I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

DREAMING STRANGE

DREAMING STRANGE

Dreaming strange on a mattress of snakes

slowing down in the early autumn

like the hour hands of cold-blooded clocks.

They’re winching yachts out of the water

like sharks at Rideau Ferry Dock.

“Winter is icummen in, icummen in”

as life braces to take a bath in its own grave,

but nothing, I mean nothing matters

very much right now to the crickets and frogs

mesmerized by Indian summer into

an encore of white noise in the unleafing woods

and the whole town doped out on opioids

like a clean needle exchange for sunbeams.

No one’s wearing their flying carpet out

under the window quite yet, though it’s hard

not to be reminded of what’s icummen in

when the blueberries have the same look

in their eyes as roadkill and just because

time stops to admire its own reflection

doesn’t mean it’s forgiven us for wasting it

on the trivial pursuits of our own survival.

The moment shapeshifts and I change with it

not knowing whether it’s dusk or dawn,

if it’s time to go to ground or pull up stakes

like the heretical scarlet runners and sunflowers

that flamed out like pilot lights with big dreams

of setting the world on fire with seeds and beans.

How odd that passions I was ready

to commit suicide or die for yesterday

have faded like the watercolours of the falling leaves

or old, grey barnboards, warped by the sun

and the rain, pulling the nails out

of their stigmatized crossbeams with their teeth

and spitting them on the ground like pine-needles

or Androcles and the lion. A cedar rail fence

on the south side of an unrocked field

with nothing to keep in or out anymore

since the last cow was trucked off to auction.

The Indian paintbrushes are matchbooks in ashes.

The rosaries of the Canada geese leaving

at midnight like tenants sneaking out on the rent

are birds on the jinx of a prayerwheel

heading home like white-collared Jesuits to France

leaving the pagans to their own resources,

dancing around the firepits of the spirits

they return to like default salvations

that will get them through the winter

like ten cubic cords of hardwood and a moose

in the freezer like a baby mammoth in an ice-age.

I’m trying to grow old elegantly like a sunset

the fighter pilots at Trenton would want to spray bomb

with contrails, or a troubled soul might want

to disappear into like the denouement

of a long road around the knots in its heartwood

obstructing the flow of the grain from finding

the dynamic equilibrium of its own level at rest,

be it among the dark roots of things, or leaves

burning on the water of the lake as the stars emerge.

Not for fame or to embroider the descending drapery

of the dream to fool the last act of the play

into thinking it’s forever spring. Not for the laurels

I’m just as happy to have fall from the brick walls

they cling to like ivy after the burning of the books.

Not believing the night is a reward I’m entitled to

for anything I deserve or have earned,

or might haven fallen to earth like a windfall

of wild apple trees with no effort on my part,

but simply to honour the anonymous starmud

that rooted Venus in my eyes like the fire of love

on the green bough of the morning, and in the evening,

approaching me now, like a doorway that’s

opening before me, just as incomprehensively beautiful

through the dead branches still blossoming and bearing

behind the abandoned farmhouse the ghosts

of the previous tenants beside the Jerusalem artichokes left

like the sign of an afterlife that would go on thriving without them.

PATRICK WHITE