BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started.

Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart

and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if

liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate

the next best thing, escape. Get out of here.

Isn’t there enough open space within

to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds?

Or has your mind become the slumlord

of a run-down tenement you converted

from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone

in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon

before you bled out like a wounded fish

in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided

like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world,

everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw.

Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish

washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness

like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps

of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too.

Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows

of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world,

or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk

as if someone had just confiscated your cash register

like an officious autumn in the Adirondaks. Or a tax

on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life

from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku,

or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind,

making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock

that knows it’s never going to turn out of time.

Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed

like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising

toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction,

indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair,

desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one

ever being there to show you how to empassion

your wonder into an insight humbled by awe

at the mystery and magnificence being here at all.

Madmen punching holes in the ozone

like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe

calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic.

Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors.

Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance

among the living and through perception

change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars

like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids

of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull

to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even

the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore.

Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods

and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window.

What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes

and let them blunt their noses like sparrows

on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells?

You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate

a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano

and hope the poppies and wheat that are left

of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better

where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come

of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids

of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery?

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE