MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

Most days went by like the helical coils of the sun

slowly crushing the life out of you, a ton of chronic anaconda,

swallowing you heart first, not the occasional

lightning strike of a rattlesnake shaking its tail at you

like dice it was keeping warm for a left-handed throw.

Childhood horrors I’ve spent the last forty years

trying to shine like a star in the eye of as if

I were trying to stare down a snakepit to see

which one of us would turn to stone first, me

with my silver bullet, bright shield, and winged horse,

my boyish notion of heroic redemption,

or Medusa loose in the aviary of my voice.

A strange stillness overtakes me in the false dawn

of anticipating my mother’s death, knowing

it must come soon enough, an astronomical catastrophe

to a species already struggling for its life.

And as then, so now, I’m impotent to help

this woman from Queensland who

shipwrecked herself like an island on the moon

we could all live around like fish taking shelter

in the niches of the Great Barrier Reef

she turned her body into, though she had been

beautiful and wild once, an artist, a dancer,

playing strip poker with American cooks

docked in Sydney Harbour in World War II

for a bit of extra food. And seldom lost.

No garden of Eden in my life, but she had Brisbane

as she remembered it more and more as the years went by,

a place to return to, sanctuary for a burdened heart,

all mangoes and passion fruit and bougainvillea,

low hanging fruits of the earth ripe for the picking

as we had the apples, plums and pears

of the abandoned orchards of Victoria

swept by field fires of Plantagenet broom.

A welfare litter of five we came upon food in those days

like birds to overgrown gardens or fish

that nibbled at the drowned when the tide came in.

My mother practised survival like a Zen discipline.

Even when we were wearing our hunting masks

she taught us all to laugh at the crazy things

we had to do to live and say, Paddy, you should

write a book one day and I guess I’ve being doing that

for the last fifty years. And it still isn’t finished yet.

If all the seas were ink, and all the trees were pens,

dusk after dusk, morning into morning, it never ends.

I keep gleaning those gardens, searching

the acres of book-sized stovewood doomed to burn

like the Library of Alexandria, checking out

the back alleys, the back doors, the nightsky

liberating its stars above the condemned houses

smelling of the salacious mildew of beached mattresses

rotting on the floor like washed up whales

dying under their own weight as if they had

their anacondas too in the form of deep sea squid, looking

for words, always words, they pay me for in beer bottles,

words that might make a difference somehow,

though it’s always a toss-up between snake eyes and hope,

to inadvertently help someone get through the rest of the month

and, who knows, maybe a little extra to spend on themselves

like a new pair of shoes that fit, without feeling guilty about it

as my make-do mother always did until she couldn’t walk any more

because she had bunions on her feet the size of gibbous moons.

The palette of the rainbow she put down has reappeared

like a moondog in me, and insufficient in my own eyes,

for not foraging more loaves and fishes to break with her

than I should have, given what I do for a living, trying,

this late February night knows how hard I’ve tried,

to write something so compassionately sincere and compelling

it would bring tears to your eyes as you laugh out loud

at the spontaneous improvement in the quality of anyone’s life

as a standard of the earthly excellence I pursue like a calling

to celebrate even this harvest of shadows and eclipses

in the empty hands of an eldest son’s love of his mother

like chaff in the grain, magpies and kookaburras

in the gum trees of Brisbane, little Edens like fireflies

in every moment I’ve hung on this southern excruciation

of jewels in the ore of the underworld, Aussie enough

to bluff a pair of deuces like snake-eyes

into a royal flush that takes the table and keeps

the clothes on our backs like the feathers and scales

of the best we found in the heart of the worst,

blessed by what we cursed, and could not live without.

PATRICK WHITE

SUMAC IN THE SNOW

SUMAC IN THE SNOW

Sumac in the snow, towers of coagulated blood

for flames, spooky candelabra, what holy day

do your upholstered spearpoints commemorate

that you’ve hung on longer than most leaves

to all these clumsy hearts throughout the winter

like a young woman splaying her fingers

to blow on her nail polish with a witchey smile

of satisfaction in progress? Are you some kind of art?

Weird gate? A pitchfork in the hands of a crone

with blood on its tines, horns that gored the matador,

burnt burgundy on shamanic antlers guling

down the heel of a paint brush, a mix of alizarin crimson

and night like a maternal Payne’s grey you’re using

to paint a bestiary of enraptured totems on a cave wall?

Where are you going with all your punky torches,

what are you trying to keep alight? Did you lose

something in the woods you’re trying to find

like me intrigued by the way you’ve gone

divining for it like a dishevelled matchbook

for a watershed? Or is that just the way

you coat your nerve endings in red teloremes

to keep your dna from fraying like a strong rope

into a million weak threads? Occultly organic,

what kind of ritual are you that your arms

are stained by wine like evening gloves

up to your elbows as if you’d been pressing wine?

Surrealist phoenix in the spring, the fledgling feathers

of your tender green leaves, the antediluvian wingspan

of a creature that survived the flood by flying over it

like cometary fire in a blaze of blood.

Have you seen October sumac set its wings afire?

I wrote that line when I was twenty-two,

and trying to do the same thing you were

in the autumn rain as if I’d just stolen something

crucial from the gods. A secret of fire I had to master

before they began to miss it like a candle

as if seeing were the first fundamental of love

not even the cold shoulder of the wind

has been able to put out over the lightyears

of heretical fires it’s been trying to rehabilitate

by piling pyres of brambles at its feet

and breathing on them at the auto de fe

of an incorrigibly inflammable martyr

to its own lost cause. Burn through everything

in the dead of winter like a first magnitude star

of white phosphorus that puts the burning snow

to shame like fire dancing on the water in a jester’s cap

because love gets away with the most incredible thefts.

May the altar of the rock never come, the vultures

and the chains, the stem cells of the renewable liver

the undertakers haruspicate by then eat

as if they wanted to consume the same signs

of courage you had to steal life out of the mouth of death

like a secret syllable of fire you fan with every breath

to live like a dragon rising out of the firepit

of its own ashes like the lightning strike

of a forked witching wand with a tongue of serpent fire

tasting spring in the air like the touchy tendrils of a solar flare.

PATRICK WHITE