IT’S GOOD TO KNOW

It’s good to know you’re there,

though the world is a diatribe

of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it’s good to know

a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,

a bell waits like a nipple of silence

and your blood waits like a language,

a rose of rain in a starfield,

that my mouth alone can say to the night

in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,

sipping from a chalice of water

spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky

and buries itself like a meteor

at the cornerstone of a sightless temple

pillared by faithless candles

that flirt with the shadows

of the fire in their eyes,

and I’m bridges beyond any way back the way I came,

my wake the scar of a vapour trail

in yesterday’s cherry sunset,

and I still catch myself at my worst

whenever I’m good.

There’s always a thread of blood on the water,

and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror

scrawled in manic lipstick,

and a gravestone

I carry around on my shoulders like a skull

that feels like the weight of the world,

and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death

that is often afraid of me,

and a ferocity of freedom

that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,

and bleaches every feeling like a wound

in the antiseptic of the sun

that bites like a mystic arrow

that was feathered with a message

before I was born to find me.

But it’s good to know

your fury and your gentleness,

the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,

your altars of wind and smoke

spuming across the vastness of the solitude

like blood and chalk

and lines written after school

on the blackboard shale of my river skin

still trying to reform its way to the sea.

It’s good to look at the moon

through your passionate windows

and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness

attuning the tines of my tongue

to a fork in the road of your body,

to the delta of an unknown civilization,

to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words

that have sought me out

like blood vessels and burning bushes

and the blossoming fingers of someone

kneading a face

out of the huge volume,

the pure space of my unattainability.

O you have said things to me

in ink and water and brandy and fire,

in night and moonlight and poppies and tears

that have made the hardest rocks

on the highest slopes

of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed

to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter

by the tenderness of your knives again and again,

urgent with beauty and joy

to be overthrown

by the whisper of your voice in the valley

triggering this skyborn avalanche

of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases

and the vases into urns

and the urns back into the wombs

of a thousand terminal exiles

tolling like a heartbeat

with a passport and a threshold,

and though I am no longer

the leaf of hope

that aspired to rudder

the fire stream of these volcanic transformations,

it’s good to drift awhile

in the dreamtime of this endless night

like recoverable salvage

among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats

and the reaping eyes

of your eloquent islands of light.

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or Ak-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE