NEVER ANY FURTHER AWAY

Never any further away

than the return address

of the stranger in the doorway

who showed you his passport

like a farewell kiss.

Never any further away

than a gust of stars

kicking up its heels

on The Road of Ghosts.

As close as an open window

can be to the sky

as the night can be to a firefly

never any further away

than water is from wine

than the heart is from mind

space from time

I shall be here

like an emergency atmosphere

when things get so rare

you can’t breathe.

When you can’t find a spare room

in any of the houses of the zodiac

and the work horses are getting too high

to pay the rent.

Call on me

and I’ll be your tent.

When your welcome’s been worn out

like a doormat

on the threshold of a black hole

I’ll stop by

and pick you up like a flying carpet.

Never any further away

than this is from that

than arrival is from departure

than the beginning is from the end

when love strikes you in the heel

instead of the heart

I’ll grab my longbow

and fletched arrow

and show up like Robin Hood

and put your last archer to shame

like a seasoned champion

who knows better

than to aim a loveletter

at the moving target of a lover

without giving her a lead

that can’t be judged by satellites.

Never any further away

than laughter is from your tears

when your spirit’s gasping for light

like a candle at a black mass

and the darkness is weighing you down

a vision of burning doves

will bring me wind of this in a dream

and I’ll wake up

and be your sacred clown.

Never any further away

than a curse is from a blessing

than a secret is from guessing

when the immensity of intense events

makes your planet start to disintegrate

I’ll make up for the loss of your black sheep

with a flock of shepherd moons

that will run tree rings around Saturn

and we’ll walk awhile together again

hand in hand

like psalms through the valley of death.

If you were to fall in love with an exorcist

and he dispossessed you of your past

I’d be the one demon

left standing beside you at last

with a renewable franchise

and an infernal sense of loyalty to your soul.

I wouldn’t let the fire go out in your lamp.

We’d jump toward paradise

and I’d show you how an angel

wins her wings

all the way down.

Never any further away

than I am to you on this day

whether the darkness has flashy eyes

or stares back at you bleak and starless

I shall always be the hidden nightbird

in the moonlit birch groves

whose unanswerable longing

rises from the depths of its solitude

to remind you

that not two

is the oldest lyric of the heart.

That what the light can’t say about love

the darkness will impart.

Never any further away

than your voice is from this echo

of things that were once said

in sadness and bliss

in tenderness and despair

in madness and compassion

never any further away

than a heretic is from the fire

than the truth is from a liar

than consummation is from desire

than the moon is from its lunatic

I shall always be there in your corner

never any further away

than music is from an unused guitar

happy if you remember once in a while

some old song from the sixties

with tears in its eyes

waiting for you to pick it up and play.

And if you should ever wonder

how the tiniest whisper of love

can be heard over

the thunderous commotion of the world

how one lone star

can mean more to your eyes

than all the lights of an all-night city

don’t ask the starmaps

to look it up for you

like seeing-eye dogs for the blind.

Walk up to the high field with the broken gate

before the dew is on the flowers and the grass

where we used to lie down together

in the unmade deer beds

and breath in the inviolate luminosity of the silence

until our lungs were full of light.

And take the whole view in

from horizon to horizon

from the nadir to the zenith

from the impersonal depths of space

to the more intimate urgency of the stars

that knew you before you were born

all that vastness

all that shining

all those root-fires

that have been burning

like the eternal flames of time

just to keep the mystery of the inconceivable

in all its indefineable specifics

alive and beautiful

and just as unbelievable to the stars

that see you with the same eye

through which you see all of them

never any further away

than the simple from the sublime

than the many from the one

than the sun is from the earth

when the distance isn’t measured in miles

but years and years and years of flowers

never any further away

than delusion is from enlightenment

than before is from after

than the message is from the sign

than life is from art

than the cosmos is from chaos

than the thorn is from the rose

than dark abundance is

from bright vacancy

than a wave is from the sea

than the incomprehensible is

from the abounding clarity

of the teacherless crazy wisdom of the mind.

And do you see?

Is it clear

even through a glass darkly

or under a blaze of chandeliers

you hold it all

the moon the planets the stars

all those reciprocal distances

all those astounding solitudes

that convince us we’re alone together here

with everything and everyone forever

here in this inexhaustible place

that holds the whole of the heavens

in every single drop of water

that gathers its translucency

like an eye of ripe fruit

at the end of a branch for awhile

and sweet enough for the angels

to fall in love with the daughters of earth

lets go to bring them closer to tears

than they’ve ever been before?

Never any further away

than now is from yesterday or tomorrow

or spring is from an aging sorrow

that wants to die young.

Never any further away

than good-bye is from the inseparable

I could no more be parted from you

than I could pour

the universe out of the universe

and expect to empty the cup.

It’s that way with all things.

There’s a million ways in

but there’s no way out again.

Never any further away

than a quick watercolour

of a double rainbow

caught crying in the rain

than the herb is from the pain

than a name is

from the anonymity of love

than the homeless are from a threshold

than the abandoned are

from the searchlights

of a cosmic lost and found

can mingled waters ever be unbound.

When one heart knows

the ways of another

like a fountain knows a well

one might be the flower

and the other

the root of inspiration.

One looks up to see the stars

and the other looks down.

And sometimes love might feel

that nothing is revealed

under the endless veils

and waves of heat

that offer you nothing but mirages

in the deserts of an hourglass

you can’t drink from

but no further away

than what’s to come is

from what has passed

than the prelude is

from the last word of farewell

no further away than the sky is from a bird

or the sea is from a fish

or a genie from the last wish

he’s about to fulfill

could I ever be from you.

No further away

than the mind is from being

than the heart is from seeing

than an exile is from longing

than a garden is from its gate

than a pariah is from belonging

than a poet is from his muse

than tragedy is from the news

than bliss is from the blues

am I from you.

PATRICK WHITE

FACTS

Facts aren’t about how reality works. They’re about how reality works us like a dream with a telescope. Pursue them immensely or minutely enough and they’ll turn into a phantasmagoria of worlds within worlds. One mile east is one mile west. Think omnidirectionally and you’re in an infinite number of places at once just as easily as you believe if you’re not here you’re not everywhere at the same time. I’m sitting here like a theory of everything within my senses. And yet I’m wandering in the mind-fields beyond the confines of these material fences like a gust of being among the stars as if I were a hybrid of space and time. And it’s strange that I owe as much to the lies that made me go looking for the truth and I do to the truths that all showed me they were just another way of looking at lies. I don’t know why or what or who I am because the questions answer questions with questions. Or as they say in Zen the man planting radishes pointed the way with a radish. And this is as true of a weathervane as it is of a compass or a man sitting in front of a fan on a hot summer night watching fireflies at the window encountering their opposites like anti-matter in tiny annihilations of creative insight with the lifespan of mirrors that disappear into the availability of the seven other dimensions I’m not aware of sitting here with me. Like the thresholds of seven rooms in a house without doors. Shakespeare said by indirections we find directions out. Dead ends turn into thoroughfares. But the opposite is true as well. Ask any arrow. Any atom. Any tree. Any river. Any star. Werner Heisenberg. Or any human. Directions lead to indirections that are just as true as the threads of an unravelled rope or the split hairs of a radioactive isotope of unstable starmud with the half-life of a mind. String theory. M theory. The music of celestial spheres. Hymens in space. Worlds begin with consummations devoutly to be wished. When’s the last time if ever you checked the gender of the universe you’re living in? Are you a cosmophobe in a closet of dark matter or a cosmophilic exhibitionist as promiscuous as light? Or are you trying to extract DNA from the fossil bones of extinct species of telephones without any sexual orientation to speak of? Does the universe seduce you or do you attend upon it like a seance?

Love plus knowledge equals wisdom. When are they going to add a factor of mind to Einstein’s e=mc squared? Noumena are phenomena. There’s no inside or outside or difference. It’s a particle when you observe it. It snakes off like a wave when you don’t. Even at the subatomic level among the wimps and axions and machos you can’t experiment with life. You can only experience it. Tat tvam asi. You are that. Like the great sea of awareness whose emotional life is its weather. Water drowning in water. What’s to fear? Who needs to swim? Unity is an expression of the light world. Not two says it all on the dark side. No need to bring a lifeboat.

Enough. Time to blood the clarity with flesh and bones again. Let the radiance get down and dirty in the starmud. Run the stars through the black hole of a garden hose until they come out the other end through the pores of a galactic sprinkler. Brand invisibilities with words. Study physics in the suburbs. Refuse to be denuded of my humanity by ideologues who wash the blood off their hands with antiseptic concepts. To feel how strange the suchness of a human is when no one’s looking. And how we are not so much the function as an event of awareness that elaborates a universe that keeps expanding to contain what’s missing in it. And who doesn’t want to believe that life is good and generous and just? That there are secret star maps of the mind that are leading us along like buried treasure for the blind when the sun comes up? An image of morning glory. Its flowers as delicate cool and thin as the skin of the moon. I look at the blossoms and see globlets and grails. I see suffering humanity and I want to heal. I want to be beautiful and brave. I want to be the sage-clown that treats wisdom like a laughing matter. I don’t want to live in the shadows of what I feel. I want to release my longing like a homeless night bird that sings to the stars of how lonely and savage the beauty of life is on earth. Until they’re amazed at where they’ve arrived and what they’ve amounted to like grains of sand that have been pearled into moons in the mouth of an oyster. I want to point to a water lily and and look up at the stars and say See? You did it. And it’s wonderful. Here’s what’s come of all those billions of years of shining down upon nothing. The light has turned around and taken root in the ground. And its flowers are loveletters written far from home that use our eyes for a return address.

And maybe it is and is not that way. And there are no more Edens to be driven out of. Or we’re all falling toward paradise hoping we’ve packed our parachute right. Or we’re just a genetic lottery that won ourselves by playing the slots long enough like the dancing masters of random chance. Who is it that asks? Who is it that answers? Here are the facts. Now what is the meaning of this? Do you know? Are you sure the quality of your questions is worthy of their answers? Or do the echoes answer the fools in their own voice? Is there a rat behind the arras in a conspiracy of mirrors?

There’s a drunk teen-ager pissing on the Bank of Nova Scotia across the street.There are two girls unimpressed with how disgusting he is and one who is. She’s being helped by the others into a little grey car. Knee-length cargo pants with competitive running shoes and caps askew I can see something perennially true even in the crudeness and triviality of this. But it’s got nothing to do with the facts. Or the psychology of those small human acts sordid and beatific alike that are spontaneous expressions of the indefinable. And for a moment I know who I am by the way I look upon them. Such as we are you shall be. And I haven’t a clue which of us has the greater claim to pity. The ghost writer that looks down upon them from a window above. Or the forced hilarity of their futile attempts to simulate true rapture in a state of chaos and grace when the body knows more about the improbable possibilities of God than the soul does.

PATRICK WHITE

I WANTED TO SING YOU A LULLABY

I wanted to sing you a lullaby

that would bring tears to the eyes of the stars.

I wanted to write you a creation myth

without any scars.

I wanted to make you a garden

that would give water on the moon

a reason to bloom.

I wanted to part the curtains of rain

on the distant blue hills

and show you again

through a broken windowpane

it’s always been your face behind the veils.

Remember when I used to connect the dots

and make up spontaneous zodiacs

of random fireflies

as if we were reborn

under a different sign

every moment on earth we spent together?

Time held its breath for us awhile

didn’t it?

We aged like astronauts.

And everywhere we stopped to kiss

along the paths that could lead anywhere

we made by walking without a care

for those who are truly religious

we were the direction of prayer.

When I first touched you

I was afraid to bruise the orchid

but after that first night of desire

I knew your body was fire

and I was its unrepentant heretic.

I remember the compassionate lustre

of your soft soft eyes

as if all the sidereal vastness of the universe

took mercy

and shone down on me

to let me know

that it wasn’t necessary

to approach your mystery with a telescope.

Before I met you

I was embalmed in my own birthwaters

like a sea of shadows on the moon.

You unravelled my rivers

and took the loose threads

like stray riffs of hair

and sitting down at the loom

played picture-music with them

late into the early hours of the morning.

And isn’t it strange

how the smallest most inconsequential things of the moment

are charged with a significance they derive

from the beauty of the field they happen in

like the first violins of the crocuses

breaking ground like the Queen of Hearts

on the rebound from her best mistakes

in an old garden bed

that had been left to go it alone with the dead?

You were the watershed.

I was the divining rod.

And between us.

The lightning.

Uprooting our nervous systems like weeds

and planting them on another planet

like the bloodroots of the tree of life with seeds

that opened their eyes like stars

trying to remember what it was they were dreaming

before they woke up at nightfall

and bloomed like street lamps.

Before I ever spoke to you

I used to choose my metaphors

like silver bullets I was loading into a midnight special

that was too afraid

to play Russian roulette with me

for fear of winning the round.

I was masked like the Lone Ranger on location

but on my own in the anywhere zone

of the green room

I was a cross dresser

in the feathers of Tonto.

I was Sitting Bull and the Buddha

enthroned on a lotus

with my crazy legs crossed

at a ghost dance

that summoned the rain like a seance.

And when we cried together

for the way the wind died

in defense of the freedom of the wilderness

our tears were just a way of tempering

the carbon and steel

of the Zen-edged swords

of the Diamond Cutter’s words

that kept things real.

I thought I was darkly enlightened

and had gone gone gone altogether gone beyond

over the event horizons of a black hole

but I can so easily remember that morning

I saw Venus in the dawn

and knew right then and there

that the tree of life

I sat under

waiting for a lightning strike

was neither a cross

nor a stake

and I may have seen the light

in my heart of hearts

but until my pulse

gave up playing the drums

to become a solo vocalist

singing alone like a nightbird

in a dark wood to you

I hadn’t heard the thunder

a feather makes when it falls.

The years go by

like the mirages of a waterclock

trying to make its way to the sea

through a desert in an hourglass

and you can read them

as the brave wavelengths

of a dragon in an urn of ashes

or understand them as I do

as the sacred first and last letters

of the undeciphered text

of birth and death

that is the story of everyone’s lives

once they realize they’re not the Rosetta Stone.

There’s hardly a moment

when a bird doesn’t fly by the window

like some memory of you

before it learned to bear the souls of the dead

like Persian angels

and Ojibway ghosts

after their bones had turned to dust

transmigrating to the dark groves

and threshed fields of the dead

Edens east of here

in the bodies of Canada geese

high overhead after midnight

passing across the treeless expanses of the moon.

Not a moment

when the past doesn’t walk up to me

like a complete stranger

and tell me that I’ve changed.

But it’s ok

it’s ok

and I take time’s word for it that I have

knowing it gives it out like a boomerang

a starfish

a sunflower

a jinxed galaxy

pinwheeling like a prayer wheel through space

and all things will come back to me

like the memory of all my afterlives

in due course.

And all those weather warnings

that have stood by the window ever since

wondering if I could spot you one more time

walking toward me in the rain

as if you were keeping a fire alive in the deluge

like a flightless phoenix that had fallen from its nest

or your Bronze Age auburn hair

no matter how many waterclocks

answered the alarm

refused to go out.

All those jelly fish

and their long painful tendrils

have long ago risen into the stratosphere

like unmanned high altitude helium balloons.

And occasionally when I see

small threads of lightning

receding over the distant hills

I’m tempted to think

whatever flying carpets

we might make of the loose ends

and downed powerlines

of the snakepit

there’s always a snag

a rat behind the arras

or a king with an arrow in his eye

on a tapestry on a castle wall somewhere

that just has to pull one thread

like rip cord on a parachute

to make it all come undone.

Someone blinks.

Someone jumps.

And some come to realize

they never had a heart to begin with.

And for them it’s always recess in the playground.

And for me?

My best feelings just come to me

as you once did

out of the darkness

like fireflies after a storm

trying to guess which stars

belong to which constellations.

I sit on the crest of the hill of my heart

just above the moonlit fog in the valley

and watch them trying to get a fix on themselves

like starmaps and flowers

with the same immaculate sense of timing

that makes sure they don’t all bloom at once.

And I make up myths

according to the seasons

to go along with the shining

so I don’t belittle the night

by looking for reasons

when everywhere

it arrays its hidden jewels before me

like chandeliers of insight

that make me feel like dancing alone with a mirror.

Sometimes I take you in my arms like a telescope

and waltz with you

across the sea floors of the moon

in trines of time that turn and counterturn and stand

like a lense of the waters of life

that opened its third eye

on a equatorial mount with clock drive.

Take the romance out of the radiance

and all your left with is clarity.

Pellucid space.

Eyeless time groping its face in the mirror

as if all its crows’ feet and laugh lines

were an occult form of Braille.

My mother always said

I had the hands of a surgeon

or a classical pianist

when she turned them up like Tarot cards

to true the future

to the lifelines of a few random suggestions.

I play the keyboard and write the lyrics

for a one man band

and I can wield a painting knife

as easily as a scalpel

when I cut into the flesh of Alizarin Red

as if I were doing a heart transplant on the dead.

Some things almost come true

if you don’t look at a disguise

as a death mask of lies

made in the likeness of the truth

like you and I

like the eyes I saw in a dream once

peering through a mask of reality

as if they were not estranged

by what they knew of me

and I were not afraid

of being burnt in the fire

as I am now with a smile on my face

in this retroactive future

singing to their memory.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S GETTING EASIER TO DIE

It’s getting easier to die looking at the way the world is. We’ve got this bigger brain pan thanks to evolution but I think we’re just exaggerated chimps. Vicious flea-pickers nibbling on parasites for strength in numbers and the security of a small place under the table like a missing link in the food chain we call love. Even absurdity has lost its pebble like a misshapen asteroid trying to bring something to life by making a big impact on the dinosaurs of Yucatan. Panspermia. Martian meteors like spare kissing stones lying in the snow of Antarctica waiting to be cubed like the Kaaba into the continental skullcap of a new religion. Someone told me we were an intelligent species once and that knowledge opens doors. No one can argue with a heart transplant but knowledge looks more and more like a doorman at the shrine of ignorance selling doves on the sly to the unholiest of holies climbing on its knees up the stairs where it throws its crutches away like the election promises of born again politicians on their way to Damascus in sunglasses. Even to say the words noble aspiration is to invite the sneers of a lobby group of crows. How many cosmic eggs do you need to see smashed on the rocks at the foot of the tree in spring before you get the idea that death is a way of life down here where the wind rocks the cradle and the babies fall to their deaths like Siberian shamans. How many turtles have made it all the way to adulthood like children running for cover in the high tides of providence in a Pearl Harbour of gulls without ever having heard a lullaby from their mothers’ mouths? The aesthetics of desecration have salted the roots of art. Morality is a game of snakes and ladders. Politics is a card shark playing strip poker with the public. Religion is a pervert that lies about the light and denies the existence of the shadows it casts on the spirit even as it scars the children like sexual flagellants for life. Has Jesus really become a blue blood haemophiliac who needs Rasputin to keep him from bleeding to death?

Scotty knocks at the door. He needs a ride out to Watson’s Corners. I need the money but I decline the offer. He checks his facebook page and goes. I commit financial suicide and shake my head like a twist of the knife at how ludicrously demented I am by getting back to this. Baby needs new shoes. And here I am standing like Empedocles on the rim of Aetna getting ready to plunge into the plasmid magma oozing from a wound in my continental drift. But you can’t become a legend without living the farce of creativity as if it were something inconceivable you could believe in because it had nothing to do with you. I raise the skull and crossbones and stand for an anthem of starmud that bleeds out like Van Gogh’s ear or Manet’s matador lying like a dead honeybee in a rose of blood. Ever since the late sixties I’ve been dying of love and compassion and and the aristocratic poverty of poetry as if they were the only local anecdotal antidotes I had left to spit back in the cobra’s eyes. I knick the snake with whipper snippers railroad tracks and razorblades. And the snake spits back like the Taliban or an honour killing by splashing acid in the eyes of an Afghan girl who wants to learn to read or fall in love. I live in a town called Perth not far from Last Duel Park. But I’ve pawned my silver bullet to pay the rent and Zorro isn’t fronting me any more swords like an American foreign policy run by Boeing and Halliburton. I’m a dancing master in a snake pit. I’m down to the last G-string of the spiderweb I’ve strung between the horns of the Lyre of Orpheus like a cosmic dreamcatcher in a nightmare of killer bees and Maenads screaming for my dismemberment like a firestorm of air raid sirens in Dresden where people were twisted into the shapes of Pompeian agony like an Alexandrian library of matchbooks. Inspiration rides the dragon with sidereal spurs of apocalyptic indignation and rage at what is happening to us as human beings at our own hands. Evolution never made these kinds of demands on us to change. To mutate like logos in the corporate genome of Coca Cola imperializing Belize. Eleven dimensions of space and time and one unknown continuum of death. How can love ever hope to penetrate the hareem of hymens in the hyperspace of the multiverse without relying on the cop-out of a virgin birth? Propagation without ecstasy. Sex is food. People are the krill of corporate blue whales breaching like a market. And love is their ambergris. The x-rated vomit of Parisian perfumes. The R-complex at the back of the brain we hold in a commonwealth of carrion like houseflies and crocodiles. We’re still snapping turtles under the carapace of our neo-cortex. Don’t kid yourself. We’re still the same old scum-sucking mud dwellers that littered the bottom with the bones of gutted swans eras ago. Twenty-five million children a year are shovelled into the grave pits of their open mouths still gaping after all these horrifying years at the atrocity of how blithely we let them starve to death while obesity is about to have a heart attack that’s going to feel like the catastrophic revenge of an indigestible planet. Gather ye rosebuds and wealth while ye may. Carpe diem. Seize the day. Because tomorrow’s going to come like the false dawn of an unmarrowed bone through the nose of an unmarried cannibal and grab you by the neck like a drug cartel playing narco music on the Spanish guitar of your jugular vein. Prophetic skulls are dancing themselves to death in violent paroxysms of hydrophobic rabies trying to hold back the rain like sacred clowns in a mirage of nightmarish pain. We’re stinging ourselves to death like scorpions in a ring of fire. We’re playing Russian roulette with lethal interrogatives we raise to our temples like the triggers of crescent moons at the business end of our cul de sacs. Murder like war is a job creation program for the poor to give killing for the rich a purpose in life and a reason to get up in the morning. In the backrooms and dark alleys of a doomed consortium of corporate laybyrinths I’ve learned to whistle Mr. Bluebird’s On My Shoulder like a port-a-pack heat seeking missile and address my peers when I’m on my own as if the third eye of the Wizard of Oz were taking aim through a fully enlightened keyhole at terrorists planting bombs in the Yellow Brick Road. Democracy lands in the Fertile Crescent like the House of the Unrepresentatives of the People on the wicked witch of the east. You can watch her toes curl like fiddleheads and the embryos of oilslicks that will rise up like a snake pit to sink the fangs of the first and last crescents of Ramadan like the Old Man of the Mountain into your throat. Hash. Venom. Assassins in the shadows of your sundials and eclipses like a black snake under the pillow you dream on waiting for the tooth fairy. Radioactive noon at midnight. The human heart too scorched to feel any pity. Calloused hands close the eyes of the dead like can-openers. Magisterial pomp and ceremony attends the trivia of the irrelevant like the paparazzi a golden chariot being driven by a rock and roll sun king with the popularity of a pimp through a slum of infatuated children. Justice upholds the freedom of expression like gun laws in the ghettoes of Philadelphia. Compassion has become the idealistic shill of a faith healer laying his hands on the daughters of his parishioners like the cervical scar tissue of the dilated profit margins that wound the flesh and the spirit like an empty wallet some misguided soul returned in hell.

Night now. Skateboarders outside in the deserted street. No one knows what I do up here but I feel like I’ve been testing lead kites in a wind tunnel all day long. Been working out creatively for a heavy lift. But I’m not sure if I’m strong enough yet. My head is pounding something momentous on the anvil of my heart. Tempering swords in a trough of blood that hisses like the background radiation of the ghost of a cosmic snake. Or a thought train mourning like a funeral procession in the distance. No rain. So the windows are thick with dirt and stars. And the streetlamps are wilting like black-eyed Susans with tungsten petals in the heat. She loves me not she loves me not she loves me not like losing lottery tickets. I’m reaching critical mass like a nuclear reactor that o.d.’d on its own plutonium 239. My eyes glow in the dark but what I see makes me wish I were blind. Something’s tattooing prophetic starmaps on the inside of my eyelids. My brain is shredding secret insights into the conspiratorial nature of the future of life. Putting words in the mouth of the embassy incinerator like apple blossoms and autumn leaves just before the wind leaves town without the orchard. Taking too long to put a little English on the spin of the planet like a cue-ball in the right hand pocket of a black hole. You lose control in the moment if you hesitate. And I can hear some Zen master battering me with my own advice. Stand up. Sit down. Walk left. Walk right. Walk zigzag. Walk straight. But whatever you do don’t wobble. But even if I make the shot. Nobody wins.

It’s getting easier to die when I see how many more innocent there are among the dead than there are among the living. I have a survivor’s guilt. And nowhere to expiate it except on a poem on a painting or the flip side of Patti Smith. I am a Canadian artist. I feel nothing but guilt. And it’s hard not believe sometimes that I’m not already dead and what I’ve been dying and living for all these years is a just this mindless art of the life of the mind. And fifty years of poetry isn’t worth one loaf of bread in the grasp of a starving child. What comes out of the mouth. What goes in. Like ebb and neap tides dragged around by the moon by the hair where they practise rape like a martial art against women in the Congo. In the wars of the Druids it used to be that you could defeat a tribe by learning the secret name of their god. Bran. Or Exxon. For example. But these days they go straight for the genome. And it’s been a struggle even here where you can grow fat on the garbage of Toronto just to survive. I was born under the street. Learned classical Greek. Didn’t want to be victimized by the stereotype of the golden poor boy who got rich to lift his family out of poverty by his bootstraps like the spontaneous creation of the universe and reclaimed his throne from his wicked father as if he’d been raised in secret by a wise old woodsman. And who knows? Maybe I should have tried. But the sixties was firing up and I was going through economic culture shock at a wealthy university in my own hometown. It was my mother who taught me to cry. It was my father who taught me to rage. Fire danced on the water. I was a cool savage in an age of abandonment. I learned to throw stones and thaw like ice at the same time so I didn’t get caught living in a glass house. I hung around a lot of rich kids with long hair who all got shorn like Samson and ended up lawyers in their daddy’s office after they pulled the pillars of the establishment down. So I put down the sword and picked up the pen and in the deafening silence of the afterlife of the party when everyone stopped believing in the music and returned to their senses like the Toronto Stock Exchange thought if I couldn’t do anything else to justify the ambiguous luck of being born into a selectively prosperous country I could write poetry that would scream murder for those who were being killed pre-emptively because they didn’t have a voice of their own. I reconciled poverty guilt rage education inspiration fire water and light in one austere calling too high-minded to call a literary career. I was a prophetic skull in a desert that women like to dance for. I was a poet. I was endowed with a great negative capability for being nothing. I let my identity lapse like a passport. I wiped my face off the mirror with the sleeve of my shirt to see more clearly what I was looking at. The mirrors haven’t heard of me in years. I spent twenty years learning secret tree alphabets in a poetic college on the island of Mona and became a wandering poet scholar. An astronomical priest of sacred clowns who could wander unharmed through the clash of armies through a mystical path in the Blood Red Sea. I studied murder. I studied genocide. I looked at the heaps of spectacles piled in the lost and founds of Auschwitz like the spindly legs and hourglass thoraxes of dead insects in the commercials for Raid. And I felt my way into the camp as close as I could for someone who had not been killed or lived their way through it until I understood that most of the passions of humankind are nothing more than insecticides for butterflies and honey-bees. That angels were crop-dusters and there was DDT and Xyklon B and mustard gas on the apple of knowledge in the garden of Eden long before Eve took a bite out of it. The Holocaust taught me three things. The overwhelming complicity of silence when murder is being done. That humans are the scourge of God when he flagellates himself for their creation by whipping his back with black hydra-headed snakes in jackboots that cock their hats and snap their heels to attention like the triggers of a firing squad trying to shoot the stars out like a disciplined eclipse. That one should never underestimate the great opportunistic potential there is in human suffering. I scream for the bone. I scream for the blood. I scream for the flesh of those who had lovers and children and violins that set the teeth of the windows on edge when they were practising. I scream for the home-made socks on the corpse of the dead child being used as a doorstop to the crematorium. I scream for the button that was torn off the jacket of the boy at the back of the cattle-car and I scream for the needle in fastidiously loving hands that sewed it on and then sewed on a yellow star. I scream for the six pointed. I scream for the eight-pointed star. I scream for Isaac. I scream for Ishmael. I scream for the gypsies the gays the German Christians the Poles the Slavs and the children in line at the foodbank being cowed by charity into licking the boots of the anti-welfare protesters as a way of saying thanks.

Can you hear me where you live? My voice shatters the stars an octave higher than the celestial spheres that crack like wineglasses. I’m flint knapping chandeliers into holy Clovis spears of light and arrowheads I’ve dipped in my blood to make sure the first sword of truth I hang over your head is wounded by my own first. I scream like the scarlet letter on the Whore of Babylon’s forehead. And blood is trickling out of the corners of my eyes at what I see. Something thunderous and heavy-limbed approaches. The fireflies are panicking to get out of the way of the lightning and the ants are amassing in heaps of defunct punctuation marks that can read like pundits the signs of the writing on the wall as if they’d reached the end of the trail.

Drunks smashing whiskey bottles on the street. The violence is too deep in us. The greed. The need. The excruciations of apocalypse will not enlighten us. Release is not liberation. Desecration doesn’t make one worthy of hell. A lightning rod won’t tell you where to dig the well. I’m sick of this. My skull is thick with paleolithic wallpaper I’m trying to compile into a Book of the Dead for casual readers with short life spans. Even madness looks like it’s wearing sensible shoes compared to walking barefoot through the scorched cities of Rumi and Hieronymous Bosch where the black corpses practise the yogic postures of death. We won’t transcend being human by mending being human until our identity is drowned like a torch among stars trying to get a mirage of an insight into what it is we’re seeing when we look back at them. But who am I kidding? Idealism is the footstool of a hanged man. Who takes a match to go looking for a volcano? I scream for the runaway in her chrysalis of shadows in the corners of the doorway across the street trying to snort cocaine from the back of her hand like fairy dust on the pinkest of her dreams. Good night Tinkerbelle. Good night. I scream for Betty who went to nightschool for her affliction and received her degree last night in post-graduate suicide when she finally freed herself from her addiction to addiction and died of an overdose. I scream murder. I scream culpability. I scream for the unphotogenic atrocities of slow human attrition drawing the agony out like junkie Don Quixotes tilting at the windmills of their arms. Or cracking rocks with Sisphyus to roll up the hill in the morning like crumbs of the sun over the whole sapiently forsaken earth. Babies get eaten by pitbulls. The homeless heroes are demonized. Demons are lionized and then sent back to where they came from. Political decisions are passed like hold-up notes to a volunteer teller at a food bank. Stunned. Beaten. Abandoned. Betrayed. Throw a snake into a fire and it just might sprout wings and turn on you like a dragon. Nemetic karma. Dark matter. The spontaneous reversal of spin in a charged particle field. The people are poor. Dispirited. Ravaged by political warlords. The global olegarchs have stolen the moon from their windows like a corporate logo. One lick of jam in the jar. One crust of bread that once modelled for Van Gogh’s painting of his boots. It wasn’t much of a journey if you’re still a traveller at the end of it. The road walks on with or without us. Hurry up. Hurry up. It’s got wings on its heels and an immensely hopeless message that makes a black hole look like an optimist. Deranged gates and bent weathervanes. All the emergency exits blocked by our grand entrance as the most intelligent species to ever fuck up what they were doing on earth. And hell. We’re not even kind or spiritually well mannered. But isn’t it like listening to shadows in the blaze of a Roman triumph? You are mortal. Don’t cradle your reflection on the waters of life like the only survivor in the lifeboat of your hands. From one dazzling extreme to another of eyeless despair. Rage upgrades the contradictions of life and death into dirty mind bombs of anti-matter. Serpentine wavelengths of radioactivity that are as immune to us as we are to their antidote. And even the animals given only four choices to throw their lives in the ring of evolution like shepherd moons around a savage planet. The abbatoir. The black market. The lab. Or the zoo. Gruesome tomorrows where you’ll be investigated for the political nature of your sorrows. Enforced consumerism. Ants and aphids. The scales of justice a spy satellite in the constellation of Libra. Spiritual espionage where your third eye plays all three sides at once. Data is power. And dice are the new currency. The human spirit decultified by pharmaceutical exorcists. The money changers throw Jesus out of the temple along with his doves. Peace will say render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and that which is not. And if you want to follow me. Go your own way. And don’t come back. Hell loses its sting compared to the venom of life on earth. There’s nothing holy enough left to scare anyone with the night sweats unless they’re going through withdrawal. A man of vision is a mugshot of a politician. Mystery. Enigma. Paradox. Oxymoronic ambiguity. The intuitionally unteachable concuspiscence of the inevitable. Irony. Longing. Inspiration. Reason and compassion are all retooled as commercially acceptable mimetic paradigms of behaviour. The one-eyed liar throws his voice like a ventriloquist into the echo chambers of the heart. And the puppet poets design a use for art that no one could have imagined until they were told.

Getting old. Getting easier to die. And the answers to the incomprehensible sublimities of the question why always seem so much tackier than the starless silence of a lost song bird disappearing into the distance as if to fly out of the cage through the night window were to win your wings like a sky that’s always waving good-bye. I’m reminded of Hart Crane jumping off the stern of the Orizaba at high noon in his pyjamas a hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Cuba. And the glee on his face as he drowned. Where the cedar leaf divides the sky I was promised an improved infancy. If you can’t find any use for your life. Live for art. Add your musical note to the choir of celestial spheres like one long scream of a tuning fork that resonates with the times like a lightning strike on a sacred tree. There are more creative ways of waiting for death than standing like an unused shovel in the corner. If you want to be a master grave digger first apprentice yourself to a garden. Then you’ll know what it’s like to feel the roots of life groping through the darkness of their starmud like blind star-nosed moles waiting for their third eye to open. Root fires creep like dirty rumours among the cedars of Lebanon in the valleys of death. I scream for the children who twist in their sleep as if every breath they took were a kite on a lifeline tangled like a sour note in the nervous hymnals of the power lines. Every bird is a whole note. And every sky the sheet music of silence. You can sing like a parakeet or shriek like the ailerons on an eagle dive-bombing a Japanese invasion fleet. You can hum like the drone of the avenging engines of a hive of approaching killer bees. Or you can bite your tongue to see if it’s real gold or not. If the best steel really does go through the forge.

See how the water-lily pads its swamp life with beautiful concessions of enlightenment? It’s rooted in leprosy and rot but can you taste the flavours of the reflections of the stars that are mingled in its mindstream like an empty lifeboat on the moon? You can test the atmosphere for the noxious vapours of decay like air on the tines of the tongue of a rat snake hunting toxic frogs like a radioactive wavelength of water with fangs. And you can have a lightning insight into the double feature of life that turns the lights of the matinee out at noon to foreshadow the horrors of what’s coming to a theatre near you. Cannibal frogs and punctual vipers with lockjaw. Soon. You get the big picture? Clarity is a dream’s worst nightmare. And there are times when all you can do is sit like an insomniac in the middle of a sleepwalking audience and scream like a air raid siren until you’re as hoarse and broken as the wishbone of Orpheus’ lyre when it got stuck in the throat of his prophetic skull bobbing its way like a silver apple of the moon all the way from Thrace to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos with greetings for Sappho and Terpander. Or you can lay a cool vision like a herbal poultice down on the forehead of a skull that’s been running a high fever that makes it delirious with life. You can grow orchids in the shadow of an outhouse. Or you can drain the swamp and clean its wound of infection to keep the spiritual gangrene of a planet in crisis from spreading. Or you can turn your back on the urgency of the emergency nightshifts like the dark side of a harvest moon and say Physician heal thyself as if your life were held in ransom by a medical plan issued by a drug cartel. Knowing it might be the butterflies with beautiful bedside manners that are wearing their wings like nurses caps on the terminal wards of the pharmaceutical asylums but it’s the maggots that mend the wounds and prepare the bones for a decent burial like graverobbers convinced of an afterlife. I give you my word like a boomerang on the cutting edge of space that what goes around like a helicopter gunship comes back like a galactic sawblade in your face. On the thresholds of the available dimensions and event horizons of the future the black rose of blood whose beauty was eclipsed by the miscarriage of the corpse of a child whose eyelids were shut in death like shedding petals will be frisked for thorns like pins in the heart of a voodoo doll looking for revenge on us all. Beware the fury of the dark mother when the moon is in its crone phase and she sees what we’ve done to her young. The female principle of the world flares like a Medean cobra rising like an executioner’s hood over her shattered cosmic eggs. Can you read the sign on her mantle like the royal cartouche of a deadly queen sealing a death warrant in our own blood? Can you taste the poisonous fruit of your loins in the sweetmeats of the children she serves up like the four and twenty blackbirds of a ghoulish lullaby to the nightmarish apple piety of your blasphemous genes? The Achilles heel of the destroyer of worlds will be stung by a Parisian arrow of love with the wingspan of a vampiric universe sucking the blood out of the venom under the sign of the cross that makes the first incision. And nothing will be healed. Seven come eleven like a winning lottery ticket at the all night grocery store on the corner of hell and heaven but the short-sighted dice trying to game the table will still roll with their self-destructive luck like snake-eyes staring through them. Medusan puncture-wounds to the moon rock of the heart. The colon of the asp at the end of our imperialistic aspirations to live in the lap of luxury like Egypt but kill like Rome. But what follows is astronomically tedious and as far from home as the light of an occult candle in the hands of a lonely exile tabooed by its own creation myth has ever been driven out into the darkness on its own. What hour is it? Time casts our shadows like Mayan calendars on shark-finned sundials circling the penumbral blood lines of a feeding frenzy where there is no host there is no guest at the foodbank. Just the ghosts of starving children wiping the crumbs of their dream of life from the corners of their eyes like the dead waking up to a nightmare.

PATRICK WHITE

FIRE FLOOD BLOOD OR ICE

Fire flood blood or ice.

The watchers are growing nervous.

The prophets are losing their voices.

The poets caw like a farce of crows

from the autumnal branches

of a scarecrow’s skeleton

as the grasslands overrun the trees of life

who dream in their fossilized heartwood

under Arctic eyelids of perpetual night

awakening slowly to the nightmare of global warming

without a hope in hell

of another cosmic ape

to stop swinging his weight around like a funeral bell

and learn to walk upright like the lighthouse of a false alarm

that came too late to avoid the storm.

The gods are asking the ants for advice.

Everyone’s wearing the mask of someone else

like the upgraded face

of a mineralized avatar into virtual reality.

The alarm clock poses as an air raid siren.

The Hubble Telescope gets busted

for distributing kiddie porn

like baby pictures of the naked universe

on the third eye of its hard drive.

There are gules of starmud

running down the candles of a black mass

like the keyholes of weeping madonnas

down on their knees

begging mercy from their tormentors

for denying them a virgin birth.

Cartels of gargoyles have pulled off

a coup d’etat of sunglasses

and posted guards on the cornices of a church

that serves black kool aid to the faithful

that smacks of licorice burning tires and oil spills.

Bodies banked like driftwood

on the concrete shores of their homelessness.

Postures of agony in the ashen Pompey

of our inner cities

modelled by Vesuvius

getting ready for the big day

they’ll be unveiled in an art museum

as part of a month long retrospective

on the geniuses of desecration

that have demonized our clay

by giving vent to their volcanic rage

like a haemorrhage of inspiration

that amputated the arms

of the experimental children of Auschwitz

and grafted them like the hands of a clock to their backs

to express the toxic ferocity of a Nazi philosophy

among the cultured doctors of Cologne.

And everywhere the bones of dismembered telephones

that hung up on death like Orpheus

when he realized he didn’t have enough minutes left

on his lyre

to make a long distance call

like two minutes with a hook

to sweet talk death

with the allure of love and music

into accepting the charges.

Do you know what hour it is?

Do you see the regata of shark fins

cruising the beach like dangerous sundials?

More children were born from women

whose wombs had evolved into body bags

in the course of the last century

than all the seedy tombs

of the unknown war dead

between Caesar and Napoleon.

The public grows nostalgic

for the rustic genocides of Hitler Mussolini and Stalin

when it was much simpler to understand

what you were being murdered for

and the secret police still made house calls

day or night

if you showed any signs of a fever

that contradicted the political prescriptions of plague rats.

Now no one knows what to hate or why

among so many candidates

trying to privatize the concentration camps

in the best tradition of free enterprise

to give a boost to the economy

by putting the shoulders of the poor to the wheel

like a slave labour force

to the solar disc of Ixion in Tartarus

by starting a war of mythic proportions.

Murder in the guest house.

Winter welcome mats

of paranoid xenophobes

wait like spiders

underneath their trap doors

to unweave the flying carpets

that cross their thresholds

like the event horizons

of blackholes

that resent the butterfly its wings

for not being cloned in their likeness

like a Canadian mosaic

of cultural icons

in an American melting pot.

They’re checking the dolls

in the arms of immigrant children

for passports.

They’re shining search lights

into the irises of refugee rainbows

and making them turn out their pockets

like pots of gold

that can be resold on the black market.

Junk bonds of lobbyists bundling people

like coyotes crossing the profit margins of the rich.

It might be harder to rise from the dead

than for a rich man to go

through the eye of a needle of Opec

like a camel through an oil derrick

like the price of a barrel of oil

but more impossible than magic or miracle

is to rise from the snakepit of the living

without getting bit like a voodoo doll

or if you’re as unlucky at evolution

as you are at love

a warm-blooded mammal in a nuclear winter

living where you work

like the undertaker of an extinct species.

I thought I saw God

dropping off loveletters to the dead last night

like shadows in the dangerous doorways of sulphur and salt

with no return address.

And then two cops

started looking in all the public garbage cans

in seriatim

with flashlights and shovels

for weapons and dope.

Evidence of the viciousness of chaos

when rapture goes wrong

and a kiss turns into a fist

and someone suffers an indelible eclipse

like a tattoo by Caravaggio

among the sprites and ghouls of isolation.

But less trivial than being awake

I was convinced I was dreaming.

When I’m not listening

to the picture-music of the mind

I’m painting masterpieces for the blind.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU ARE NOT CAST AWAY

You are not cast away. You have not been ostracized by the shards of a broken pot. You are not the torn bat wing of an umbrella in the spirit’s lost and found as the rain keeps pouring in through a hole in the ceiling as you feel the rafters heave like a ship’s hull in a storm. You have not fallen out of your constellation like a jewel or a skull. The night is not cruel to them. The darkness accepts you and when you rise in the morning. The day. Don’t greet the dawn in yesterday’s chains like spider webs you wove on a loom of dream catchers that can’t see anything without their jewels. And when have the windows ever turned you away? You stand in your doorway of shadows without any thresholds because it’s just as dangerous to go in as it is to stay out. Your eyelids are bruised bells and your heart is a scarlet rag of blood gored on a horn of the moon in a death dance with the sun. And now you feel like a ghost of yourself waiting in the anteroom of your afterlife for a doctor to tell you you didn’t survive. Love and betrayal. And the aftertaste of your sulphuric longing. The ferocity of stars you shave off the edge of the sword you don’t know whether to fall upon or kiss allegiance to. A judas-kiss. I can feel the mass of the anvil of your heart you beat things on like yourself to keep them in shape but it’s you that’s bending like space. Let the pain go. It’s a mechanical Byzantine bird in a rococo jinx wheel posing as a Chinese zodiac. It’s a viper in an hourglass you can’t train to bite other people. Give the moon back her fangs. All the known antidotes are too slow to catch up to those toxins. You’re not the turtle. You’re not the hare. There’s nothing to win or lose here. You were vulnerable. You risked the spear. You stood naked out in the open to show your lover you had nothing to hide. But no one can make a trophy of your wound. Medusa St John the Baptist Goliath Anne Boleyn and Caravaggio. You are not one of these. You have not been beheaded. Your lover has nothing to mount on his wall. He doesn’t clutch your skull by the hair and swing it like a small moon he’s enslaved in orbit. Victory doesn’t pass through the gates of the treacherous. A battle cry isn’t the hiss of an assassin behind the door. A rattlesnake under the rosebush of your heart. Two months before you had his baby your lover cut the umbilical cord like a back alley midwife with a coat hanger not a sword and now you feel like a box kite tangled in your power lines and the spinal cords of short-circuiting embryos. There are drops of blood in God’s beard and you wonder with a shudder what he’s been eating. And you long for the future you dreamed of once in paradise before you discovered you were the second mother of Eden and Lilith was the first prefiguring demon of Eve’s curse. Don’t nurse this. Don’t try to suckle a black hole. Don’t put the Milky Way on the menu of a leech that’s attached to you like a full eclipse of the moon. You’re not the blood bank of an artificial rose. Cut the tongue out of the snake and either use it as a way to witch for water in hell or root it like lightning so deep in you it can’t do anything but flower in fire. And as for leeches. Shove a match up their ass and watch them drop away like scar tissue. And don’t give the blackflies any room on your stage. Not a line in your play. Not a make-up artist a green room or an understudy. Indifference is the best antiseptic to the feeding frenzy of maggots that feed on any open wound of the heart. Don’t make a nest of thorns and razorwire to hatch the atomic eggs of innuendo and rumour. Why answer the buzzing of flies with the shriek of an eagle? Or take any account of the opinions of the fleas on a plague rat? There’s no cross on your door in the morning that’s been white-washed by nocturnal visitations of purgative angels. The moon hasn’t been stolen from your window by the furtiveness of trusted thieves. You don’t need to shed your skin for a Kevlar vest nothing can penetrate to keep the mosquitoes from flagging your blood like junkies getting a rush off your DNA like the first link in the food chain. And don’t think you have to make yourself credibly edible to be attractive. Put mascara on the eyes of a peacock and you’ll end up with a likeness of an old school Gothic rock and roll ghoul. Truth and beauty are like space and time. You have to learn to trust both the way you do your eyes. There’s no focus to seeing anymore than there is for the blind that isn’t your own mind. Don’t pry your dreams open to get them to bloom early. And don’t abuse the delirium of your innocence for not heeding a warning it didn’t have the heart to hear. Experience isn’t a sleepwalker on a collision course with a rude awakening.

Did you taste the mirages in the raptures of water that effaced you when you went down to the river to splash the acids of your tears in the eyes of your reflection? Did the mirrors break all around you like the sound of a broken word that love could not bind? Did you fall in love with the passions that took you hostage like the Stockholm syndrome? Love is a terrorist without a cause. Love never asks for a ransom that anyone can pay. Now here you are demanding proof of life even as you’re laying flowers on Ophelia’s meandering grave. And there’s nothing to save. Nothing to redeem. No vows you can take to prevent what you’ve lived like a nunnery. You can smear lipstick on the spear head that you pulled like a love letter out of your wound but that won’t keep the chandelier of your smile from bleeding like over ripe cherries all over the ground. And I know you feel denounced rejected put down. Cheated of your heart’s desire by a wishbone that cracked like a liar at the crossroads and left you standing there like the road not taken. And yes it’s more merciless than a straitjacket when space turns into glass and all that tender-heartedness is trying to swim like a goldfish upstream through a glacier. Or put the pieces of your skullcap back together like a synarthritic ice-age looking for its ancestors in the archaeological remains of a future with a bigger brain pan than that canvas of stone you paint on now in your own blood. Put your hand up to the wall and let the selflessness of the negative space say I am for you. Without really knowing what you’re pointing to. Once and for all. Be the spirit of everything you’re missing. Lover. Happy home. Adoring children. Thirty feet of asphalt driveway and a garage full of unused gym equipment. Spit-paint your dreams in black carbon red ochre and blood. Put your brand. Stamp your seal. Paste your logo. Spray-bomb your graffiti under the bridge. Make it your temple. Your shrine. Your paleolithic Taj Mahal. Your cave of Hira in Ramadan. Your Mosque of the Golden Dome with musical stalactites calling the faithful to prayer. See what you need to see to push the fish hook of the moon through your eye to get it out. Realize that you are what you need to be at every moment in this cosmic enterprise of being you. Even when you’re in that unnamed place you go to when you fuck up in hell and neither heaven nor earth want anything to do with you look the dragon in the eye like a mother eagle not a hummingbird and protect what’s young about you and your children. Show the dragon how an enraged Medusa having a bad hair day of snakes can turn a dragon’s scales into the most delicate stone feathers pressed like keepsakes in the Burgess Shale. Be the oracular priestess of the snake pit. Trust what is whispered to you like the nightsea in a shell the colour of dawn. Respect the wavelengths of the bonds of loyalty among your stars. And don’t be overzealous to take revenge should you discover a sidereal conspiracy of black holes among those you once called friends. Effortlessly the great sky bends graciously toward its extreme ends.

PATRICK WHITE

LADY NIGHTSHADE’S SUICIDE WASN’T VAIN ENOUGH

Lady Nightshade’s suicide wasn’t vain enough.

She insisted on dying for the world.

She finally stepped through the black door.

She took all that splendour of mind and flesh

and instead of going supernova to make a statement

let it shrink down into

the single snowflake of a white dwarf

in a spring thaw.

She died as unobtrusively as a wild flower perishes.

Lady Nightshade died like a whisper in a hurricane of razorblades

a candle flame

a toy in the corner

that knows when it’s time to let the child go.

She knew her greatest claim to fame

was perpetual silence.

There are some eyes so clear and radiant

the light’s too shy to enter.

There are some mirrors

that have to turn their backs on you

to show you what you’re looking at.

Lady Nightshade died like a black mass at the eclipse of a water lily

and then blew out the flames

on a skeletal replica

of the extinct candelabra

she made of her fossil remains.

It was hard to keep up with the half-life of some of her lies

but she could tell time radioactively

like numbers on a watch that glow in the dark

while the rest of us had to rely on a water clock.

She could see things coming

from the asteroid’s point of view

and when you heard her speak

of what she thought it was you should seek

among all those invisible things

we make visible through our lives

even if you only had a rag of blood

snagged on a thorn of what’s left of a heart in your body

she made a deep and lasting impact.

You looked at her

and you knew the time of night

and the weather.

In her nuclear winter

you were either a species of delusion

that went extinct

or you changed the way she did

and she was a legend among chameleons.

She was a rainbow’s worst nightmare.

With her

you weren’t deep enough into anything

until you’d dug your own grave.

She could hold your spirit up to your face

like a mirror one moment

and in the next

tear it off like a bandage on a deep wound

as if she were unmasking a new scar on the dark side of the moon.

She could make you smile like a face-painted clown

who just had his smile widened

from cheek to cheek

by a scalpel.

She was the daughter of intensity

but god help the snake

who tried to ride the dragon

by hanging on with its fangs

as if those were any kind of match

for her crescents and claws.

She could weld a forked tongue

back into a spear head

and bury it like the Clovis point of a viper

deep in the deserts of Arizona

where it would take twelve thousand years

for someone to find it

like a flint knapped skull with lockjaw.

With her it was ok to be the universe

as long as she were its physical laws

and they were at all times and everywhere

applicable and true.

And god what a body.

You took one look at her

and you knew already

you’d been sexually bruised.

She was living proof

that on the Day of Creation

when God made woman

he had a muse

and the rest of us were plagiarized

from an overdue Texas textbook

that denied evolution

was creatively collaborative and true.

The immutable faithful still profaning existence

where everything is the genome of the many

and all are the chosen few.

But Lady Nightshade was more amused by

than convinced of her own beauty.

She was too intelligent

not to use it as an index

of male cupidity

twisting their inflated multiverse

like birthday balloons in hyperspace

into her favourite kind of lapdog

as Leonard Cohen sang in the background

no man ever got a woman back

by begging on his knees.

She was the kind of hunger

that could teach a rude man to say please

and a wiser one

who’s been seasoned by the sea

under full sail

like an orchard in a storm

thank-you.

She could roll men’s skulls like dice

that always came up snake-eyes

because she could see how clearly

they were estranged from their own reflections

like telescopes that can see everything but themselves

bring the far near

shorten the mile

be the last day of the thirteenth month

in a leaping light year

that stays one step ahead of itself

like a thief of the moon

coming in through the back door

of someone else’s homelessness.

She loved to give performance poetry readings

where she’d scream at the featured guests

molesting the microphone with their monogamous poems

like the accused at the accuser

like an oracular snake pit from the audience

or a banshee at the window

Do you know how many muses

you blind assholes

have turned into social workers?

And in the barefoot silence that ensued

no one dropped the other shoe

and you just knew

those on stage

felt like the cutting edge of a new ice age

that would be the crib-death of inspiration

and thousands of baby mammoths

that would be clutched by dozy glaciers

like stuffed teddy-bears for security and warmth

for the next twenty-five thousand years

of black ice a mile high

trying to transcend itself

like a recurring nightmare.

Lady Nightshade wasn’t the kind of revolutionary

that showed her face to the world

like a mask turned inside out.

She never let her certainty get in the way of her doubt.

I remember watching her one night

after we’d made love

look out from the fourteenth floor

of the Hotel des Governeurs

at St. Denys Boulevard

lit up like a Nazdac landing strip

in the middle of the starscape

that bloomed like Montreal.

She was naked.

She was vulnerable.

But I could see a bridge in the far distance

on her right shoulder

like a threshold that was all

exit and entrance

at the extreme ends of things

always at right angles to the direction of the flow.

It arched over the river

like the Egyptian sky goddess Nut

her body night-blue with white stars

that lined the bridge like streetlamps

as fragile and delicate in the aerial atmospherics

as the eyelashes of nocturnal humming birds.

And I saw right then and there

how vastly she longed for her ghost

to ready her for death

like a lover from another lifetime

when suffering wasn’t

the only natural renewable resource

you could rely on to make a living.

A wounded hawk never asks for pity

and she didn’t ask for mine.

She was the key

that left everything open

and for awhile

we were inseparably alone

because I was the lock

that couldn’t keep anything in.

She jumped from her bridge

into the lifeboat of a coffin

and left a farewell on the mirror

written by a bleeding snail of scarlet lipstick.

I don’t know what star she was following

but back here on earth

there’s a black hole that eats its own shadow

and chandeliers of firelies

that keep putting themselves out in their tears.

Lady Nightshade never cheated her solitude

by buffing it with love.

Lady Nightshade played solitaire

with a Tarot pack of mirrors.

She saw what turned up.

Lady Nightshade followed the Queen of Cups to the block.

She said a few words

that ransomed her life with a candle.

She blew it out.

She swanned like a summer constellation

on the smoke of a distant fire.

She drowned her silver sword in the star stream

like a barrette she took out of her hair

to let it blow away like the fragrance

of something beautiful hidden somewhere

like a secret that was meant to be kept.

Lady Nightshade bloomed like a bruise.

A blue rose.

A new moon.

Dark.

Unknown.

And cherished.

And when she perished

only strangers could have guessed why I wept.

PATRICK WHITE