NOT LESS THAN THE SUM OF ALL MY YESTERDAYS

NOT LESS THAN THE SUM OF ALL MY YESTERDAYS

Not less than the sum of all my yesterdays

this now without origin or end as the stars

turn from summer to fall and the lake

is all farewells, herons, geese, Aquila

and the Swan, in the sad demotic of waterbirds

that echo among the hills as if a ghost

were crying somewhere among the shedding trees.

And I don’t know if it’s just me, or time,

or the gene of an ancient sorrow that hasn’t

been named yet, or the eerie coiling and uncoiling

of the low lying fog chilling the air

with spectral possibilities of seeing something

when you’re not supposed to be there,

like a child sharing a bedroom at night

with her own imagination after the door’s closed

and the lights go out, and the darkness

has been smudged by wishful dreams,

and the moon is huge and bright behind

the glowing curtains like a veil on a face

with an unbearable smile she dare not open,

but the waters of life have grown remote

and unfathomable as tears in a strange solitude.

As if the drowned were about to claim the lake

as their own again or a love story that was

still mourning how tragically wrong it all went

a hundred years ago, and would be for the rest

of its unexplainable afterlife, suddenly revealed

how shockingly beautiful she had been

in a frock of homespun moonlight and bare feet

sitting on a rock watching the waterlilies gather

like soft, evocative candles around her as she

slipped as easily as an otter under the waves

to become as sacred to them as she had been to him.

As a great, vast open silence holds a finger to my lips

and says, hush, human, her absence is not

a negative space that can be embraced

by shading in the background with broken mirrors.

Years haved passed and the water still cherishes

the memory of the wound she entrusted to it.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANT TO WRITE

I want to write something that will impress you, 

a blue virgin with a silo of hand-picked stars

for a heart that we might begin with,

the soiled velvet of my collapsed parachute

that came down like the night over everything,

the miscreant sky of an ancient descent

that keeps snuffing the candle of blood

I keep using to draft poems on the mirror

that suggests an emergency of fire and ink.

I want to write something like a pulse

that doesn’t belong to anything in existence,

the mythic inflation and collapse

of a sail or a lung or a womb

that might engender something extraordinary

among the plaster cherubs

and efflorescent gargoyles of this abandoned theater

that no longer stages the improvised encounters

of the demons or the angels,

whose silence is the salted earth of a city

that traded its wilderness in

for a cemetery of clowns and scarecrows

and traffic jam of golden crutches. I refer,

of course, to the plastic bag

someone put over the mouth of my longing

and the cyanotic agony of trying to breathe freely

under the asphyxiating skin of the sky

that adheres to my eyes and voice like dew.

I want to write something fine and wild and exalted,

and enlighten the hinges of a vastly open door

with the raw ore of my meticulous urgencies.

Supple and eloquent, a sapphire river

flowing effortlessly through the night,

a rose of fire ashing on its own roots,

tendering its green thorns

like the fangs of an innocent moon,

I want to wash off the mud of the road with stars

that only bloom for those with the eyes to be them,

and throwing off the yoke

of all these sad windows

I collect like dogtags and discount coupons

of spiritual junkmail,

plough the moon with my tongue

and in a whisper of opening eyelids

weep like a silver tree

for the beauty of the dark-side jewels

that water my roots.

You must be in bed by now;

you must be mourning your lost lover,

lamenting the blizzard of ghosts

that coats your heart in the burlap and chainmail

of another winter that must be borne on your knees.

May I hover, may I linger,

may I spectrally request an audience,

pour this star-flavoured darkness into your ear,

can I be free without intruding

and rattle this chandelier of dragon tears

like a spell across your last shadow?

I want to astound you with the risks I take,

walking on my hands down this guitar string

keyed to the gaping annuity of the abyss;

I want to shed my skin

and stretch it like a playbill

over last year’s cancelled play;

and write you certified cheques

on the petals of luxuriant flowers

for exotic causes

only the homeless clouds could believe in.

And I don’t want to be loved for who I am,

I want to be loved for what I do;

as the wind is loved in its passing

for clarifying the sky like a rag of air,

for winnowing the grain from the chaff

after the threshing of the harvests of the dead

into feathers, waves and leaves,

for the muffled thunder of cannons and apples

going off in the distance

like a holy war of one

trying to overcome its own stratagems.

I don’t want to swing the planet like a wrecking ball

against the condemned tenements

that sweat from the pores of a selfish mirror,

and bury the poor in doorways

that exhale the nocturnal vapours of the hopeless

who rummage through hand-me-down poppies

for an affordable dream that might fit.

I only want to wear you once

in a mansion of water and moonlight

like a nakedness of space and cherries

I can’t take off,

and from the orchard of these black blossoms

that scatter like heretical doves from a fire,

this migration of the white phoenix

to a burning branch in a combustible solitude

that roots its holiest ladders

in the ashes of its own blazing divestment,

offer you the fruit of the crazy wisdom

of the fool who drinks from my eyes

as if the grail of this all night feeling

were a bar that never closed.

PATRICK WHITE