no one’s trying to paint the other end of the lens

by wiping their glass slippers off on the grass

as if the princess just stepped into a mess of Hooker’s green.

Disoriented hues of colour blind rainbows, who knows

how many faces have been wiped off on a towel

with the big, sad, musing eyes of luminous gazelles?

How many cardinals nesting in red cedar trees

were wiped off the canvas like lipstick on the moon

when the sun went Puritan, midnight at noon,

and scourged the scarlet letter of the kissing stone

until nothing was left of humanity

but the purged shadows of an abstract divinity

that burned a hundred thousand women

foxed out like witch hunts in the seventeenth century

at the stake of a principle that stood up to the flames

like the backbone of a heretic

with a streak of Payne’s Grey in her nature

slashing at the orange sunset

with a painting knife in her hands

at those who resented the concupiscence

and dark innocence of her sacred body and soul

and saw her go up in flames

like a bouquet of sable paintbrushes

stacked at her feet like the pyre of the phoenix to come.

Sooner transform the emptiness into something

as absurd as it is meaningful, than ponder the waste

of a good mirage trying to look

for real water down a wishing well.

Sooner try to patch the tear in the sky

that rips me open under full sail running before the wind

and lets all the stars come pouring out

I was saving for a rainy day, with a paint rag,

a discarded face towel sadder

than viridian pine trees in the distance

with an aerial perspective of pthalo blue

gentled and blanched by the intervening atmosphere.

That said and done until the sky drys

I’d rather wear the patches of a compassionate clown

like paint rags on the Sufi blue of my cerulean robes.

I’d rather walk in a pauper’s clothes to show

my solidarity with the cast offs of creation,

not just finished canvases with artsy attitudes

in stiff upper collars and colours

that match the wallpaper like seasonal mood swings.

Sometimes it breaks my heart from the inside out,

it guts me like a tube of alizarin crimson

to see all these fledglings strewn at the foot of my easel,

my tree, my loom, my lean to, like the paint rags

of crumpled, ruined, leftover lives

that couldn’t quite make it as flying carpets.

But I’m not going to forget the ashen sorrows

and habitable earth-tones of starmud

under the winged heels of inspiration.

As for me and my zodiacal house of ill-repute,

my renegade observatory on the wrong side of the tracks,

I’m going to ride this wavelength of light out to the very end

where the wildflowers open

like the complementary loveletters

of a colour wheel, a rainbow come full circle,

unbroken just for them.

The donkey looks into the well.

The well looks back at the donkey.

Art. Life. Zen.

When the line turns round

the donkey at the end is in the lead.

Yesterday’s bleeding paint rag.

Tomorrow’s aesthetic creed.

PATRICK WHITE

A GOOD DAY TO ENJOY BEING LOST, ADRIFT

A GOOD DAY TO ENJOY BEING LOST, ADRIFT

A good day to enjoy being lost, adrift.

A monarch butterfly skirts the heritage stone

of the bank across the street for good luck.

Hectic palette, it’s good to see the badge

of your shadow smudging the gridwork

of predictable brick. You made it through

the pesticides, the milkweed’s been good to you.

Small relief, tender loveletter may no one

ever scrawl return to sender across your envelope.

May no one ever tamper with your pollen.

Sweet rapture of not giving a damn for a day

and meaning it. I’m an offroad aster, a wayward

English ox-eyed daisy that’s thrown off the yoke

of all the burning bridges I’ve crossed, trying

to grind the chaff in the hand of the sign

I was born under into broken loaves of starwheat

cooling on the windowsills of my ersatz ideals.

It didn’t take me long to learn by living me

to be afraid of everyone else. That every moment of life

was death-defying in extremis, a high wire act

on a spinal cord stretched like a single filament of a spider-web

between one abyss and the next. I’ve been a poetic wino

dizzy with mystic vertigo, slumped up against the door

of a stranger’s threshold that kept sweeping me off the stairs

like a mirage of junkmail, leaves and stars

that could foretell by the agony in my eyes

I was born to live a life in freefall as I have,

no hell below me, no heaven above, and earth,

the shakey footstool of an unstable mountain

on the back of a turtle that seldom sticks

its neck out for anyone who can play

self-fulfilling Orphic threnodies on a tortoise shell harp.

Choreographers who know how to teach totem poles

to dance to the picture-music of the sacred fires

that still burn, branded by spring, in the tree rings

of the heartwood they refuse to pile like pyres

around the feet of native martyrs singing death songs

at their own sky burials. Life’s a bird bone flute,

a syrinx, a lute, a harp, a cithara, a guitar, Lyra

in the summer sky, not the trumpet of a dying swan.

Good day to let go of my mind like a kite

or a weather balloon, give up beating on

this old drumhead of a trampoline like an erratic pulse

and jump six times higher on the moon

like the photon of a third eye of a spy satellite

in a chromatically aberrated orbit that sheds

more light on the secrets of life than it keeps to itself

like private data deep in an unsightly black hole.

I don’t want to candle out like the parachute

of a daylily the higher I rise into a spiritualized atmosphere

wigged out by its haloes and comets. I don’t intend

to wait like a dragon in a wax museum for someone

to show up with a wick to give a little spine

to the votive candles in a shrine of gummy prayers.

I’m going to take charge of events like a fisherman

caught in a Pacific storm, and take my hands

off the wheel of birth and death in this great nightsea

of awareness and roll with the dice on the swells of chaos.

Seven times down, eight times up. Such is life.

Even if I’ve got to chart my course through life

like a starmap of snake-eyes, I’ll make a constellation

of matchbooks that will set the zodiac afire

like an arsonist inspired by the cult of his own

heretical martyrdom. I’d rather burn sincerely

for something I don’t believe in than give my assent

to the false confession of a poem I didn’t write

from the inkwell of a heart I threw at the devils in white

like blood on the snow of a savage sacrifice

of a life that arises from life, not the death wish

of a cold, cold rose with thorns of ice on its frozen eyelids.

A good day to cherish the innate heresy

of creative freedom I was born into like the natural medium

of imaginative extremes I keep violating

like a snake with wings on a burning ladder

of hierarchical taboos laid out like crosswalks

with traffic lights to supervise the way we came back

like shepherds down from the mountain at night

with a flock of judas-goats in painted tiger-stripes

and sheep we fleece for their carnivorous clothing

along the same path we’ll labour back up in the morning,

like pale stars that bleach their torches in the eyes

of albino crows with silver irises for moondogs

and a skull’s way of looking at things that makes you shiver

when there’s no one else in the room but you

and what you’re becoming as the older you grow

the more you realize, how little you have to do with it.

A good day to sit enthroned in my own brain coral

like a gleeman in the absence of a dynastic bloodline,

free to laugh at myself as the urge overcomes me,

or cry like a ghost of rain on a spreading root fire.

Good day to take my deathmask off another man’s face

and throw it away as if neither of us ever

looked good in it, and the mirrors lied behind our backs

as if our hearts were blind to what our minds were up to.

Intellect blossoms. Compassion is a moonboat

with a cargo of windfall apples riding like a low-hanging branch

on the waters of life, as the stars pilot it into port.

No born again cuckolds pushing the eggs out of my cosmic nest.

A dragon with the wingspan of space, time can’t keep up

with the pace of the stars I keep panning out of my ashes

like nanodiamond insights into meteoric splashdowns on the moon.

Good day to stay crazy and let wisdom follow suit.

Good day to go down to the river and watch the beaks

of the white-throated waterlilies open like the mouths

of baby birds that burn with hunger to be consumed

in the fires of their own appetites, young candles

preening their flames like the feathers of falling stars

that forego their fixed place in the great scheme of things

every time a child makes a wish upon them,

and the serpents at their heels puts the plumage

of the highest on the lowest and in a union of opposites, flies.

PATRICK WHITE

MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I'VE LIVED

MY WORDS TASTE OF THE FLAVOURS OF THE LIVES I’VE LIVED

My words taste of the flavours of the lives I’ve lived.

I cauterize my wounds on the stars. Runes, cuneiform,

scars, I’ve even found a way to use spiderwebs

like the fridge magnets of an exoteric alphabet.

Everything’s written in sand, in water, on the wind.

In the cursive script of the Kufic treeline. So many leaves.

So many mother tongues. Ciphers of the nightcreek

whispering to itself sleepwalking through the woods.

I may hold flowers now, and the fragrances of petunias

and coleus waft down the street, polluting the carbon monoxide,

but my heartwood, though scorched, is still steeped

in the firewater of a whiskey barrel I was once

keel-hauled over like the hull of the moon for being

a drunken sailor absent without leave. I indulged

my madness in the spirit of a dragon that couldn’t

hold anything back. I didn’t smoulder like a man

who expected to be the victim of an adage, I burned.

In the perfection combustion of my inspiration

I left no soot on the wings of the discoloured butterflies.

Sincerity was wild and angry, sacrificially cruel,

the sacred thorn that rent the third eye of the rose.

If you weren’t living and dying as ferociously as you could,

you were a fool. An inquisitor with a dunce cap

in the corner, or a balancing act with a fear of heights

with your head in a noose and your feet firmly planted

on a two-legged footstool. Sorry for the roar

of overconfidence, of course, I am, most of it was bluff,

but it seemed like a necessity at the time

and a lunatic’s got to do what lunacy does

to renew its blood oath to the moon on the edge

of a sword it pulled out of the stone of its own heart.

It wasn’t about eviscerating the living on the altars of art.

It was a severe initiation into my own estrangement

into the occult mysterion of poetry that makes you feel

more unworthy the deeper it enters your bloodstream

like a dream of darkness and stars, as you bond

like a blowtorch or a comet welding your eyes

to the darkness and the stars as a rift in your skull

opens like an observatory on a lonely mountain

to the immense intensity and solitude of it all

and your mouth is pryed apart by the voice

of a wound as old as inchoate creation itself.

I look into the abyss, watershed, void, dark abundance,

bright vacancy of the emptiness ahead of me

as space accelerates locally into a starless night

and I haven’t blinked yet at the darkness growing inside

like a new moon burying the bones of its dragons

at a sky burial under the gravestone of a constellation

shining like the ashes of a firepit you won’t find

with the aid of a starmap, and I wouldn’t call it

a change of attitude, or the recantation of a false confession

I never made to ease the torment of my mean-eyed inquisitors,

(they never had a clue about what to ask me anyway)

but I approach the genius of my left-handed solitude

with more gratitude than I once did, and my sense of wonder,

though it never put on airs, gapes in humility

at the gravegoods that grace the wake of this horrific beatitude.

PATRICK WHITE

MY LITTLE BOOK'S OUT THERE BEING READ

MY LITTLE BOOK’S OUT THERE BEING READ

My little book’s out there being read by someone

I hope somewhere like the plank of a shipwreck

with my name on it, the flyleaf of an artificial coral reef,

you gotta go deep, you gotta drown your book

on the moon, an underwater, island, barrow tomb

so you can bury your death in the life it gave shelter to.

Hey, little fish, welcome to my wake. I won’t say

I sank for your sake, but, here, where my oracular bones

are being pearled at the bottom of the Sea of Tranquillity,

it’s good to see you thriving as if evolution

were a high end colourist with a mad palette of hotspots

and at night, schools of argent insights emerging

in moonlight like the leaves of the wind in

the silver, Russian olives that lyrically mentored me on earth.

And, you, squirmy worm, literrateur, you can tunnel

through me like a blind, star-nosed mole boring

black holes for what was most illuminating about me

to leak out of like the shadows of the shadows you see

as you follow the crumbs of the feast deeper into

the labyrinth you’ll never come to the end of

like a wandering scholar following its tail back to its mouth,

the spitting image of a vicious, disappointed sentimentalist.

Have a happy. The party’s on me. Knock yourself out.

Can’t you hear the moon bawling like a large mammal

from the ice age in a tarpit on the dark side of life?

My little book’s out there being read

like the poetic genome of some potentially

extinct species of some hominid who knew

it wouldn’t be long before he was the last of his kind,

and spit-painted his handprint like the negative

of a silhouette he never coloured in with lifelines

like a starmap that might have led the gypsy palmists

astray like a ghost with a candelabra in an open doorway.

My little book’s out there, indelible as hardback and ink,

sporting the vision of life I once wore like constellations

tattooed on my eyes so my tears couldn’t wash them out

like the flood myth of a watercolour I never meant.

My little book’s out there shining like a fossil

in the eyes of the graverobbers on the black market

of the Burgess Shale of my sedimentary starmud,

indexed in the Dewey Decimal System in the library

of Ashurbanipal. Cosmetic scalpels like the birdsfeet

of sandpipers scarring the lyrics of their song

in wounded clay left out to bake in the kiln of the sun.

It’s healthy to mock yourself like the fool

at the foot of a throne the peasant’s revolt in you

was always inclined to abdicate like a gravestone

after Richard the Second lied to Wat Tyler in l381.

Even if you’ve made a sacred clown of yourself

doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun

in a dans macabre with death when it takes you

way too seriously like a terminal literalist who expects

you to mean everything you express as if

you weren’t just skywriting among the stars

like a ghost declaring how much it loved so and so,

no boundary stones like the prophetic skulls

of the turf wars we make of our global evanescence.

My little book’s out there somewhere, a petal of flame

that blooms in fire once every seven thousand years

like the pine-cone pagoda of a Zen monastery

with its one good eye on enlightenment, and the other

on the shadows of God it casts like gravegoods into the abyss.

Nothing more rapturous than an heretical arsonist

being burnt at the stake of his own auto de fe

like a scapegoat on the pyre of a left-handed sacrifice

as the anti-venom to the toxic innocence of the orthodox

who purify themselves like smallpox among the natives,

guilt by infection. Better to eat your own ashes in hell

than contaminate your neighbour’s spiritual housewell

with the decaprified horns of the goatsheads

that poison the waters of life with lies about the clarity

of waterlilies festering like nuns in virgin swamps.

I’ve never had an agenda for what I wanted to achieve

when I fell in love like a hole in the road on my way

to someone else, as if I had an errand to run that

my life and death depended on arriving in time

with news of the misdiagnosis of everything

I thought was wrong with me in a gnostic moment

that turned me into a happy docetist in the urn

of old papyri buried in a cave until a goatherd came along

and woke me up like a genie in a lamp

burning like serpent fire in the snakeoil

milked from the paps of Medusan amphorae

as if there’d been a mass mastectomy of breasts

that could kill as easily as they healed the visionary fevers

of the poetically snakebit. My little book is out there

somewhere like a binary star system doing

a ghost dance around a firepit that blossoms

like the eternal flame at the sacred forks

where the sacred rivers join like the tines

of a snake’s-tongue searching the air like lightning

for someone to strike like a root-fire of revelation.

Until the autumn oak breaks into a conflagration of leaves

how else can you shake a windfall of acorns down to earth

for the wild boars to keep growing the tusks of the moon

you’ll have to pay death one night for your passageway

to the other side of your unsalvageable Orphic descents?

My little book’s out there somewhere like a liferaft

in an hourglass with nobody on it, riding the thought waves

of strange seas of awareness where the stars

go pearl diving and come up with the moon.

The same mindstream I was carried along on

like an autumn leaf, cutting through a stranger’s woods.

Flightfeather of a book in a gust of stars like Cygnus

that can open its wings and fly like a cross

or land a high dive like a wild swan on a river,

threading the eye of the needle between an eagle

and a flying horse. My little book’s nocturnal

but it’s not morose. Aesthetically infernal, but not an urn.

PATRICK WHITE