A NICK OF THE MOON

A NICK OF THE MOON

A nick of the moon. Thin smile of circumstance

and the paint rags of the few, modest dreams

I had left, are bleeding out again. Alizarin crimson

leaking like lipstick out of a slashed mirror as my blood

congeals glacially and gives my heart freezer-burn.

Crazy alert. Three alarm anxieties. Loser brigade.

Should I drown like a new moon in the calendar

of my waterclock mindstream going through

all these phases or rush to my rescue again and again

and again, the lifeboat of a waterbird with oars for wings?

I’ve been exhausted by mundane terrors.

The man gets scared. And he sings in the face of despair.

He waits for the night to heal. An injured wolf

in the bone-box of his lair. And the stars like Arcturus

for months above the dark roofs of the glaring town

always the charm of a long, hard-won childhood

lightyears away from this creosote of a life

that gets left like the slag of a dragon that’s gone

up in smoke like a short-cut through a chimney

all over the inside of the dead furnace of my heart

where I’m still trying to keep a few fireflies alive.

Poetry, my sanctuary, my asylum, my chrysalis,

my fortune-cookie of oceanic consciousness in a seashell,

my Braille koan laid out like a starmap for my eyes only,

my spinal connection to the blue guitar of my imagination

in an ensuing phylum of Chordates, black box of my soul,

anti-grail of my worldly aspirations, look

how I’ve worn your lip down sipping from your elixirs

like a devotee walking up the sacred stairs on his knees

he’s blunted like a pestle and a mortar to throw

his crutches onto a pyre of fossilized wing bones.

My curse. My blessing. Inkwell, thorn, heart, pen.

Could be a bad choice of metaphors or a pillowcase

full of flightfeathers I wear like a war bonnet in my dreams

when I’m ghost dancing off the reservation.

Cowboy Zen art martyr from the lunatic fringe,

I’ll make it cosmically through the Leonids somehow,

if not by will, by a spiritual reflex of my imagination.

I’ll walk barefoot over the ashes of my root fires

like a rusty cedar down to the bedside manner of the lake.

I’ll watch Jupiter bobbing like a lure in the narrow field of view

of an atmospherically unstable telescope waiting for a bite

and when the swim bladders of the northern pike

mythically inflate like nuclear submarines surfacing

off the Lomonosov Ridge. I’ll carve a barbed spear point

out of the tusk of the moon and reign sovereign

over the ice like a dispossessed Inuit hovering over a bubble.

In an oblivion of heroic numbness, I’ll wear my laurels

like razorwire proudly to the stake of my heretical desire

to let the nightbirds return to the gentler nests of last year

in the heartwood of a rootless tree, undisturbed

by the unconfessed holy books of the leaves

that burned in their absence like the sky burial

of a snake in autumn that won its wings, at last, from the flames.

I’ll climb the burning ladders of my own lunar vertebrae

like a dolmen of moonrocks that stood its ground

in a firestorm of solar flares in the Sea of Tranquillity.

Even if my tears blister into glass, I’ll water

this desert of stars like a dragon tending a garden

until it blooms like an ocean of broken chandeliers.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

The river an old waltz on the dance-card of the stars,

at the navel of time, at the crossroads of the unborn world,

I take the hand of the waterclock that pumps like my heart

and escort it to the centre of the floor and in a strophic wind

of wheeling turns and counterturns, lyrically reverse my spin

like the weathervane of a Sufi trying to annihilate

my sense of direction in the vertiginous bliss

of not knowing where I’m going on the journey ahead

and as ever, still as clueless, whether it really matters

if I arrive or not, on time or late, mad or enlightened,

weeping like an atmosphere that’s soaked up

too much from the occult arcana of the air

or laughing like a trickster crow shaman as innocent

as a black sense of humour blowing the candles out

like shallow insights into enlightenment to see better in the dark

what truly shines in my third eye, and what does not.

Should I mend the cracks around my eyes with gold

like a broken Japanese teacup, or are those the roots of the lotus

that anchor me like axons of black matter to the lower depths

of my starmud like a radiant alloy of Orion and dirt,

all my neurons wired in series like galactic sea stars?

I don’t take notes on the fires of life in short-hand

and I’m alert to the false dawns of inspiration

that urge me to draft my first impressions of night

in flourishing scripts of cursive smoke uncoiling

like the vapour trails of dragons in the quantum sunsets

of a mystic singularity behind the veils of a black hole.

If it isn’t written in the scarlet vowels of my blood,

koans of unbreakable consonants, seventeen sacred syllables

of the total eclipse of a haiku in nirvana, it’s

only an experiment in the loss of identity of an old science,

not an experience of the crazy wisdom of the new

realizing the shape of the universe is the shape of the mind

that observes it, and knows like an intimate of emptiness

it’s inconceivably alive and intelligent as space.

And I celebrate it now like an ageing man

looks at his hands and immediately understands

why the last flowers of autumn are always the most beautiful.

I have sown like a star what others will harvest

of my light after me like the eyes of a man who spent

a long time dreaming in the watersheds and wine cellars

of the art of learning how to break into song

like a graverobber into the heartwood of his youth,

how to carve guitars out of coffins without cutting

your own throat like tightly bound vocal cords

badly attuned to your jugular vein like the low E string

of a Tibetan mantra with nothing but an empty begging bowl

for a microphone. And the forked tongue of a lightning bolt

witching for serpent fire in the mouth of a dragon sage

that triggers the moon into releasing the mercy of rain

on the scorched earth path of a volcanic grailquest

that might give the lost something to look forward to

when they’re drowning like fish in the sea

that gave birth to them like the sun in Pisces

at the vernal equinox where the celestial equator

and the ecliptic intersect like rippling bracelets of rain

elaborating into mandalic interference patterns

where the protocols of chaos wear the appropriate life masks

like dark poems and light on both sides of the moon

to commemorate the occasion of a rising constellation

in a metaphoric rapture of collaborative illumination.

Homage to the dark mothers of the words for water and light

it took a lifetime of silence for the daughters of the muse

to learn to say as if a poet’s life depended upon it.

Homage to the thieves of fire that set the windows ablaze

from the inside out in ways they’ve never been lit up before

when they least expected it from the least expected quarter.

The sun at midnight. The moon at midday. And the shadows

remarkably supple given the age of the dance they’re performing

like a swan song of black feathers with the wingspan of a ghost.

Homage to the mystery that led me like an exile

out of my own doorway to disappear like a bird in the night,

brief, brief, brief, and gone into the abysmal dark

of an afterlife I followed like a starmap of lightyears

into the open until my eyes adapted to the black mirrors

of my deepening awareness of how the heart

shone brighter than the mind and the entrance not the exit

was the harder way home for a human who was willing to risk it

for a valley full of fireflies and savagely clear insights

that echo a mountain that shrieks in its sleep

like a nighthawk to the sharp-eyed stars. Asleep

or awake, alive or dead, the differences pale

like wandering scholars in the moonrise on the river.

Prophetic skulls lose track of the time like amino acids

in the alphabet blocks of ancient asteroids

trying to keep it together in the Oort belt

after they were messed up like ricochets by Neptune

on tour in the leper colonies of shepherd moons.

The seven inaccessible dimensions of the future

fray like a spinal cord into an infinite number of lifelines

at the deltas and sacred meeting places where

the mindstream returns to itself, water to water,

not ashes and dust. And the silver sword

the moon lays down in tribute to the lake

is bent like the back of an old man so no one after him

could ever wield it like the hands of a clock in battle again.

Homage to the stranger that stands at the gate

to another world without disavowing his homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE