BRUTAL BLUE OF TWENTY BELOW

BRUTAL BLUE OF TWENTY BELOW

Brutal blue of twenty below,

a serial killer with angelic eyes.

The light slashing off the snow

like sabres in full gallop reaping throats.

Even the windows going through

a mini nirvanic death-in-life experience

to catch a glimpse of the fireflies

of enlightened diamonds

that let them warm their hands awhile

around their blazing, hoping

they’ll catch on and be back soon.

O sweet one, hurt one, wounded blue rose,

your eyelids have turned brittle in the cold.

Your heart’s a baby mammoth

caught in a glacier

that’s exposing you to the wolves.

Your tears flow like slow rivers of glass

all the way to the sea that rejects them

like holy oil on the wrong forehead.

Blood on the snow, lipstick on kleenex,

a haemorrhage on the bedsheets

at four in the morning,

a flag of the rising sun

flying over the miscarriage of a virgin birth.

You’re the Pearl Harbour that sank

your volcanic battleships in a sneak attack

in a sea of shadows on the moon

and now you’re waiting for the birds

to seed them with new life

like islands stuck in port for the duration,

waiting for prophetic skulls

to wash up like coconuts on shore

where you go bobbing for the head of Orpheus.

And you’ve learned that your body

can only say so much

and you’re stuck in the doorway

like a word in your throat

for something you can’t quite

put your finger on like a braille starmap

of where to go next,

a morning dove

in a chimney,

out looking for land,

smoke without fire,

that won’t sully your shining with creosote.

And it seems your life’s gone on ahead of you

into the starless abyss of a forwarding address

and left you as homeless as a loveletter

in an abandoned mailbox

that’s beginning to get the feeling

no one’s going to answer you back.

And even though you’ve mastered

several zodiacs like Druidic sign language,

the finger ogham of L.A. Gangs,

to make yourself well understood to the mob,

you keep being reborn facing west

and you don’t know how to turn

the baby around in the tomb.

Your singing voice is baffled

by the dawn that rises at midnight

like the silence of a zoo with open cages

where someone let out all the animals out

like nocturnal animals to fend for themselves.

And it’s not hard to miss

the forty days and nights of flood in your eyes

you’ve been lost at sea

like an ark washed out of your tears.

And now you appear here like Morgana la Fey

trying to con Merlin out of his art again

by thawing you out of that pillar of ice

you’ve been locked into

like a butterfly in an ice age

that’s booked like Alice in of the Looking Glass.

But I’m not the Mad Hatter, Merlin

or the Wurm-Reiss interglacial warming period.

Nor yet an aristocracy of trees

in the democratic grasslands

of a Saharan savannah

where the deserts come

like crude beasts slouching toward Jerusalem

for the restoration

of their delusions and mirages

in a worn-out hourglass

with eyes in the sides of their heads.

And even the crazy wisdom

that drips from the tongues

of enlightened clowns like rain

from the gutters of a house

that’s been stuffed with too many leaves

from the book of the trees with knowledge

can sound like utter foolishness

by the time it traverses the universe

to bridge the gap

between your mind and your ears.

So I’ll just suggest you start listening

to that small, inner voice of yours

that’s been speaking

softly to you for light-years.

You know, the one you keep ignoring

like a candle among the illuminati

whenever you can’t take your own advice

and go looking for mentors and gurus

like a first magnitude star

seeking the advice of flashlights.

Stop looking at stardom from the outside

and turn the light around

until you come to the omnidirectional edge

of the known universe

and then instead of balking

on the threshold of the gateless gate

take your shoes off

as if you were going swimming

and plunge that torch

you’ve been carrying for so long

into the fathomless darkness ahead

like a sword you’re tempering

in the great night seas and watersheds of life,

not the wishing wells

you’ve been exorcising like steam

trying to cool your demonic magma

into the islands of the blessed in the mindstream.

Be brave. See what the oldest stars see

on the growing edge

of the expanding universe.

Nothing but darkness before them

and nothing for a lifeboat

a starmap or lighthouse

but the shining they brought with them

like those bioluminescent fish

that find their own way of illuminating

the sunless depths of the sea

where each is their own north star.

Here you deepen the darkness more

with your eyes open

than you can with them closed

like coffins in a graveyard of eclipses.

Here the light of one star

doesn’t fall upon another

to enlighten it like a wounded flower

at the side of road in a tragic attempt

to catch the eye of what’s passing it by

only to render itself ripe for the picking.

The clear-eyed light of the void

is as invisible as space

and hidden as time

under an executioner’s hood

whose blood runs bluer than death

when something gets in it way

like the lightning flash

of the double-bladed axe of the moon

falling on the nape of your neck

to separate your head

like a prophetic skull

from the long wharfs

of its earthbound mooring.

Here the solid becomes real,

and the corpse of thought

is reanimated by insight

like a nightlight in a morgue

like a canary in a coal mine

like a firefly with a longer lifespan

than the flash in the pan of a starmap

that thinks it’s the beginning of a gold rush

when it’s just the same old iron pyrite in chains

that you walked in here with

your your heart up your sleeve

like a dreamcatcher

in a broken windowpane.

I’d give you the answer

to life and death and love if I had one

that wasn’t just another

rusting weathervane on the roof

trying to lay a windproof cosmic egg

with a cast iron flight plan

to improve the direction of prayer.

But what would be the use of it

even if I had one that wasn’t seized

upon the axis of the turning world

like a bird wheel that’s lost its bearings?

But you’re a pretty girl with cold blue eyes

this winter sky that drives its icicle

through your heart like a sword

you keep deluding yourself

you’re falling on like a samurai

to uphold the honour of your defeat

at your own hands in Tokugawa Japan

is jealous of.

So I’ll tell you what I tell myself

not for love, or art, redemption,

or a polyp’s place

in the Great Barrier Reef of history,

not out of ignorance or enlightenment

when the silence snatches my name

right out of the mouth of my solitude

like a baby hawk in a crown of thorns

tearing the heart out of a morning dove

like a locket of blood; say

what I say when no one is listening

to the rain on the roof with me

and there’s only a homely echo of longing

in the valleys of death I’ve passed through

like the blade of bird slashing through

the air of its wounded passage.

There is no message.

There is no meaning but that

you make for yourself

on your way to finding one.

Ignorance and wisdom

write and paint

in the same creative medium.

The heart is a fire alarm

for arsonists and poppies alike

Tattooed snakes on a scaffolding

of burning ladders aspiring to dragon fire.

Angels in the ash buckets

of Icarian over-achievers

who fell to their deaths

from the skyscrapers of heaven

like an accidental gargoyle

from a demonized Gothic church.

Just to be walking around on the earth

huddled in your flesh and bones,

or swimming with stars

through the white-water

of your own mindstream,

or salting your own good nature cynically

until the baby gets turned around in the womb

and you look upon birth

as nature’s way of keeping death going.

You can curse. You can bless.

You can live like a heretic in joy.

Or die like a saint in rage.

From a single wavelength of thought

you can grow a thirty foot oracular python

you end up consulting

about everything you do

as if it had already been done

by somebody else with a bigger snake than you.

Or don’t blink until the stars do.

No matter. It’s your face.

You can wear it anyway you want to.

But just to be here, do you understand?

To have passed through

so many lion gates already

that were only meant for you to enter by,

whether you came in through

the backdoor or the front

or through the window like moonlight,

or a thief that did b. and e.s from the inside out.

You’re indebted to the roads you’ve walked.

You’re indebted to the things you’ve seen,

the elements, the moon

and what it revealed to you,

and you’re way in over your head

in what you owe to the ocean,

trees, stars, the children who

came and went like fireflies

before and after you.

They’re all the embodiment of you.

And you, you’re all

that they’ve achieved to date

and they’re neither guilty

nor innocent of you.

Because everything in this universe

is complicit with everything else

including the judges,

and that means there’s no one

to answer to

but your own questions

and when you do

you’re only ratting yourself out to you

like a woman hanging out laundry

singing an illicit love song under her breath.

All this and everything that’s missing

the physics, the math, the art,

the myth, the mystery,

the lyrical picture-music of your mind,

all the wisdom, the ignorance,

the cosmological theory of you

shape-shifting through your own space and time.

This is the starmud you were born of.

This is the chaos and order of you.

This is the harmony.

This is the dissonance.

This is the house of pigeons

that would rather be haunted by doves.

This is assent. And exile.

This is the lost and found of existence.

This is where you come to claim yourself.

And this is where you give it back.

This is where the losers

aid and abet the winners

by wanting to be one of them

and when they can’t even manage that,

hope, at least, they’ll inherit their afterlife.

Now take everything I’ve said

and throw it up in the air

and let the wind winnow

the chaff and the grain alike.

What will root will root.

And who knows what bloom

will come of that?

When you’re ploughing

and sowing the moon

as I am here with all these words

I occasionally look up from my labour

when my blade strikes a rock

and remind myself

from a lunar point of view

at the other end of the telescope

I’m looking at you through

just to be walking around on the earth

making tracks in the snow

no one’s ever walked on before

is proof positive

you’ve got the right stuff.

And even to live in vain here is enough.

PATRICK WHITE

STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN

STILL LIFE WITH CLOWN

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude

that receives everything without distinction or caste

like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising

or the luminous myriads of the night

into the visionary cauldron of the dawn

that drowns them in their own beginnings, an excess of light

that drew too near to read the fading scrawl

of disenfranchised love letters

from a god fashionably unfaced. And I have seen birds

disappearing into the quiescent dusk like prayers

that fold their wings in an unknown grove

to wait for a morning that rarely comes, a song

that would hurl them back into the light, redeemed,

because the greater love unanswered,

it could only end this way. This world, a scintillance of dust

in the gaping darkness of implacable aeons

whose indifference to mind and matter alike

is worse than any judgment, grows lonelier with the truth.

A smile and a wound, one heart nudged toward another

in the frenzy of mad water

drawn out by the poultice of the moon, life is a cannibal

that wolfs its own, eats the candle and the flame

to pursue a scheme of persistence

shuffling the portfolios of proven minerals

to maximize the largesse of its living issue

with intensified affinities of blood and vision.

Bless the modern man who has sloughed his life

like a skin of chrome for an aimless longevity

that cannot grow older than the eternity he is.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way.

He passes away like a pore on the cheek

of someone he never met.

Without going anywhere everything passes,

spring buds on the branches and Jupiter

flashing its tiny plinths of lightning

at the cradles of the elm in the upper boughs

sweeping the sky of stars,

and love, and friendship, and family,

and arrayed in the veils of its own enigma, beauty,

the only acceptable apology

for the serial distortions of time.

Transformations of the orthodoxy I call myself

keep turning the mirror inside out

so that one word of enlightenment

might be poised on my tongue when I die, but

until then, I am bound by a serpent of doubt

to drink from its fountains of fire

a martyr to my own desire. The greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, a creature

endowed with seeing, mind, wonder

looking for a purpose in the skies that ponder

what to affirm and what to refute

masters of the mutable and mute

who return the view to the seer, no wiser,

an ice-age of winter glass inching like a glacier

or a cataract over the smudged moon,

and over the hazards of light, the ellipses and eclipses

that make it seem midnight at noon

when the heart looks radiantly

for comprehensible origins that do not diminish

by dwarfing the questions,

the intrigue of knowing the finish.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

strangers that trust the word of the wind, and avow

adamantine fixities of nuclear binding forces,

but cannot, ambushed by change, stay,

grief in the flashflood creekbeds

that release the runaway horses

that were slowly gathering in the clouds

and farewell like blooming flowers

all along their courses and crusades.

Orion over the horizon, trumped by the queen of spades.

Eyes, heart, mind, eternities hover over every event

in a spiralling descent

from the bough of happier springs

that lent the soaring wings. Now food

is organized into civilizations

and the key to the chain of haloes

that enslaves the fallible nations

is buried with the dead like a dangerous secret

behind the dream mirror

in the jewellry boxes of their graves.

Generation after generation

the truth has been kept like a firefly in a jar,

a prophet in an asylum, or a peduncle

lost in the ensuing phylum

of a spurious progress toward pi-ing the circle

into incommensurable parts. We elude the real

and break like waves of urban trash

on the volcanic ash

of our island consciousness

ignoring the distant appeal

of the unsinkable world in distress on a sea

of infinite being. Everyone goes down with the ship

because the greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, our moiety of intelligence

merely a quip of the stars that rip

their constellations down the middle

like a first draft of muddled fates that congregate

at the embassy gates

of a passport and a sanctuary that doesn’t exist

regardless of what the murderous squads

of defecting tour guides insist;

when the heart opens like a fist

to take up the cross on its holy quest

to free itself from the infidel, and the eye

is clear in all directions,

after countless liberations,

the only thing that is freed is a funeral bell

calling the faithful to hell

because the greater love unanswered, nothing certain

and no one with anything to say

at the falling of the curtain

on the specious themes of a cretinous play,

it could only, so delusionally enacted,

no absurdity retracted,

end this way.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREATER LOVE UNANSWERED

THE GREATER LOVE UNANSWERED

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

a star without planets shining into the inhuman solitude

that receives everything without distinction or caste

like mountains toppling into the valleys that shadowed their rising

or the luminous myriads of the night

into the visionary cauldron of the dawn

that drowns them in their own beginnings, an excess of light

that drew too near to read the fading scrawl

of disenfranchised love letters

from a god fashionably unfaced. And I have seen birds

disappearing into the quiescent dusk like prayers

that fold their wings in an unknown grove

to wait for a morning that rarely comes, a song

that would hurl them back into the light, redeemed,

because the greater love unanswered,

it could only end this way. This world, a scintillance of dust

in the gaping darkness of implacable aeons

whose indifference to mind and matter alike

is worse than any judgment, grows lonelier with the truth.

A smile and a wound, one heart nudged toward another

in the frenzy of mad water

drawn out by the poultice of the moon, life is a cannibal

that wolfs its own, eats the candle and the flame

to pursue a scheme of persistence

shuffling the portfolios of proven minerals

to maximize the largesse of its living issue

with intensified affinities of blood and vision.

Bless the modern man who has sloughed his life

like a skin of chrome for an aimless longevity

that cannot grow older than the eternity he is.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way.

He passes away like a pore on the cheek

of someone he never met.

Without going anywhere everything passes,

spring buds on the branches and Jupiter

flashing its tiny plinths of lightning

at the cradles of the elm in the upper boughs

sweeping the sky of stars,

and love, and friendship, and family,

and arrayed in the veils of its own enigma, beauty,

the only acceptable apology

for the serial distortions of time.

Transformations of the orthodoxy I call myself

keep turning the mirror inside out

so that one word of enlightenment

might be poised on my tongue when I die, but

until then, I am bound by a serpent of doubt

to drink from its fountains of fire

a martyr to my own desire. The greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, a creature

endowed with seeing, mind, wonder

looking for a purpose in the skies that ponder

what to affirm and what to refute

masters of the mutable and mute

who return the view to the seer, no wiser,

an ice-age of winter glass inching like a glacier

or a cataract over the smudged moon,

and over the hazards of light, the ellipses and eclipses

that make it seem midnight at noon

when the heart looks radiantly

for comprehensible origins that do not diminish

by dwarfing the questions,

the intrigue of knowing the finish.

The greater love unanswered; it could only end this way,

strangers that trust the word of the wind, and avow

adamantine fixities of nuclear binding forces,

but cannot, ambushed by change, stay,

grief in the flashflood creekbeds

that release the runaway horses

that were slowly gathering in the clouds

and farewell like blooming flowers

all along their courses and crusades.

Orion over the horizon, trumped by the queen of spades.

Eyes, heart, mind, eternities hover over every event

in a spiralling descent

from the bough of happier springs

that lent the soaring wings. Now food

is organized into civilizations

and the key to the chain of haloes

that enslaves the fallible nations

is buried with the dead like a dangerous secret

behind the dream mirror

in the jewellry boxes of their graves.

Generation after generation

the truth has been kept like a firefly in a jar,

a prophet in an asylum, or a peduncle

lost in the ensuing phylum

of a spurious progress toward pi-ing the circle

into incommensurable parts. We elude the real

and break like waves of urban trash

on the volcanic ash

of our island consciousness

ignoring the distant appeal

of the unsinkable world in distress on a sea

of infinite being. Everyone goes down with the ship

because the greater love unanswered;

it could only end this way, our moiety of intelligence

merely a quip of the stars that rip

their constellations down the middle

like a first draft of muddled fates that congregate

at the embassy gates

of a passport and a sanctuary that doesn’t exist

regardless of what the murderous squads

of defecting tour guides insist;

when the heart opens like a fist

to take up the cross on its holy quest

to free itself from the infidel, and the eye

is clear in all directions,

after countless liberations,

the only thing that is freed is a funeral bell

calling the faithful to hell

because the greater love unanswered, nothing certain

and no one with anything to say

at the falling of the curtain

on the specious themes of a cretinous play,

it could only, so delusionally enacted,

no absurdity retracted,

end this way.

PATRICK WHITE

NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

NOISE SEEPING INTO THE SILENCE

Noise seeping into the silence.

The apartment groans, cracks it knuckles.

The gas furnace flares, a poppy, a matchbook,

and as things heat up, the tin pipes

keep making spasmodic rimshots on the drums,

then cooling off, you can hear

the last heavy, ripe drops of rain

on a metal roof with no walls

as he imagines it, somewhere in Burma

where the bacteria have such an appetite for life

they eat books down to the spine

and the glue that binds them

like a creekbed of milky honey

that’s cracked with use and time.

And all the letters of all the words,

nothing but flies in amber paperweights.

You take the dirty laundry of a life time

and you wash the blood and semen

off the sheets, the sweat-stained outlines

of a he and a she that made lust

to exhaust themselves and go to sleep

like the chalk silhouettes of two corpses on the street.

And you hang them on the line

like a computer screen blowing in the wind

on a sunny summer afternoon

for the neighbours to see

how much like them you are

when you’re both wearing the same disguise

like clean bedsheets with no evidence of life.

A tabla rasa. A cheery white void.

Snow on a desolate sidewalk late at night

that no one’s walked in before you

showed up to ruin it with your presence.

Footprints on the moon. The estranged signs

of a starless space within

that keeps a journal of our innocence

and its aborted attempts to shine.

He watches the smoke of a cigarette

shaped by the air it passes through

and thinks of the bucolated cosmology

of his last lover’s hair, black walnut

with Bronze Age touches of infra-red.

He remembers her taking her clothes off

in master strokes of candlelight

that painted a Rembrandt of her likeness

and realizes however naked

she stood before him on Wednesday night,

there were still skins to shed,

layers upon layers of metaphor

as divisible as an atom

or the pages of a book

that’s written in wavelengths

that go on forever

beginning where they left off.

And even nude beside each other in bed

they were still too dressed up for the occasion.

And even the silence and the solitude

don’t go far enough into the abyss

not to be warped like space

by the mass of a metaphor

concentrating its light in one place

like a serpent sleeping in its coils

with its head on the pillow it makes

of the endless wavelengths of itself,

an emergency firehose encased in glass

dreaming of what snakes dream of

when they’re not called upon to put things out

by swallowing the moon in a single gulp

to bring the rain on

in this white Sahara of snow,

listening like a mirage

that wished it had something to cry about,

to the eyes of big rain drops

falling on the tin roofs of Burma

like a gas furnace

learning to play the drums

like a novice John Bonham

in Led Zeppelin’s next afterlife

in the dead of winter,

in the dark hours of the morning

in Perth, Ontario, Canada

in an apartment that thinks it’s a band

warming up,

doing a sound check before the show.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

WHEN RAGE BROKE DOWN INTO TEARS

When rage broke down into tears

over the shattered chandeliers of stars

that crashed against your windowpane

before they thawed in the furnace

of a Promethean thief of fire

human enough to burn,

and you cried, yes you did, I was there,

I took the splinter of light out of your eye

with the corner of the sky where Venus

goes down in the west like the crumb

of a radiant dream that wanted to break

loaves and fishes with the masses

only to find you were swimming through glass;

you cried as if all the birds in the world

had died under your windowsill

like the words to the song

you were dancing to at the time.

And you picked them up one by one

and cradled them in your hand

like a midwife with a manger

and stroked their soft bodies with your finger

as if you would give their lives back to them again

by way of apology for being human

in an ice age of rain

that had lost its purpose in life

like the seeds of flowers on the moon.

And that’s when the wind, that’s always

the moment when the wind cools your eyes

like a glassblower dipping crystal blue birds

in the fountains and watersheds of the moon

and strews your path with the flight feathers

of a nightbird that can see beyond a starmap

fireflies shining in the distance.

And you suddenly realize

a thousand and one ways home ahead of you

like a Nazca landing strip

for alien artists blown off course

into the third eye of a spiritual hurricane.

And you can’t help but fly through it

like an open window into your soul

seeking repose and shelter

among the human totems

of more habitable emotions

scratching fish, birds, monkeys, spiders

jaguars, flowers, trees, fallible people out

in the desert plains of coastal Peru.

Zoomorphic geoglyphs of greeting and return

in every conceivable sign of life

as if the whole planet came out

all at the same time to say hello

and welcome back

like a vow they kept for you

until your myth of origin

returned to its fulfilment,

a nightbird singing

in a rootless tree on the moon,

as if love, rage, life, joy,

death, separation and sorrow

were all pilgrims of one voice.

A pageant of medieval notes

bearing the banners of knights

the hoods and habits of monks,

unholy vocables of middle English

on the tip of your tongue

like the wicks

of holy candles at a black mass

where a young girl dances naked

around a pale fire on the moon

as a flower blooms in the flames,

or sparrows on a stave of power lines,

when the music makes its return journey

like Canada geese in the spring

bearing the souls of the underworld back

like the eyes and stars

and new moons of the dead

to the night of the living

making love in the dark.

Pelvis to pelvis,

heart to heart,

crescent to crescent,

two halves of a broken wishbone

conjoined again into one harp,

one cithara, one guitar

in the ashes of a blue moon,

the second harvest of loaves and fishes

at the spring and autumn equinox.

Every year a new zodiac,

the growth rings in a tree.

Something protean about memory.

The dark matrix of the muse.

A wavelength with its tail in its mouth

that doesn’t ricochet off anything else.

Lamentations, bewitchment, rapture,

time in the hold of the abyss

for not mastering your own powers.

You either cast the spell for yourself

or you wind up gilled

in your own sidereal nets,

a firefly in spider webs of dark matter,

and it’s not likely

you’re being hauled into a life boat.

There are realities, there are windows,

some broken, some whole

even the moon won’t dare look through.

And there are rooms in a palace of water

that move like fish on the moon,

and starmaps that are used to start a fire.

Birds that are the sacred syllables of the sky

that nest in chimneys like hash pipes,

every one of them the Rosetta Stone

to a language of your own

only you can learn for yourself

even if you’re the only one

who was ever born to speak it.

Most people sip spit

from other people’s wishing wells

but they’re always two echos shy of an original

and it’s enough if they put a seashell up to their ears

like a hearing aid to listen to the ocean,

a tidal pool dying like a starfish

out of water and sky,

a shore-hugger that’s afraid

to go along with the ebb and neap

of the dream that gives a pulse to the moon,

your own mindstream

returning to its homeless source

to realize that life and death are both redundant.

That whatever passes away, stays.

And that which doesn’t, goes.

And there are places so deeply secret

that everybody thinks they know

what’s happening to them as it unfolds.

But this is just a way of using knowledge

to keep your eyes closed to the world.

Only a fool would build a gate

and live in a guardhouse

of sword swallowers and fire-eaters

to keep the birds out of the garden.

Or a refugee camp for turtles.

True clarity doesn’t know the light

for what it is.

Reality is as blind to its own translucency

as a painted window.

Two blades of stargrass in a hurricane.

But if you were to take them away

like the long and short straws

of something to win or loose

like the luck of the draw

and chew on them like cud

to get to the deeper meaning

you might get a gesture of it,

you might get the flavour of it

like a dry wad of gum

stuck to the bottom

of a school room desk,

but you wouldn’t get the use of it,

for any reason at all

that should or should not concern anyone.

Have you ever noticed

that time might be

an hourglass full to the brim on top

but it always begins at the peak

of an inverted pyramid

stuck like an arrowhead

in a flesh wound of sand that’s bleeding out?

What’s the point of trying

to claw your way up the heap

to the top of the bottom

when even Sisyphus knows

enough about absurdity

to realize the mountain

climbs its own reflection

all the way down like an avalanche

of all those little rocks

you used to roll up a hill

convinced you were getting somewhere.

And it’s true there’s a different universe

in every grain of sand

and every grain of sand is us.

So why go looking

for what’s already been found?

In any universe there’s no up or down.

And everywhere anywhere you are

from the smallest pebble on the beach

to the most radiant star beyond reach

the gates of the lost

are the end of the search.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if

I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up

and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying

to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;

if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,

back into that night you drew the blade of the moon

across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting

it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling

like a drop of shadow-flavoured water

from the tip of a spear of stargrass

for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,

a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire

that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,

consuming its way without flame

through the long valley of the sorrows and years

where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword

of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash

of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,

I could green it with daylilies and vetch

and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.

I could stop meaning what I say when I say

crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured

like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun

waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light

like coins from a one-armed bandit

that gashed the vein of its motherlode

to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,

than the strange loneliness of the losers

who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.

I could mean something else other than heroin,

I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft

of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,

brighter constellations than the needle tracks

that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs

with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms

tying you off with the spinal cord

you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,

I could put the fire out, I could look at your death

square in the eyes

and haul in a god to answer it

like you did me that last night

when I asked for signs of life

and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade

revealed to you alone on your holy mountain

before you dumped on paradise

like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,

an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand

and fill your absence in

with things that begin. I could scrawl

a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick

and marry you in our honeymoon coffin

behind closed doors

in a downpour of wedding rings

I stole from the dead.

O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,

you could be my candle-holder

and angel-food for good

if only I could cry again,

as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE