NO DOORWAYS, NO WINDOWS

     No doorways, no windows, I come to this white-washed wall on the glaring computer screen, not knowing whether it’s an end or a beginning or a means to something I’m not aware of. I almost go snowblind staring at it as if I were waiting for someone on the other side to step through it like a homeless man in a blizzard, or one snowflake with an identity unique enough not to melt on your eyelid like a kiss that trickles down into your tear ducts sooner or later. This is the great white light at the end of the tunnel coming at you like a train that’s trying to bead the mountains into an aboriginal rosary of bear teeth. And if it could, it would bore a hole in the moon like some Neanderthal drilling through a seashell to prove it wasn’t a brute. This is a Saturnalian white night the day after the winter solstice in the void bound doldrums of late December. This is the anti-nirvanic revelation of someone who’s been illuminated on the dark side of the Via Negativa, though he was hoping for butterflies that flapped their wings like white sheets drying on the line in the sunshine. This is that negative of a starmap where the dark is white and all the stars look like constellations of cigarette-burns and black holes. As if some Oedipus when he put out his eyes, put out theirs as well. And you can see it as dove released by a Roman augur, or, as soon as I type the first letter on it like a bird track in the snow with ambitions of becoming an alphabet, a Martian meteor, billions of years old, landing in Antarctica like the unabridged version of a flood-myth. Land Ho! In the dense fog of this cloud of unknowing, where the linearity of forms is absolved of itself like water, it’s the crow on nightwatch in the masts of the leafless trees that first spots a place to land on the moon as it appears in full sail on the horizon like a waxing phase of the Sydney opera house.

     And that’s when I begin writing a long note on this white wall to someone I’ve never met I imagine is on the other side of this, who wasn’t home when I called to hear what I had to say, or was, but was preoccupied on the other side of this one way mirror blinded by its own blazing like a mediocre detective enthralled by a prime time confession to a sin of omission that didn’t do anything at all. I waver like a mirage in a desert at night between leaving a detailed suicide note, a loveletter to the world from hell in terza rima, of writing a local recipe for making home-made raspberry jam to explore the distractive potential of dysfunctional domestic poetry by putting an apron on a butcher and teaching him to make bread. But I’ve got too much of a surrealistic temperament not the see the jam pouring out of the empty Mason jars of starving children like a hemorrhaging rose from a bullet wound in the stomach that felt like the first thing they had to eat all day. And I begin to despise the triviality of the culinary poets who abuse their domesticity by using it as a gateway drug to a cozy corner in the kitchenin denial of the mundanity of hell while their schoolhouse of homey horrors burns down all around them. At least, sleep with your mother first, before you put your eyes out. And your poems like obsolete pennies from a child’s piggybank on the eyelids of those you were blind to, and would not speak up on behalf of, because what you don’t see is going to hurt everyone. And what you don’t say can make a liar out of you just as fast as what you have said about how much pectin to add to your poetry to keep it from being overwhelmed by the real flavour of the raspberries that don’t give a damn about who picked them. There must be a graveyard of cracked teapots somewhere that like having the wool pulled over their eyes like a tea cosy, but that doesn’t mean it’s any kind of place a real elephant would go to die with all his memories intact. You can put all the local homegrown you want to into a marijuana pie for a body stone that’s going to last all afternoon, but that only makes it the quiche of a mediocre high. Better to be Icarus and fall to your death out of the precincts of the sun than poultry that’s lost the will to fly. Mechanical Byzantine nightingales singing their hearts out like semi-precious stones in a tree of lapis lazuli. The aesthetic tomfoolery of fatuous objects replicating the symbolic orthodoxies of fraudulent zircon jewellery. But you need to be born with the third of a fish to know how to debone a diamond, and mine opens more like an enlightened observatory at night that’s happy just to look at the stars like a diamond in the rough that’s not inspired in the least to filet the Circlet of the Western Fish in Pisces.

     Cellphones of rage like the larynx of a blasting cap in a beaver dam made up of the bones of mass graves discovered after the fucked act of the fact deep in the forests of Poland where everyone was either shocked or shot for what they knew all along. Something evil in the air like the sickly-sweet smell of corrupt lilies in the lapels of the slapstick politicians in a vaudeville of Baudelarian flowers squirting acid in the eyes of literate schoolgirls. But sight, to me, is a kind of love I read on a poster giving a lecture on how to become enlightened in the student union building of the nineteen sixties. So nix that shit like a black angel in a plague year with a paintbrush at your front door that isn’t trying to sell you anything or ask if it can come in. And I’m tired of writing retroactive love-poems to all my girfriends and ex-wives that are always missing the last word like the other shoe that didn’t drop like an astronomical catastrophe out of the blue into the biosphere. Or the meteoritic impact on the foodchain of an oil spill by BP in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing personal, no offense to dead Mayans talking about cosmic events they didn’t live to see like a misinterpretation of what they actually meant about entire civilizations being lost in translation like truths that keep their mouths shut about the stone-faced lies that drive current events to the brink of extinction. And I’m more interested in life outside the theatre while the play’s going on than I am in rich Sophocles telling me like North Carolina a black welfare mother that it’s best not to have been born. The brave propositions of Nazis leading politically to the cowardly conclusions of Auschwitz. Over and over and over again like the estranged tears of a summer rain on the tin roofs of a concentration camp emptier than the promises of regret that were made not to forget what was done here was done to overweight children with specific names and pudgy hands that felt like comfortable armchairs full of loose change and lost keys to doors no one could remember. Not the bloodless abstraction of some Malthusian ideologue who preys upon statistics like a wasp upon the eggs of an ant like an occult science. And yet, that’s not it either; that’s more rage than this sword swallower can handle without gouging the eyes out of the record like a needle in a long playing thirty-three rpm eclipsed by an album the size of the moon turning on the axis mundi of a drum major at a Nuremburg rally. History repeats itself, the first time as the millenial tragedy of Senecan Rome, the second, as the six black farcical years of the Nazi demolition of Berlin. Which only goes to prove that arrogance makes you stupid and stupid will get you killed faster than evil. Give a blowjob to a cobra and you’ll end up washing your wedding vows out of your mouth with gasoline. But right now I lack the physical stamina to contain that kind of theme like a nuclear meltdown of my Fukushima heart, tears of heavy water turning into the radioactive steam of toxic outrage that makes you want to do unto others what’s been done unto these. And I will not. Knowing hate hates the hater first and worst. And the perpetrator always dies at the end of the farce like a self-inflicted karmic curse on the clowns who would be kings and ride in triumph through Persepolis as if the swarming of flies were the same as the flight of eagles. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to introduce birds of prey into the conversation of the larks and nightingales trying to strike the right note on the dead boughs in the aviary of my muse to harmonize this cacophony of chaos with the delta blues of Robert Johnson. I just want to get out of this cramped cosmic egg and add my wingspan to the vastness of space like the flightplan of a horse that couldn’t care less whether it stays the course or not. I want to graze like a planet in the twilight pastures of the sun, and when night comes on like the stars of the Milky Way by the open gate of the Great Square of Pegasus, I want to run until my heart explodes with light, knowing there’s no end in sight for a blind beginning that doesn’t trust its eyes enough to look into the dark mirror of its inconsolable eclipse to let what appears, appear, even if it be nothing for light years, but tears in the night bright with the stars that nobody sees, nobody points out like Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider in the handle of the Big Dipper, nobody stands among the brittle stubble of cattle corn in an open field of snow and makes up new myths about to adapt the life of meaning to the untapped watersheds of wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

ANOTHER NIGHT CLOSER

ANOTHER NIGHT CLOSER

Another night closer to hell

and the promise of paradise fading

for lack of interest; even the serpent bored

with tempting the worthless tourists of Eden.

No one need get upset; nothing means anything;

and the crimson parrot with green eyes

isn’t talking to the cosmic apes who are trying to teach him

cosmic gibberish. Lately

they’ve been painting their asses red

and flashing the white bull of the moon for a giggle.

No one seems to get it, but it doesn’t matter;

everything will go on absurdly the same;

old windows weeping like glass toffee

over what they’ve had to look at for fifty years,

emotional cripples on Celtic crutches

giving blow jobs to the defectors

who jumped ship on an island in their blood

and wound up marooned on Atlantis

two days before everything got real deep; assholes

looking up each others’ assholes with flashlights

to get to the heart of the matter

only to find God’s got a sense of humour

they can’t appreciate

without an acquired sense of taste.

One wants to say something,

if only for form’s sake, but what’s the point?

The etiquette of wisdom demands restraint,

and besides they haven’t got the eyes for it.

Why waste the light when tinfoil will do the job;

and they’d prefer a painted moon

to a real one anyway. So the dragons leave,

the sages mourn, the saviours turn their crosses

into clotheslines and the mystic wolves

howl high above the timberline of consciousness,

far from the village minds

who flap like the tongues of old shoes

that stopped just shy of the threshold. Cluster flies.

Occasionally someone smells something burning on the wind.

Occasionally someone sees

something strange moving fluidly among the trees,

just out of sight, glimpses of another world.

And at night, in their sleep, what dreams may come;

what baffling images from other realms, eerie guests

that no one quite remembers, occupying rooms

that no one knew were empty.

Hand them a key to go and see,

and they conceal it like a gun.

The world is solid, flat, and fixed;

their wisdom the hieroglyphics of a dried creek-bed. I repeat,

what’s the fucking point; their gifts are wrapped in flypaper.

And no one gets off without a torn wing;

spiritual amputees all over the floor, fanning the dust

upside down in circles. Look, everyone’s walking around

on their head

thinking with their feet, talking through their heels,

mistaking their toe-nails for teeth. How

can you love that without knocking them over?

It’s not that the demons aren’t compassionate;

but honestly, what herb of darkness

watered by the sorrows of the blackest saints

could overcome their backward ordinariness,

lead them out of their assholes back to their mouths

where food goes in and words come out,

and ease the callouses on the brain

that aches from all that standing?

Better to let them bang their feet against the walls

they’ve built to keep from getting out. The angels have given up,

and the doors, and the windows, and the ladders,

and the demons were always happy

to have them pointed down; but even they were smart enough

to laugh and leave them as they found them,

pissing up their own legs.

Now I’m leaving too, convinced their hearts

are parking meters, sick of their pettiness and meanness,

enfeebled by their raging lack of life,

their inverted mirrors and low door-knobs, the way

they care without caring, and speak without saying

anything that matters two fucks more

that it did before they opened their holes

to desecrate the silence and foul the air

like pop-tarts burning in a toaster.

Even the stars go out hissing in their minds

like cigarettes in a toilet, delighted to be crossed

out of their destinies like illiterate braille.

Why hitch a thoroughbred to a death-cart,

an eagle to the leash of a jackass,

love to the crimes of a fool?

Yellow leaves will do for gold

and dirty ice for diamonds

when everyone’s an embryo shy of old.

I don’t want to scare anyone, or bring

anyone up that isn’t already down,

or anticipate that anyone really cares

what happens beyond the shit at the end of their nose;

this is not the shadow of a falcon

over a chicken-coop; no one

has to bounce down the stairs on their head like a ball,

or squirm on their thrones

for fear of being toppled by a turd.

I have lived long and perversely enough

to leave these affairs

to the creeds of the absurd.

It’s just that I’m hurting worse than ever

as the stars pour into my wounded eye like salt

and always before me the promised land of never

where a border-guard in the guise of someone I love

screams halt, who goes there,

and shoots me through the heart

that was my only hope of refugee-status in heaven,

of waking up inside her,

seven come eleven,

all my gifts, accepted and forgiven.

PATRICK WHITE

AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I'M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR

AWAY WITH LANGUOR, I’M SWIMMING THROUGH TAR

Away with languor, I’m swimming through tar.

The room is still as winter. The plants are stalled.

Their roots are dry. The walls

are made of fossil calcium carbonates.

My fish has died. The air outside is cold and mean

and the sun shines fruitlessly on red heritage brick

with windows that look more like empty stages

than the last curtain call

at a red velvet small town funeral.

Faces of the people on the street,

novellas of erosion,

holding out little white flags of surrender

like patches of snow looking for someone to surrender to.

My poetry’s gone into semi-hibernation,

comatose as a red-blooded thermometer

that’s dropped below zero

and I’m trying to smoke last year’s bats out of my attic

with nothing but a wash pail, cedar bough, pack of matches

as if I were smudging the evil spirits away

like the low hanging fruit of temptation.

I need fire. I’m gathering up the dead twigs of lightning

that struck the heart wood of an oak tree

like the ice storm of a cold-hearted prophecy

that killed the messenger for being true to his word.

Madness. Enough of this. Winter, a fist.

Summer, an open palm. Neither of them

can get a handle on a weapon or a tool.

Where’s the pen, where’s the paintbrush,

where’s the dirty keyboard grimed

with sweat, dust, ketchup and ashes,

that can make a poet who’s been writing

three years shy of the last five decades

feel at least as useful as a window?

All the books I’ve published

nothing but empty doorways

that have left the door ajar

so the light can get in and out

like a cat that wants to go howl in the night

or come back in from the cold,

having accomplished what drove it outside

to do what it had to do.

I see two leaves gusting through the gutter

like companion halves of the same map

and I think how lucky they are to be so

irrevocably lost together with enough hope

to approach things as if they were still green.

And they’re probably right. There are

more chances of being found together than alone,

but solitude isn’t the occupational hazard of what I do

to destroy any chance of making a living,

it’s the black hole at the core of the galaxy,

it’s the golden ratio that turns like a starfish

or the pinwheels of sunflower seeds,

whorled seashells, the Hox gene

of the moon in a landscape painting,

it’s the sine qua non, the axiom, that article of faith,

the truth we must hold to be self-evident,

that plunges me into intense states

of creative visualization

that thaw my heart out in an agony of hot water

to keep it from getting frostbite

and get my blood flowing again

like a poppy weeping down a white canvas

because it’s used too much Georgia pine gum turpentine

instead of just lying there like blood on the snow.

Solitude is the mother-tongue of a polyglot silence

that doesn’t have a mouth or ears of its own

but who can count the voices it’s inspired

by its perfect lack of response

to speak up on its behalf

as if anyone were listening to what they said?

Three chord wonder pop-tarts on the pop charts

and whole symphonies of regret.

La Brea tar pits like sabre-tooth tigers

who had their fangs pulled like crescent moons

and went down into history,

dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark,

like toothless Smilodons.

And, yes, the sound of the bees in the locust trees

returning like ghosts in the spring

to the seance they liked best

to pick up where the flowers and the thorns left off.

But you can’t impress an abyss of solitude

with your radiance. The wavelengths

just keeping going on into forever

looking for something that might come to life

in their light. A crocus. A planet.

A cryonically frozen fly on the windowsill.

You walk alone with the Alone long enough

and you begin to realize

even when you pour your heart out

like white gold out of crude ore

you’ve been talking to yourself all along

and what you hear is the sacred syllable

of your own buzzing

resonating in the deaf ears of the hollyhocks,

as if you were rubbing your finger around the rim

of a Tibetan prayer bowl full of nothing

or a tower of hydra-headed microwave dishes,

though snakes don’t have any ears,

listening to the humming bird, the butterfly

the bee, the black beetle that looks

as if it were designed to pull paperclips out of paper,

the red ant chafing firesticks of formic acid,

a different voice in every different ear,

as if one wavelength per flower were a bellyful

of the same cosmic background hiss of radiation

I’ve being trying to write

like a symphony for a snakepit in B minor

with nothing but a bird bone flute to play it on

at twice the speed of sound

on the moon, people, on the moon

trying to replace the old dozy cow bell

in the firesteeple next to the local library

with a sonic boom, people, a sonic boom

well outside the oral tradition of lightning.

What kind of a dove would it be

if it were merely the echo of a loveletter

I sent out to look for land

instead of the real voice

of the wind in the winter chimney

lamenting the passage of the birds

that used to bear and raise their young in it,

and though the wind says as much as it ever did,

its vocabulary is being reduced

by a few more words every year

and there are longer silences between the stars

that make it look as if

someone’s finally got a fire going

that’s more light than smoke

and nothing, not even the stone pillow

of this luckless day can smother.

Because I’m going to cradle it

like a young bird I found in my hands

and I’m going to blow on it ever so gently

so as not to blow it out

and mentor it like a dragon

until it grows flames for feathers

and learns to fly like a phoenix in winter

with my breath under its wings.

Muhammad ascended to seventh heaven on Buraq

to see the angel of light as it really is

and Perseus has fallen off the milk wagon

it hitched the Great Square of Pegasus to,

and Einstein rode a beam of light

all the way from the Swiss Patent clock tower

into a continuum of time and space

in an oscillatory electromagnetic

charged particle field at rest,

and Hermes the Thrice-Blessed

has got wings on his heels

and one where his tongue used to be

as beautiful and eloquent as the parabolic trajectory

of an arrow whose medium

can’t help but be true to the message.

Something that’s lost upon

all these mythically inflated weather balloons

drifting like Medusan jellyfish among the stars

as if inspiration were just a matter of elevation

and if you got high enough on yourself

you could turn your farce into a legend

and run with the dragons

like a circumpolar constellation

that doesn’t know when to leave the stage.

Alcor and Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper,

Horse and Rider, stars for spurs,

I’m going to ride

my tiny unbroken seahorse bareback

like a Zen cowboy reincarnated

from an unsaddled Cossack

into a Pacific sunset

face-painted like a rodeo clown

with the constant smear of a grin on my face

and my feet on the ground

and an old whiskey barrel for pants

that keep falling down

to reveal my red rapper boxer shorts

to get a cheap laugh out of the bullshit

that keeps bringing me down

like Don Quixote at Sancho Panza’s expense.

Taurus tilting at the winter solstice

when sun and moon, fire and ice

stand still as the unhinged windmills

in the Tiffany china shops of the zodiac,

I will risk my life like a Chaplinesque matador

or Mithras Tauroctonus

when the sun shines at midnight

just to poke fun like swords of light

through the voodoo heart of the raging bull

that takes itself way too seriously

to be the sign of enlightenment that Capricorn is.

PATRICK WHITE

YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE

YEARS BEFORE I MOVED INTO THE RENOVATED FARMHOUSE

Years before I moved into the renovated farmhouse,

the previous owner told me

he had to go down to the lake

and shotgun the rat snakes

that were dripping like powerlines out of the trees

to keep the campers from freaking out.

Rat snake. Biggest constrictor in Canada

found in the Rideau Lakes region of Eastern Ontario.

Black anthracite that can grow up to nine feet

when they’re stretched out like rubber

some hotshot laid down the highway.

They nest in the southern exposure of boggy fields

rotten logs and compost heaps

that have been abandoned to the wild,

water to water, air to air, earth to earth

and anchor their fangs in rats and birds and frogs

and other small mammals

they crush in their coils like vicious inner tubes.

And they’re not afraid of humans if you mess with them.

And they swim like wavelengths of dark energy

the way Nureyev used to dance.

The good farmers stop their trucks

to take a stick and shoo them off the road

like defamed angels that keep their silos free of pests,

but the morons run over them

like those hoses the Minister of Highways

stretches across the road

to count the number of cars that use it.

And if you get too close they turn into

three on the floor spring-loaded Hirsch shifts

that can bite back like a midnight special

in a game of Russian roulette.

They’re the reptile version of a black hole

when it’s acting more like a wave than a particle,

a linear eclipse that moves as eloquently

as water on the moon in the Sea of Shadows

or a loose strand of the Medusa

letting her hair down like an oilslick

to rinse the conditioner out of it in the river Styx.

Shock of black in the tall yellow grass

they can move as quick as electricity

or make your heart stand still

like the sun above Jericho in cardiac arrest.

Dark rosaries with nothing to confess

as they unsheathe themselves like the daggers

of the assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain

sliding through the darkness to seize the night

carpe nocte, by the throat, by the heart,

one tiny locket of life after another

beating on the doors of their panicked hearts

from the inside to get out.

And you can’t help associate evil with them

or Darth Vader, even though

they shine and shimmer

like irridescent boat-tailed grackles in the sun

and at night as I once saw one swimming beside me

like a parallel line of anti-matter

that threatened me with utter annihilation

should we ever converge,

I’ve seen the moon flash off their scales

like waves of black lake water

as she shed her skin like the Milky Way

just to get as naked as they are

when she went skinny-dipping

with one of her oldest totems

to renew her virginity

as the epiphany in the mirror

of a Black Madonna, priestess, oracle, muse

that can arouse the lowest

to the heights of prophecy

like black rat snakes with the wings of dragons

on sacred glyphs of the god Iawa

who reconciles all opposites

by turning scales into feathers.

Snakes always keep their secrets to themselves

and startle us with the power of myth

to embody in such as these

the tragic and the true in a species facing extinction.

I’ve always tried to keep my distance from them

as if they were some kind of mutable event horizon

and though I once saw a girl in a bikini

wrap herself in one at an outdoor art exhibition

in Bon Echo Park like a poster child of Freud,

and it just lay there with its head between her breasts

like a spent symbol on the pschent of Cleopatra,

the oracle at Delphi, Alexander’s mother,

I’m too much of a warm blooded mammal

not to respect something so dangerously old

that looks at you with a wicked grin

and two black lidless eyes

its body followed like a colon

that knows everything that could happen next

because it’s seen it all happen before

like black serpent lightning shooting up your chakras

out through the crown of your head

like a lightning rod in shock

that it got all its Kundalini connections crossed.

Now imagine after the shotgun blast

snake meat flying through the air,

snake-blood gone supernova,

snake-skin bursting into shreds of black balloon,

snake-guts, hearts, lungs, eyes, tongues, fangs

landing on the rocks, the lake, the trees, the flowers,

food for ants, crows, maggots, coydogs, and turkey-vultures.

By the dozens, as the shotgun boomed across the bay

like the drum roll of an echo in an executioner’s hood

as if Jacque de Molay were being burnt that day

with the last of the Templars.

Darkness demonized into extinction

to keep the campers from freaking out

so they could play at communing with nature

for two hundred dollars a week.

A canoe. A cottage. A man-made beach.

Just you. And nature. And the shadows

of the rat snakes sliding down out of the trees

like a black veil of blood descending like night

down upon the stage of your campfire

where you’re making up ghost stories

like last curtain call before lights out

and under the blossom of your tent

you dream of the innocence

of dark mysterious things

that have been eradicated for your convenience.

You dream you see Isis dropping her veils

and you look deeply into the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

through a canvas flap in a burqa of safety-nets.

And the silence is a requiem for rat snakes.

And the death of the darkness

makes the light a little less convincing,

and the stars shine a little paler by contrast,

and the candles wane uninspired

to dance with lesser shadows.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt

like a child reaching out of its innocence

to test a bruise that used to hurt

but now has mellowed into a wild flower

with just a touch of local colour.

Wild irises among the breathless willows

along the shores of the Tay River

adjusting the catfish to its flow

like underwater weathervanes

and it’s summer on earth

and the sun ripens like a tomato

on the inside of your eyelids

and the hum of the dragonflies

buzzing your ear like a flight control tower

lulls you into a narcosis of physical well-being

when even an hour of being so at peace with life

as it is, was, appears, ought to be or not,

the distinctions are as unreal

as water consulting a nautical chart,

and even time stops judging things by its first impressions.

Something easy, inclusive, and true as it needs to be

without going to any special efforts.

Just to lie back in the fresh summer grass

and wish you were a white horse

with a black star under your forelock

that could graze upon the young blades

that smell so much like cool green peas

and stare into the endless cerulean blue of a sky

with an eye for antique clouds

the burgundy-tipped brushes of the birches

are scumbling a little alizarin crimson into

just to warm things up a bit.

I want to see wet mammals

gleaming with water and light

sliding down a mud bank back into the river

otters, muskrats, beavers,

and forget all about evolution

like any other corporate utility

that can wait to be paid.

The turkey-vultures and the red-tailed hawk

circling high overhead without disturbing

a feather on their wings

when they’re riding their thermals for the sheer joy of it,

like kids sliding down a bannister

that find the most fun in what

there’s the least purpose in

and even less reason to question.

I want to look upon life

as if its only secret agenda

is as it always has been

hidden out in the open

for everyone’s eyes only.

I want to let my mind

sprawl and cluster as it will

like the waterlilies in lieu of stars

giving illustrious astronomy lessons

inside the dark planetarium

of the abandoned beaver hut

on the far shore

that’s just as big a mystery

as the disappearance of the Mayans.

For the moment I don’t

want to go anywhere a maple tree

wouldn’t grow of its own accord

whether it made it through

the first few winters or not.

Listen to the leaves on the aspens

lapping like the small waves

of an incoming tide of shadows

as the afternoon slowly withdraws its assent

like a hand from the hand of a sleeping lover

to reveal your sacred absence when she wakes up

like the best gift you had to give her

though she’d never dream

of asking for so much.

Powder-blue eyeshadow on the damselflies.

My spiritual dakini dancing voluptuously

making Hindi hand gestures of light

that flash off the backs of black watersnakes

that roll with the waves

like a melody to music

your whole body hears

like serpent-fire roaring through a chimney

to clear its throat of birds.

Enlightenment might be akin

to galloping on a horse through a busy market

without bumping into anyone.

There are enough fools who doubt it

to convince you there must be some truth to it,

but here where the red-winged blackbird

sings from the dead branch

as often as the green bough,

the deathless insight is effortless

and ignorance and enlightenment

are just the front and back doors of bliss

in this house of life that takes a worm

and turns it into a Monarch butterfly

or takes a landscape

and turns it into a state of mind,

a dynamic equilibrium among opposites

that stand before each other

like a man before a mirror

without one asking the other

which of them is real.

Not as I am but as it is

is true of everything in creation

from the atoms in a lost osprey feather

on up to the superclustering of black holes

like voodoo dolls in the hearts of the starfish

who gather in covens to sacrifice their light

to the darkness, making a ritual

of the natural order of events

emerging from the chaos of a random universe

like a school of fish

or the flight of birds

or even the improbable concourse of these words

when they all swerve the same way.

Reeds in the river.

The hair of the willows.

A human who seeks peace in a low place

down by the water

and lets his thoughts go along

with the flow of things

like the main theme of a waterclock

with a heart and a bloodstream

discrete enough to ignore me for a while

as I drift like an empty lifeboat down the Tay River

like one of my unmoored poems

whenever I am whatever it is

standing in the shadows of the answer

that’s been liberated from the slavery

of responding to the question that belabours it.

We are consummate nothingness.

The metaphoric vapours of a drug we inhale

like the fragrance of white sweet clover,

distillations and elixirs of the moon

we drink from our own skulls,

semaphoric fireflies waiting for the stars

to answer back, shapeshifters

bending space to the shape

of our momentary cosmic minds

to have everything fall into place prophetically

like wild grapevines into bottles of dated wine.

Go ask the water if a reflection

standing on its own two feet

like a mirage of stars in the desert cold

of the upper atmosphere

waiting for someone at a wishing well

is any less real than one that’s lying down

to look up at the passing clouds

until it disappears like a mirror

that doesn’t inhibit them

into whatever they’re the image of

in a fraction of sunlight

on the wing of a blue heron

startled into flight by something

on the far side of the river.

Mesmerized by the mystic specificity

of the extraordinarily ordinary,

one dandelion in a wild raspberry patch

overwhelming it like a tsunami,

the fate that must have befallen

the one-legged gull

I gave bread to here last summer

favouring him above all

to humanize the radical impersonality

of the randomly accidental

that did this to a bird

without purpose, will, or meaning,

I sit here among these,

my senses attuned

to the vagaries of consciousness

as they’re beaten off like crows

by nesting sparrows

or keep a journal like a leaf

that set out young to explore the river

like a water god that went looking for water

and found it when he came upon

what remained of himself and cried

when things went oceanic

as if it had happened to someone else.

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt.

Two ruby-throated hummingbirds

hovering over a bouquet of daylilies

like single quotes.

PATRICK WHITE