A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A GOOD DAY AND NIGHT ON EARTH FOR ME WOULD BE

A good day and night on earth for me would be

hurling paint at an eight by four foot canvas

propped up on a rusty hay rake for an easel

on top of a hill by the soft basswood trees in late September.

A thin thread of blue smoke rising from the farmhouse

down below, somebody home and a satisfied ghost,

rising idly like a spirit from the heartwood of a log

of two year old maple I cut and split and stacked myself,

ten cubic cords of habitable planet to make it through the winter.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

like the early Muslims under Umar ibn al-Khattab’s caliphate,

knowing the angels were going to visit the town

around four in the morning, knowing everyone on earth

were given bread and flowers enough not to go to bed hungry tonight, 

that everyone had something they wanted to get up for in the morning

that made it easy and exhilarating to be alive, wild asters

saturated with sunlight and the humming of clumsy honey bees

just below the window apprenticed to a telescope.

Short focal length, Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector

on an equatorial mount with a clock drive synchronized

to the wheeling of the earth like a moonrise in Virgo.

A good day and night on earth for me wouldn’t be

knowing I was loved, but looking back over the tree rings

in my heart like the history of rain that left its mark on me

like every woman I’ve ever loved, sad, mad, bad, beatific

or indifferent to the fact she could make a locust tree bloom

as if it were enraptured by its own crucifixion, the crowns

and stigmata of the thorns it wore with prophetic distinction

like the first heretic ever burned by the new moon

who could taste the mystery of life in the ashes on his lips

when she kissed him one last time, and to steal a line

from Jim Morrison, turned his blood to mystic-heated wine.

Not to assess how well I was loved, but to feel extinct

knowing I gave everything I had to love and still fear

it wasn’t enough. It’s an indelibly memorable mode of madness

I may have fallen into like a habit that stuck like the La Brea Tarpit

somewhere along my antediluvian way, but I hold

the onceness of forever as lovers step away from each other

like an abyss on the downside of a dangerous precipice

up to my jugular vein a razorblade away from where Allah says

he is when I have no reason to disbelieve him. Love

is a sword dance with a waterclock in three four time so

a good day and night on earth for me would be

out walking with the stars alone through the high summer fields

quilted by wildflowers as the moon came up like a water-gilder

and breathed a skin of gold around every one of the tears

they’ve ever shed in joy when some cosmic egg cracked

like a koan in a dragon’s jaw and they were set free

like a winged horse beside Aquila and Cygnus to ride

their own eyebeams in the free range of the sky anywhere they liked,

when the wind throws off its chains like the rain

and I feel forgiven like a starmap for the times

they stubbed their hearts on my life like an asteroid belt

they couldn’t see in the dark on their way to the black market

of a species exchange on earth for something completely different.

A good day and night on earth for me would be

advancing backwards through all the stations of my childhood

and father myself like the man I always wanted to be

like some kind of playful wizard who knew he was

a great fool to squander his life on joy, but knew how

to stop the bleeding in a boy by uncuffing his life from a bike chain

or at least, when the lifeboat goes down, keep him

from feeling like salvage that should have stayed aboard to bail.

I want to mend that wound in every adolescent heart with gold

like the midnight sun smiling on good starwheat in the siloes

of a radiant end to a dark start. That what I sow outlives me well.

Like morning glory in the lobby of the Hollyhock Hotel.

If it were a good day and night on earth for me, it would

have to be for everyone else as well. I’d have to see

the homeless wearing new thresholds on their feet

that welcomed them at the door like prodigal sons and daughters

that didn’t want a black sheep slaughtered in their honour,

and every young girl weeping in the corner of a restaurant

right now so her friends don’t see her nursing a broken heart

like a voodoo doll gored on the horns of a heavy curse

might rise from her gloom like the moon-rise

of a Minoan bull leaper vaulting through the crescents

of her dilemma and landing on her own two feet on the other side.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

TIME GRIEVES IN ME, AUTUMN IN THE APPLE

Time grieves in me, autumn in the apple.

Warm sugars in the dusk, my body mourns

the flowering farewells of what has passed,

the eerie twilight smiles of ghosts at the gate

I haven’t seen in lightyears, heraldic seabirds

this far off the coast of an approaching landfall

where I’ll step out of the lifeboat claiming

nothing in the name of anyone who doesn’t

already live there like the private diary of a sundial,

whether they cast a shadow or not, or time

loses its sense of direction in eternity between

one thought-moment and the next, and the waterclock

I was will say out of what I remember of being human,

no destination, you’re free to drift as you wish.

Or if the arrows’s broken for good, the weathervane

doesn’t crow anymore like a cast iron rooster

in a dawn that doesn’t distinguish its voice

from the silence of the darkness that absorbs it

like the white noise of the mute and the dumb

as back up singers to the background cosmic hiss,

let space do the flowing as a change of pace.

Sit on your hands. Unborn. Unperishing.

Embrace your own stillness like a starmap

making plans not to do anything more for the night,

knowing space is as important as timing used to be

to content, when you were all creation myth

in the beginning, and untimely allegory of perishing

at the end. And the young? How you baffled them

lingering in the doorway of an abandoned house of life

they ran to for sanctuary like an old man with nothing

but room on his hands. Be a sea to the waterbirds.

Be a sky to the stars. Death the measure

of how far we’ve walked together without ever

coming to a fork in the roads where we parted company

and birth, the second innocence of the return journey,

better than the first, because, like the flowers of earth,

didn’t we always cherish those most that bloom last?

Oceans ago. When we took the height of starfish

to know how far we’d sunk, and plumbed the eyes

of blackholes with galactic irises for haloes

to determine how long it would take for a shipwreck

to rise again on the event horizon of our next port of call.

Black sail, white sail, same photograph

flying the colours of a country not our own.

Cool bliss I’m beginning to trust, and lust,

God bless lust, taking its time like a slow cologne,

savouring what it used to gulp as if it were

trying to make an ice-cream cone last. Self-sufficiently

mad enough to be gainfully-unemployed finishing

the long labour of destroying my life creatively

I’ll go down into the underworld with my tortoise-shell

abalone Chinese voice-box within a voice-box,

that’s saved every echo of the sirens and muses I’ve ever listened to,

and death or no death, I won’t waste my futility on

trying to make sense of it all, crying over

the vaporous nature of tears. Death is no business

of mine. And life’s a long holiday I took in the flesh.

But I’ll ask her to come with me just the same.

She’ll look back on everything and her hand

will slip from mine like a loveletter of lifelines

out an envelope that hasn’t got anything

to look forward to but what’s been left behind

like a name traced in an afterthought of dust

on a windowsill, an old threshold of seeing

like a bird with a message, a star, a housefly,

the tuning fork of a mosquito, a lightning strike,

a firefly, the wind before a veil of rain, a firefly

that looked down upon the rooftops of a small town

with tears in its eyes for what transpires here,

and a telescope with a hand-painted lens of what it wants to see

when the mirages I crossed starless deserts for

are too near, far too near to my heart to be believed.

Never tell anybody the truth about the causes

and conditions of suffering, and love that asserts

it doesn’t have any, unless there’s enough

mercy in your heart to remember that we

are all humans, expressions, not definitions of ourselves.

But I’ll praise her in such sad, hermetic songs

the great secret of love and life and art

can’t help but speak for itself through her eyes alone,

neither true to the sunset she shines in, nor

false, when she rises before it, to the dawn.

PATRICK WHITE