LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

Looking for a stairwell of stars in a labyrinth

of fire escapes I can slide down the bannisters of

like a childhood planet in an aberrant orbit

as if I’d wandered off somewhere like an unattended kite

or the black sheep of a shepherd moon

into the same vast spaces where the stars

graze like dragons on the ashes of themselves

and all along the river, fleets of waterlilies

break into light as if they were hauling their sails up

into the wind like the flightfeathers the moon sheds

like a waterbird lending its plumage to the waves

so they can soar in the depths of a borrowed wingspan

or swim through the stars on the oarpower of their own fins.

I’m parasailing in the Pleiades like a dandelion seed

that’s about to ignite into a big yellow sun

with planets all around it coming into consciousness

like life losing its innocence by becoming

aware of itself like a secret it shares with a stranger.

I’ve freed my dreams from the tyranny of mirrors.

My windows into the soul are breeding

with my mirages in a happy connubium

of appearances with the way things are

deep down underneath the rock you turn over

like your heart for the pale, yellow worm

of a meaning to life once you’ve come to mistrust

your senses into making better spies than friends.

I take as much delight these days in the way

things end, as I ever did in the way they began.

I rejoice in my impurities like sunspotted beauty marks

on the coronas of my crazy wisdom

and the alluvial laughlines at the deltas of my eyes

flowing like some soft-spoken waterclock into the abyss.

I sink and rise like the tides of a bell on a shipwreck,

despite myself, and sing out like a pearldiver

that drowned on the moon trying to open its shell,

all’s well, not, hell, maybe heaven, but only for awhile.

I beat myself up like a pinata of the heart

to be a righteous gift at a poor kid’s birthday party,

but I always feel deluded by the sacrifices I have to make

to transform the dupe of my morals into the sacred clowns

of the high ideals that have been making a fool of me

most of my life. Nobody trusts anyone anymore

if they can’t discern a reason for why you’re good to them.

Sad embassies on the moon waiting for a terrorist attack.

Whether you pour an ocean of compassion

into a teacup with a crack in it that’s as seismic

as the one in your crystal skull, or measure it out

drop by drop like some kind of Chinese water-torture,

even if your right hand gets caught spying on

what you’re doing with the left, things ebb and neap

like tidal shadows in the Sea of Tranquillity

where emptiness is always full, and maybe,

we’ll prove most useful when we’re not even here.

Not indifference square in the middle of things,

ignorant of its embittered self satisfaction

trivializing the aesthetics of its own solitude

by carrying the angry placard of a wallflower

in a protest parade that reads, I don’t care,

though it’s never true. When you most expect it to be.

Like a silent majority looking into their cellphones

like the third eye of God making collective decisions

for the mob that’s itching like the internet to flex its authority.

You can say you’re committed to a cause

you’re life’s been a long preparation to die for,

but the greater discipline is enduring the agony

of living it as if it were something beautiful

forever passing away. Like night on the face

of someone you love when you’re not trying to possess it

like a starmap on the black market to happiness.

Or the solitude that binds your quantumly entangled vines

to the wine in the eyes of an opposite,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

flesh of your flesh like the shadow you cast

in the form of the other as if it were a mask

with the eyes missing to see deeply

into the dark waters of the mystery of life

that sight is the kind of love that includes

the absence of itself like an old moon

that once knew what it was like to hold

and let go of the new moon in its arms.

PATRICK WHITE

MY LIFE AND WORK

MY LIFE AND WORK

My life and work as much the oeuvre

of all the poems I didn’t write as those

that made an impression upon my voice

like the Burgess Shales, a firefly

flowering on the wind from a seed,

the lapwing of a gate on one hinge

someone left open years ago for me

to walk through now into the high fields

between the lyrical vetch in the grass

and the picture-music of the stars.

Myriads of simple things I never

laboured at nor mastered like how

to treat my heartwood like a real craftsman

instead of rooting it in a long line of beginnings

on a clear cut slope of a mountain like a tree

or a nightstream that just got on with me

like a leaf drifting on my own mind

as if the point of every wavelength of the journey

were the going and the going were the destination

I arrived and departed from every instant of my life.

If I’ve had to live at times like a black hole

in absolute stillness like the pupil of an eye

or a trap door spider that locked itself out,

how else could I have come to understand

that isolation and darkness are two jewels

of an underworld where the dead are full of surprises

like the urns of angels with a message of ashes

that heralds the demonic like an aniconic oracle

of the new moon that resides in each of us

like the tooth of a dragon we’ve sown at first crescent?

Never felt the need to make a dolmen out of it

and hang it around my neck like a talisman

I could shapeshift with my fingers when I was

scared and alone in a house of life that was built

from the ceiling down with somebody else’s hands.

A tent’s always seemed a more habitable planet to me

than cement. The deportable thresholds of the homeless

more a passport to the promise land,

than the forged documents of a denatured citizen

who alienates his own humanity to belong

to the effluvial detritus of whatever’s left

as if an atlas were anymore real than a colouring book.

Getting mad. No. Not Now. Won’t do. Won’t do.

This is one of my more abstruse meditative moods.

I want to stay clear, peaceful. Like a mud puddle

enraptured by the serenity of the stars that bloom

like waterlilies in the eyes of fractured mirrors

without getting lost in the distances between us

like a lifeboat too far from the hill in the fog

to hear anyone calling as if they were desperately praying

are you there, are you there, were you ever there

or are you just another hidden secret that wanted

to be known, and you were, and drowned in your own despair

at the thought of something that couldn’t be undone?

The shadows are getting longer than the things

they represent but never embodied and it makes me

so sad so much has to die unfulfilled because

it never stood up to the light within it

as if there were nothing to be afraid of

or the sunflowers wouldn’t raise their heads

to make eye-contact with the face behind their masks

we all wear as if it were mystically tailored for us.

In the expanding space of an abyss as big as the universe

and yet, somehow, seems dwarfed by the human heart

throwing cornflowers and roses into a grave

because they say better than we do, what must remain

unsayable to us though it’s well understood

what a flashbulb our time is here on earth

standing on the red carpet of the bloodstream

that’s been rolled out for us like a poppy in a dream,

what strange music arises out of the heart

when it learns to cherish the things that life

no less than death, is indifferent to. As long

as there’s a space for one drop of compassion

in your art, even a genius far greater by comparison

will seem like a fool beside you as the entire universe

fits you like a skin it’s growing out of like an eye

about to break into tears when you’re mourning

for the world like a homesick farewell. And autumn comes.

The thief leaves the moon in the window

as he usually does, and love, hang on to love

as long as you can, and when it’s gone

so deep inside you like a waterbird disappearing

into the twilight, try to remember we’re

a vaporous kind of sentience, evanescently aware

we’re pilgrims of fire on a long road of smoke

to the shrines of the stars to perfect our solitude.

Don’t try to climb your burning ladders

like a snake of scarlet runners up to heaven

just stretch your wings out and try to ride

the thermals of serpent fire at the base of your spine

like the cinder of a red-tailed hawk in the third eye

of the sun, or a dragon, if you want to have some real fun.

Don’t try to turn back the helical lifespans

of the waterclocks. The shadows of time

are softened by the patina of the moon on our eyelids.

The peaks and the valleys of anyone’s life

eventually fall into each other’s empty arms

like quantumly entangled annihilations of place and time,

bright vacancy, dark abundance, the two become one

and the one, well, you’ve got eyes, see for yourself.

PATRICK WHITE