I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.

I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.

I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.

A poem’s got one foot on shore and one in the boat.

Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait.

Even when it’s calm, my heart is an idling storm

and every third thought is a voodoo doll

as it sees itself on the inside

behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse.

Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to put

the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva.

Look at me tracking myself all over this paper,

mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper.

How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn’t exist.

God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs.

Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood?

Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad

but once you get there it’s easy to see it’s the lily that shines

in a whole other realm of language

that everyone understands but no one can speak.

I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through.

I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly

applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals

of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch.

What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask

and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you

like a dimension you hadn’t detected in your awareness

than the light is to what you see when

you’re sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning.

What a world, hey? What do you make of it?

The marvel and the horror and the mystery

and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery

for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays

Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all,

this mere speck of nothingness that can embody

in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies?

And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear

and the way things change and disappear

as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere

and everything’s either an approximation or consolation

of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air?

I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass,

but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound

and not even the dead are as free as I am right now.

The whole universe is one big solid insight

where inanimate things are just another mode of motion

sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time,

and I’m tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter

you weren’t expecting in a language that could read you

like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint.

I’ve been listening to you for lightyears like leaves

listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight

and what you have felt about being alive

to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling,

and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels

and the generosity of their expansive interventions,

I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations.

And my feet swept out from under me

like an undertow of shadows on the moon.

Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light

of these intensities and immensities for long

this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars

without reeling in the delirium of simply being here

to witness them as if they somehow depended on us

to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids

as if they were no different from us than we were,

all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean.

The imagination transforms everything in to us.

The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them

like pyres and telescopes and censers, it’s

in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover,

it’s what makes the meteorites as kissable

as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy.

Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini,

what have you been dancing for all these years?

Have you been pearldiving among the castanets

for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell

that could sing to you like the ocean you’re lost upon?

You’re the station every seeker gets to

on a pilgrimage he doesn’t know he’s taking

where he damns the consequences and blessings alike

and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion

as he addresses himself to what’s arrayed before him

as if there were only one voice between himself and another

like a bridge that flows, like a star

that doesn’t drown in your eye like a firefly.

And if there were anything I could ever say I was

it would have to be this just as it is, this

endlessness I keep being poured out into

as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by

and disembodied space the only medium

that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations

like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars.

Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds

and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows,

and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if

someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness

see you standing on your barren precipice

and long to know what it is you’re thinking.

In order to understand you must become the thing itself.

You must abdicate your own presence to be

remotely at peace with the world, it’s a strawdog anyway,

and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse.

And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed

like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water

laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins.

I shall come to you at first as a premonition

as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight,

a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity,

and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere

and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars,

and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose.

Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground

my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain

and though I look at you through a broken window,

the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised.

PATRICK WHITE

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.

A penny on the third eye of the hurricane

I’ve been trying to ride out all day without

having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.

Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws

like quotation marks and crescent moons

around the silence of your name.

The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.

Inspiration doesn’t trample on things

like flowers and stars. No more. No more

of those feelings that were meant to be as famous

as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears

as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain

deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers

when you fire the voice coach

and teach them to paint watercolours.

It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light

like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard

and let it dream like wine in the dark

until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September

and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy

of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome.

I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.

Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.

I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on

and not expect to lose my way back home

wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless

and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.

I should raise naval flags like spring flowers

to signal the relative victory of a few short hours

but the candles have already sent the message in flames

and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday

let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will

I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake

of the irreligious history of the world trying

to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god

someone met on the way to the promised land

and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median

to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks

that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes

of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert

to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.

Rare revelation to the changelings of lust

released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn

to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire

as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There’s never been a star named after a human

except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,

dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips

of a mermaid in the desert like real water

to a true believer in the midst of delusion

just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing

like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.

And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck

that went down at the end of her song,

the whole town on board this leaking ark

and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat

like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,

the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.

And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,

and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows

that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation

above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots

in the pungent closets of the watershed

that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River

under chandeliers of light-footed starmud

in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing

like gusts of air to the heritage harps

that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,

an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out

like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on

like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home

arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.

Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time

no more vernal in the east where the moon rises

than eternal in the west where the sun sets,

I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,

I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians

between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away

like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets

someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep

the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them

with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets

in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again

as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.

And neither of us had anything to fight about.

And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet,

like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it

wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off

like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.

Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.

And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

PATRICK WHITE