I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I shed skins like eclipses and black latex gloves

peeled back from the new moons of unravelling snakes

that have outgrown their starmaps. Fire-sage

of a surgical dragon wound around circumpolar north,

there’s freezing in my fangs, little arrows of toxin,

and the milk of human kindness in my anti-venom.

I’m a wavelength unto myself, not a path

for anyone to follow. There are aimless rivers for that.

Poets skilled at setting paper funeral boats afire

as if they were burying their dead like real Vikings.

When you’ve left everything behind, you get used

to not leading anywhere. A cul de sac is as useless

as a labyrinth when you’re lost like the wind. Yarrow sticks

in all directions. Dishevelled stalks of dry summer grass

broken like the sarissas of a phalanx on a hillside.

You take the lowest of the low and join it

to the highest of the high and you have the makings

of a dragon that never overinflates or underestimates

the mythic potential of the quantum entanglements of life.

Scales and feathers. Winged horns ascending

over the birch groves of the lake like a dangerous moonrise

as I try not to cut my eyes on the talons and the sabres,

the Damascene crescents of clarity I’ve been running

across my tongue like the folded edges of ancient blood vows

to risk nothing less than everything all the time

making peace in a holy war of dead metaphors

buried too deep in the collective unconscious

to ever rise again with the same perceptive innocence

of their first alchemical revolution. The bloom

is off the rose. Beauty bares its thorns. Monks of gold

mine their own base metals for lesser transformations.

They unhinge their jaws to swallow their cosmic glains.

To them its all eggshells in a manger at Easter,

the two crows of Egypt, the triune identity

of three faces in one of St. Hillary, the Catholic Druid.

I sleep in my coils like a pagan hill fort

at the center of a mandalic crop circle

with occult starmaps tattooed under my eyelids.

I’m writing a grammar of symmetrical unlikenesses

to give my dissimilarities a chance to express themselves

without peristaltically swallowing thousands of contradictions

like the moon in a single gulp to bring the rain down

on the serpent fire of the lightning that engendered it.

Once you’ve passed through the monoliths

of dualistic reasoning like stone labia

at the Medusan entrance to the cave, you don’t suffer

the metamorphic uncertainties of what you were born to be,

quite as much. You’re free as a forest fire

to immolate yourself like a heretic at your own sky burial

on a pyre of crutches you threw away like the Tunguska meteor

radiating out in all directions like compass needles

from the unmarked grave of an auto de fe that made an impact

without gouging the eyes out of the truth like an unbearable fact.

PATRICK WHITE  

AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

AWAKE AS THE DAWN APPROACHES

Awake as the dawn approaches, my cat

curled up on the desk beside me in her liferaft of a bed,

three goldfish sleeping at the bottom of their tank.

Ashen-blue in the urn of a sky burial wounding space

with the lament of a nocturnal bird disappearing

into the distant hills like the moon and Jupiter.

Intimate, almost hallowed, the stillness of a bell

hangs in the air, breathing through the gills

of the local steeples under the eyelids

of their half-opened air vents. Cerulean seepage,

venal blood that’s lost its way back to the heart.

Awareness quiescently strange, I’ve been listening

to the silence of solitary voices all night,

the medium of a seance I never summoned

but attend by acclamation at the urging

of natural selection. Meditations of a mutant gene

observing the red shift in the wavelengths of its blood line.

Haphazard paradigms, astigmatic mandalas

trying to take the guesswork out of being alive

as my thoughts run their numinous fingers

over the chasms and cracks that have been appearing lately

like a prophetic earthquake in the sign of my crystal skull.

My brother’s leg amputated by tree-cutters

to keep him dying from number two diabetes.

My mother, ninety-three, I’m afraid of her death

like a species fears extinction and I can’t help wondering

why I’ve wandered like a rootless tree so far from home

for so many years as if it fell to me to be the exile

in the family, so they could stay together on the island

and I could pursue the inanities of a lonely excellence

with Chaplineque holes in my tragic socks.

The rough-hewn complexion of heritage field stones

flushed by a beatific rose of the flowering light

glowing like a mood swing warming up to sunflowers

in Naples yellow. Even at the beginning of the day,

I feel displaced as a winter constellation paling

brilliantly in the west by the advent of the vernal equinox.

An epilogue of the ice age receding like a glacier

into an underground watershed on the moon

that hangs me like a polar locket around its neck.

Has there been a hidden purpose in the shining,

a gravitational eye that bent the light

of this long, dark journey way off course

the original flightplan to return back one day

along the path I made behind me, a comet

looping around the sun, a moth around a candle,

enraptured by the fire of the stars in the sails

of seagoing dragons set like blossoms on the wind

for the coasts of anywhere, warrior land namers

carving their totems on the dolmens of runic asteroids

falling like first stones without sin on the heads

of the dark glassblowers in the pellucid menageries

breaking the limbs of the evergreens like a fragile paradise

in an ice storm? Black sheep surviving on wild islands

in the desperate straits of their shipwrecked shepherd moons?

Life thaws. The mind thaws. The heart weeps

and the viscosity of the melting windows turn into rain.

The body is a medicine bag of wounded seawater

leaking out of nine stigmata. Time can walk one foot

after another geared robotically to the mainspring

of a wind-up, mechanical, alarm clock, but mostly it flows.

Even given you can’t step into the same river twice,

but wanting to clarify the ambivalence that most people feel

about the things they do in life, what are you going to do?

Run back with a monkey wrench and tighten a bolt on the river

to keep it from wobbling up ahead? Regret what you said

because you’re practising silence and sitting still?

Train the lightning to bite other people, or discipline

your emotional currents and mental whirlpools,

to accommodate themselves to your navigational charts?

You want to make a change to change, that’s ok, too,

but it won’t make a difference. Change just comes upon you

like morning to the nightshift retiring with the stars.

Everyone’s going to make the sea in time their own way

even if it isn’t to care whether they get there or not.

No river’s flowing the wrong way, every vein

is a path back to the heart, every drop of rain

is a jewel of the sea, oceans in its eyes. We’re swimming in

what we’re on our way to. You can’t pour the universe

out of the universe, and which of all the rays of light

from a star is heading off in the wrong direction? You can’t,

nor is there a need, scrub the darkness out of the light.

I remember getting up as a schoolboy in the morning

and seeing my mother’s, sisters’, grandmother’s slips,

bras, underwear hung out to dry like morning glory

blossoming on an eight foot long unplaned board

gradually being pushed through the open hole of the hot plate

with the portable teapot handle into a roaring black woodstove

with curd-coloured enamel chipped like teeth

as each of them collected their lingerie like mail.

Now I’m sixty-four years old and it’s millions of words

and thousands of miles later than I think. And my absence

accuses me like a sin of omission I wasn’t there to commit.

Like the sound of a small town waking up to what it rarely wants to do.

PATRICK WHITE