THE JOURNEY ITSELF

THE JOURNEY ITSELF

The journey itself changes the nature of the destination

until it is so unrecognizable that the notion

of ever arriving is as absurd as waiting for a star

to catch up to its own light. Poetry’s like that,

and love no less than life: Transmute the wayfarer!

Transmute the wayfarer! If you want to preserve

the remains. I’m led astray by where I’m going.

I don’t linger at the gates of my own unknowing.

I don’t read starmaps backwards in the mirror.

The orphanage isn’t homeless. The lost and found

isn’t waiting to be discovered. My madness

never greets me like a visiting hour at the asylum.

I send my prophetic skull on ahead of me

like a time capsule into the history of tomorrow

and the future remembers me oracularly as a sign

anything can happen retroactively you didn’t see coming.

Lost in a labyrinth of eyeless windows, the town

sleeps on the nightwatch. The silence purrs

with the white noise of somnambulant machinery.

I never listen to here as if it were the echo

of other places I’ve been. The train whistle mourns

like a ship at sea. Nothing quite so abjectly homeless

as a threshold with a return address. Better

to sleep on the wrong side of the tracks than

lie down with the suicides like a ladder that had given up

not realizing life’s a two way street, one rung east,

a crosswalk west of here, a burning crutch closer to heaven

than shakey Jacob on a three-legged footstool.

There’s no snakey paradise up the sleeves of my pyres,

no burning doves in the urns of my ashes in hell.

I don’t worship in the shrines of their reciprocal fires.

I don’t sing springtime carillons of wild columbine

to a dying funeral bell in winter whether it’s sempiternal

or not. I might light a few candles now and again

but I never extinguish their wicks in my tears

like the pilot lights of burnt out dragons in pain.

Whatever mirrors I might break like plagiarists

of the way I see myself when I reflect on the lack of one

I can trust, I don’t put brand name constellations

on fake creation myths that compromise my starmud

When I go down in flames, I never expect

the sunflowers to bloom at midnight, or noon

to throw a bouquet of shadows it cut from its own garden

into my grave as I’m lowered into my coffin

like the lifeboat of a meteor impact on the moon

into a sea as tranquil and surreal as it is inarticulately alone.

PATRICK WHITE

LIE TO ME, IF YOU MUST, I'LL BE YOUR CULT OF ONE

LIE TO ME, IF YOU MUST, I’ll BE YOUR CULT OF ONE

Lie to me, if you must, I’ll be your cult of one.

If there’s a darkness you want to lead me into,

a coven of night, a blackhole where you hide your light,

I’ll be Arcturus in the crowns of the black walnut trees.

I’ll follow you down into the underworld, a gibbering shade,

And I won’t look back, I won’t loop retrograde

when you overtake me like a planet on the inside track.

Draw me a starmap. I’ll be whatever configurations of shining

you want me to be, the bestiary of a different kind of zodiac,

and you be the black I’m embedded in and let death

assess the value of the jewels of insight I bring you

like the bituminous eyes of all the snowmen I’ve ever been

intensified into diamonds that will thaw whenever you weep

for reasons you can tell me or not as you please.

Talk to me in your sleep, or write a note for me when you wake

and I’ll hang on every word like a waterdrop

on a blade of blossoming stargrass, or a poet

with his head in a noose hanging like a pendant from your neck

and I promise never to reproach your silence

like a misdiagnosed disease suffering the symptoms of a cure.

I’ll be your dirty old man and you can pretend

you’re the pure embodiment of lust in a nun’s habit,

and I’ll keep my word to the blood oaths and vows,

taboos and alibis we make for the both of us

like the sword that lies between us like the hour hand

of an alarm clock with a snooze button

like a dozy nightwatchman that looks the other way

whenever you want to avail yourself of a pagan afterlife

in a goose-down duvet. Tell me who you dream of being

and I’ll get behind you like a mirror of your shadow

and I swear I’ll never blind you with my blazing

like the legends of the false dawns I once aspired to,

a mirage that wept real tears witching for water,

the ghost of a dolphin in an ocean of maritime stars.

I won’t ask you to enter my solitude without

a wet suit on, or immediate access to a space-station,

or explain my crazy-wisdom to us both as if

you had an anti-venom you milked from the fangs

of the moon that could heal the blessings

of my snake-bit prophetic skull like the eyes

of the dice I roll like the unlucky bones of the skeletal key

that keeps a lock on my heart like the pit of an apricot

until some muse of the autumn lifts my spirit

like a curfew in a half-way house for recovering poets

and there are more unrehabilitated exits in the freedom of my art

than farewells in the tone of the doorbells at the entrance.

PATRICK WHITE