ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

Another lightning strike diverted from the oak

a moment so I can uproot my nerves,

steel them to the sensitivities of the light

on a rampage, electrical snakestongues of fire,

welding sparks jumping the gap between

one neuronic synapse stripped of vitamin B

and the next, the entrance and exit of a collapsed bridge.

I want to go out the way I came in, a poet.

All my prophetic skulls laid out like stones in a river,

an inundated cemetery of moons hoping

to catch the next providential tide of spring run-off,

I’m still trying to get to the other side of why

I’m alive, by jumping like the moonrise of a pinball

from one extinction event to another, keeping in mind

the meteor that gave its amino acids

to the elaboration of life on the planet in the first place

will also be the one that takes it eventually.

A blow to the solar plexus of the earth

that knocks the atmosphere out of it.

But my mistletoe isn’t fried quite yet

though I’ve had to pawn my golden sickle

just to survive the deforestation of my sacred places,

I’ve got the eyes of the Gulf of Mexico

though given the oilslicks and astronomical catastrophes

that always come as a suprise, I’m undergoing

a sea change of self somewhere in the Cambrian era.

I’ve integrated a sense of compassion into my cells

like the mitochondria of my mother. I empathise

to the point there’s nothing human under the stars,

from cartels to Cepheid variables that I don’t take personally.

Some people collect souvenir spoons. With me,

it’s scalpels. Especially the ones still buried in my wounds

like crescent moons waxing and waning

like the phases of my eyelids, the bright vacancy

of a full glass of emptiness, the skull cup of the dark abundance

of the ghosts in the shadows that refuse to be conditioned

by the medium of anyone’s seeing but my own

as if they were all familiars of mine from a long time ago

I met at a seance they summoned me to as if

I were the one who had died in this dream of life

and the living and the dead stood eye to eye

like binocular vision in the observatory of the same head.

Water, time, suffering, and the wind blunts the sharp edges

I flintknapped like obsidian from the eclipse of a new moon

that slowly pressed into my flesh like a black rose

in the pages of a book I seldom open anymore

like a bone-box with my fossils in it that an avalanche

on the sea bed wears like tattoos on the inside

to remember me by. There are wines and inks

as indelible and dark as the night, pumping

through the heart forever, long after

the last tear in the rain has flowed away

like a watercolour of a fallen leaf under the bridge

of the mindstream you’re walking on like a great blue heron.

Don’t let the brutal sorrows make you defect

like a plague rat the many joys of the moonboat

that used to unload its cargo of roses in Genoa.

As soon as you fall like a cynic on the bitter thorns of life

it’s oxymoronically inevitable you’re going to become

quantumly entangled with someone who strews

rose petals in your path with such disarming tenderness

you’re seated like a fool on the impoverished throne

of your own defeated predictability. Bad, prophet, bad.

Tomorrow mutates to adapt to the available dimensions

of a future that has no conception of you even

existing yet here in the past where the real business

of living is done and now, though you cut it infinitely fine

like God particles that turn out to be your own mind,

never comes because time is what you are and what

you shall be, embodied in the throb of your own humanity.

Live up to it like the cause and effect of the only

regressive alibi that has stood up for you so long

it’s becoming a paradigm of stars and fireflies,

a new myth of origin among the constellations

that count on your imagination to sustain them.

Fire in the eyes of a snowman. Shine, shine, shine

like diamonds in the coal, wine in the bitter grapevine

that doesn’t know where all this ends like a road

gravelled with the skulls of hospitable planets

across the firmament so some drunk can stumble his way

home alone, all his darkness and light singing

in harmony with the stars and daylilies

of the flames in his heart he’s standing in for

like an unrecalcitrant martyr to the heresy of the art

of staying drunk on the moonlight, the orthodox

who decree they know what’s right burn in effigy

like a scarecrow because there’s no body to dig up

when you drink life down to the lees of the crows

looking for hidden jewels in the ashes at the bottom of the cup

as if the urns of dragons are the seed beds of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE  

TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track

as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.

Grafitti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery

spray bombed by underground American artists

on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,

driving cab, I always wished I could publish

a poem like that, one line coupled to another

as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.

Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising

the red light district for a working girl who called

without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress

as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less

about where I dropped them off and picked them up

than they used to when they knew I had taken

an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest

who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,

on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise

with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical

wallowing in its own starmud as if someone

had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls

before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation

of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer

fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills

he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether

to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk

the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.

This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops

like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting

big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars

like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying

to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.

Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare

of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it

I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got

no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does

through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings

that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to

when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness

for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me

as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River

where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way

as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures

on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one

like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back

into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up

like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing

what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman

caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost

of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights

like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself

to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads

of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town

in the dead of the night like a found poem

I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines

from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels

rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads

of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord

you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines

rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower

with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows

horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively

like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,

each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed

like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time

as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s

a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same

mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly

the denaturing of creative humanity from his art

isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever

been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box

that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism

blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars

with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy

had freshly painted over the hunting magic

of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly

by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood

like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths

of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change

from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun

to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls

of howling bush wolves contemporaneously

packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds

echoing across the lake like the longing

of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why

we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly

like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,

hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.

PATRICK WHITE