I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say

everything there is to say, one heart to another.

I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.

Write it in blood and honey and snow.

Write it in moonlight on the water,

in the sands of sidereal deserts

where the wind doesn’t sing

as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness

when you’re on hallowed ground and those

who are scared to death of what it all means

and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,

give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo

to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth

to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said

imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination

and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.

And that’s the way space gets bent

like the nightsky of my third eye

whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon

that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers

to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.

Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.

A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull

that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music

you like and if he were ever called upon

to go down into hell again before your eyes

got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,

I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp

for someone like you to follow me up out of death

without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion

that has made us both feel at times,

like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly

preserve our bones, if nothing else, so

the future can tell by the fang marks

what pierced us through the heart

like crescent moons into voodoo,

baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs

so we both look like we’ve been carved on

like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus

You can weave a wavelength into

a beautifully disciplined flying carpet

and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine

on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton

that thirsts for wine from your heart well.

I may be the inspired in this, but you’re

the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,

a shape of space that teaches matter how to move

in orbit around you, even from this distance

where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries

to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one

and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face

toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion

for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,

but life always comes like a vestal virgin

or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,

who knows what they’ve seen in their time,

but whatever it was, or is, or will be,

they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see

the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.

Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light

as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky

and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through

like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower

in my field of view for light years that have left

the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,

one warm breath, and I begin to melt

like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.

The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells

of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes

when I began to believe they were seeing things

from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.

Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,

even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,

and if I’m not weeding the constellations

in secret gardens where the gates open

at the same time as these flowers in my eyes

it’s just because of the way I can empathize

with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,

show some timely respect for the pariahs

burning at the same stake that I am for flaws

I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night

casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow

and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child

to the sounds of its own silence

when it thinks no one is watching.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,

poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,

a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,

caught in the updraft of a momentary insight

of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,

and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,

red shift through red, orange, yellow, green

from the outside in toward the trunk, same

as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.

Same as the fires of life returning to the root.

Same as the starmaps of the visionaries

flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.

Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,

or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,

the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver

slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,

a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot

and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping

of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord

at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence

of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins

of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.

But to judge from the windfalls of green planets

shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream

that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse

waking up in a place like here, and a time like now

with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself

as if appearance weren’t just the rind

that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell

of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds

the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions

that have naturally outgrown themselves,

the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky

leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock

tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns

like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream

like a circular waterclock making linear time

take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence

that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life

into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought

and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,

the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap

between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection

on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing

its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream

you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,

though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling

like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead

of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow

by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo

like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light

for the dark abundance of the new insight

into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming

when everything is burning like the sumac

with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.

Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.

And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring

as this new day dances as readily with the old woman

watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,

than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean

swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing

with its river reeds like a lonely child

in the embrace of her imagination,

like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom

flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness

without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses

bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore

being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen

and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring

like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead

taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,

and the lowest of earthbound snakes

are dreaming of feathering their scales

into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars

around the wobbling axis of the earth

on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud

that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE