COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

Comet in the west just after sunset

between the Great Square of Pegasus and Pisces,

breath on a windowpane, a smudge of light

as a warning, a blessing, a curse, the Ides of March,

a flightfeather releasing as many doves of meaning

as anyone cares to give it walking into the woods

along the packed-down wolf paths to see,

while there was still light, resolve in my legs,

if the red-winged blackbirds had returned yet.

What the river had been doing in my absence

that would help me take my mind off the world awhile

and forget there’s more pain in my laughter these days

than the joy of freedom from being me that used to

efface me with a smile that had travelled lightyears

from where it was born, a message to a man

who was still a child at heart, who could read

comets and smiles like keys to the indecipherable art

of bridging the gap between them like a unified field theory

of metaphors that could sing to the stars

as if there were a patina of meaning and beauty

that made everything glow with radiant significance

in the mystery of being alive in love with a muse

who traded the moccasins she’d walked a mile in

to know me, for a pair of winged heels, easier on her feet

than the long firewalks of thorns and stars in an ice storm

she used to have to take to follow me into exile barefoot.

Gone like a loveletter I once received in a dream

and set fire to like a poem I meant to keep

in the urn of my heart forever like a dragon

in a deep sleep of oblivion it never wanted

to wake up from disenchanted by the awareness

of what haunted it like the ghost of a lotus

at a seance of the sun. Gone those nights and days

that ran their course like the draconian serpent fire

of scarlet runners entwined around my spine

as if the axes of the earth were three poles in a garden.

Gone the long soporific nights with the cats and the dogs

brought in from the cold beside a woodstove you could trust

like a habitable planet orbiting Aldebaran in Taurus

before I had a vision in high definition of the Burgess Shale

in colour that made everything seem as vital

as the aspirations of Opabinia with its five eyes

and vacuum hose with claws in the brine seeps

of the Middle Cambrian taking the high, hard road

up the mountain that below might be as above.

Comets, smiles, the metaphors that unite them,

Pikaia gracilens at Pika Peak in Pisces, chordates

into backbones, fragile filaments, the spinal cords

of life, light and love, the hair of a star on the shoulders of night

like the sign of an ongoing love affair

with the depths and the heights of who we are to each other

highlights of the downtimes plunging

like angels and heretics, new moonrises

into the ageing dawns of the setting sun

between the eyelashes of the treelines beginning to sing

like red winged blackbirds on the dead branches

of seasoned guitars leafing into spring.

PATRICK WHITE  

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

Spring rain in the small hours of the morning,

exlixir of leaves, tears of anthracite on the asphalt streets,

drumming circles rippling out of every pulse of the heart

that makes an impact, ghosts of gasoline thrown

on the pyres of the rootfires trying to ignite the lampposts

that have never known what it was to shine on their own

like daffodils and crocuses, trout lilies and wood sorrel,

without someone else telling them when and when not to.

Water music in the iron vocal cords of the gutter

free-flowing into its own underworld echo

like a mind stream making found art out of

accumulated garbage that announces it has no soul

though the dolmens of the pygmy fire-hydrants

stubbornly refuse to believe it. Some nights so brutal

the moon knocks its teeth out trying to take a bite

out of the curb like a crust of bread made of cement.

Corpses of soiled swans sculpted by the rain

lying like road kill in the parking lot of Mac’s Milk

like a ghoulish leper colony in fluorescent light.

The powerlines weeping like mandalic spiderwebs

on their own, melancholic dreamcatchers letting it out

like broken necklaces of tears filling the moats

around the throats of crystal skulls losing it

like glaciers to global warming, prophetic windows

thawing out their frost-bitten eyes by disappearing

from sight as the cedars sweep chandeliers of light

from their wings as they try to take off the lake,

the rain packing down the starmud of the path

they were meant to take, their feet on the earth,

their heads in the clouds like totem poles and pagodas.

Soaked to the skin, the bloom of the rose with thorns

like silver buckles off my black leather jacket

heavy and sodden as the flesh of a rat snake

that’s been run over by some stupid farmer

as it was coming out of hibernation like a wavelength

pariahed by rainbows, as water droplets tap

their fingers on the rim of my gangster hat

tilted on its axis like a total eclipse of the rings

of Saturn trying to look tougher than it actually is,

there’s nowhere to go but down to the rising river

where the willows are rinsing their hair

under the faucet of a kitchen sink the way

my sisters used to before our blood parted

like the waters of the Red Sea that never closed up

behind me like a wound that’s gone on hemorrhaging

for lightyears like hydrocephalic Al Gol in Perseus

holding his sword down like the reflection of a headlight

trembling in tribute to the ladies of the lake who hold

their bare arms out like the boughs of drowned trees

to receive it. The snowman with eyes of bituminous coal

disappears in a bath of warm, carboniferous tears

that appeal like black diamonds to the evergreens

for understanding and compassion not to come too late

as I open the floodgates of my heart like a lockmaster

white water rafting the spring runoff in a lifeboat

he’s trying to bail out like a waterclock that’s jumped

an hour ahead of itself to wander in the light

like the narrative theme of a real dream character

trying not to drown in its own mindstream

this close to waking up like the ghost of a sleepwalker.

No one in my bed I long to return to like a shipwreck

No poem in my heart I’m trying to protect

like the dishevelled bouquet of a wet matchbook

trying to keep love alive like a dying art long enough

to catch fire like the vernal equinox in the imagination

of an underground flowergirl setting my roots aflame

with blue hyacinths and wild irises of tantric sex.

My solitude seeks no mercy from the rain.

No dilution of my blood that runs like a watercolour of pain

vainly trying to unskein the black and red threads

of a passion for life from the bass riff of a death wish

blinded by the approaching light of the eerie beauty

of the black sun eclipsed at nadir in the Circlet of the Western Fish.

PATRICK WHITE