WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

WILLOW-MINDED FRIEND OF MINE

Willow-minded friend of mine

you’re the star of Isis in the palm of my hand

that keeps me from drowning in a sea of glass.

How often have I been washed ashore

on the coasts of your flesh

like a naked sailor in an icestorm

of breaking chandeliers

and been taken to see the king

by a princess doing laundry?

A firefly in the distance

might be a great star up close

and your every breath

seed the whirlwind

with golden drops of rain

after the tempest has exorcised its pain

and you grow more beautiful picture by picture

like someone who wants to be redeemed

in her own eyes

for things that only she could be.

But that’s not why I love you.

No siren no muse no priestess no witch

no shepherdess of exotic snakes

squirming with the future

like mystic themes around your body

no sacred whore ready to party in the temple

with Minervan night owls and Cepheid movie-stars

that don’t want anybody to turn the lights on

to see what’s going on in the darkness

they are to everybody,

you are to me more

than I have eyes to see

to the beginning and end of things

but I can feel the night within

flowing like dark energy through space

and tendrils of time growing like paisley lifelines

into something sweeter than the wine

the white mirror drinks from its own reflection.

Before the arising of signs

I can feel your presence moving in me

like unborn constellations playing chess with time

to see who shall be the blossom

who the root

who the leaf

and who shall prime the lightning of the vine.

Long before your veils are parted by no one

like rivers of insight

I can hear your stars

whispering things into my ear

that make whole worlds appear

rocking life in their arms like water.

Time is a mental space

with different flavours.

You taste like the wounded grace

of an eloquent truce with flowers

or as Dogen Zenji said in l238

the lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day

meaning one chameleon

turning many different colours

to match the hours it spends

in front of the mirror

that keeps it guessing

who’s the seer and who’s the seen.

The grass turns red.

The flower turns green.

How long have I waited for you

like a tide on the moon to come in

like the spoke of a tree for a rim of stars

like a metaphor in the chrysalis of a dragonfly for wings

you could see through like a stained-glass window

divining the silence like a witching wand

in a waterless church?

And it’s all just been a moment ago

that isn’t at the discretion of birth and death

I learned to breathe with you on the moon

like some atmospheric fish

transformed by a new medium

into whatever you wished me to be

when I was the lifeboat

in the eye of the endless sea

that washed me out like a cinder

with the tears of a passing mindstream

as if I got in the way of my own dream

and you?

You were the mystic specificity

as you will always be

in the lunar pearl of it all

that sometimes doubles for my skull.

And isn’t it funny how when the night screams

it’s always an aurora

that everyone mistakes for dawn?

A snail of a comet smears the mirror and moves on

and it’s as good a path as any to follow I suspect

if I had a destination in mind

that wasn’t looping in retrograde like a noose.

I may be as footloose and fancy-free as a ghost

but there’s no end of this longing

that keeps making me up as I go along

trying to be true and strong

to what I love the most about being dead.

I think of you

and I burn in the terrible clarity

of a light that’s never fallen on anyone

as if illumination were endlessly eyeless.

I think of you

like water looking up at the moon as it rises

and I realize the wingless openness

of the dark gates before me

and pass through like a midnight sun

whose seeing evaporates in the morning

like visions and words and waterbirds

that have been transcendentally uplifted out of the graves

of their own reflections.

We are what we need to be to each other

without knowing what that is

like a phantom kind of picture-music

that’s always changing its lyrics

to keep up with the mood of the times

whether it’s the high definition tunnel vision

of the smokey beekeepers

trying to bring law to the unruly flowers

or the dark energy of an expansive space

driving the stars like exiles

into the absolute sublimity of a starless place

deep in the heart of God

that even creation can’t fill

or we’re just kicking pebbles down the road together

through clouds of white sweet clover

like afternoon companions of each other’s solitude.

Time is the poetry of the eternal

when love sits by itself under its willow tree

and watches the stream pass by

like the flowing eye it drinks from.

I drink pellucidly on the moon

from old grails of sacred blood

like an ark that survived the flood

only to find itself abandoned like a farm

on a mountaintop with two of every kind

except for one

who made his way down alone with the alone

to sing his lover up out of the dead

as if he were missing one of his eyes

and the other had turned to stone.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SINGULARITY

THE SINGULARITY

You were the singularity at the bottom of the blackhole

where all the light and life and love and money went.

You were an abyss that just couldn’t stand being empty.

You wanted to be a fat void in the midst of plenty.

You took your own body as the Standard Model of the Universe.

You were a death-maze that tried to make a living selling breadcrumbs.

You used to tell me

I could run from the blessing

but I could never escape the curse

of being an optimist for whom

things kept turning out for the worst.

You always did try to make an original point of the obvious

but your clarity was invariably cruel and cunning.

So I gave up arguing with you

and learned to grow orchids

that slept with secrets

in the shadow of that outhouse on the moon

you kept up like a diary of your changing moods.

Being the stupid one

I thought love had substance and content

the way thought and feeling had flesh and blood.

You thought it was a wardrobe of auroral attitudes

you could put on or take off as you wish

like smoke in a mirror

or a whisper of lingerie.

Sex with you was always a good day

and we had a lot of them

and that’s how I ended up staying for six years.

That and the compassion I felt

for the tears of rage you would shed

like rain on the lava of a wounded volcano

that would pop up on the west coast without warning

and bury both of us like Pompey and Herculaneum

trying to grow geraniums on its harassed slopes

like the hippies who grew pot

on Mt. Saint Helen’s

who aren’t selling anymore.

I always thought you gave your love to someone

and that’s what made it a gift

but you bestowed yours upon me

as if it were a right

I should be grateful to receive.

I was abolished from diplomatic lip-service

in the court of the mad queen

time and again

for things I didn’t mean

even in my native language

that were just too insane to believe.

But the body endures.

The mind copes.

And despair and ashes to me

given the tragic optimist I am

are full of high hopes

like spiritual loveletters

in earthbound envelopes.

And just as I did then

when at least I taught you

what not to look for in a man

I hope you’ve found the simulacrum

of the real life you were looking for

and it’s healed that crack in the mirror

that used to scar you like a black sail

on an empty horizon

waiting for cosmic news of the weather

that kept running you aground

like a widow on a beach

everytime the tide came in like providence

and left you just out of reach of yourself

like a wedding bouquet

the bride tossed away over her shoulder

without looking back.

As for me

things have gotten worse for the better over the years.

Swimming through quicksand.

Swimming through stone.

Impersonal revelations of intimate stars.

Sometimes the moon shows me

the fossils of the ancient oracles

she’s pressed between the pages

of her darkest shales

like deep wounds

gashed in the matrix of space and time

that were the distant ancestors of us

who have survived the truth of their prophecies

like scars without a myth of origin.

I still end where I begin

like the black grammar of a white magician

answering for myself before my own inquisition

for heresies that were holy enough

to be condemned to the fire as proof

of their volatility.

Your blood was a watercolour.

Mine was an oil.

And red was the colour of pain.

I shook things off me

like water off the fur of a dog

that’s just come ashore

on the far side of the river.

You ran in the rain

like a crazy ribbon

from the gifts you were given to give

and didn’t know how to survive.

But wanting to live

isn’t the same thing

as trying to stay alive

though they’re the two ends

of the same telescope.

When despair becomes

the orthodoxy of the age

and sinks like a heavyweight

who threw the fight like Atlantis

when it lost its sea-legs

the only true protest is hope

and the abandoned courage of a bubble

expanding like the universe

to break the surface

in a rapture of aquatic freedom

and disappear into the new medium

of an evolving atmosphere with wings.

And sometimes it’s hard

to remember the way things turned out

as if the certainties were brief weathervanes

of the good days that never came

and the doubts went on forever

looking for scapegoats they could blame

like the leftover smoke

of an extinguished candleflame.

And though I might be slow

I know I’ve been thorough over the years

in wishing you love and life

and laughter among friends.

So I’ve never summoned you by name

like a ghost to a seance of strangers

who think they know you better than I do

and make way too much of too many little things

that don’t matter anymore.

I haven’t swept the stars off my stairs in years.

And there are loveletters

piled up in the mailbox

that say I’m in arrears

and when the windows cry

as they sometimes still do

looking out over the vastness

of the view from here

at the solitary figures fading

into the landscape of their homelessness

I try to cheer them up

like a reflecting telescope

by getting them to look at the bright side of things

by exchanging their lenses for mirrors

the way love does

new lamps for old

when everything that’s beautiful and lucid

disappears under a veil of rain

like old eyes looking out at the world

through the new tears of a stranger’s pain

like a faithful death-wish that’s come true again.

PATRICK WHITE

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

THE ONLY WAY TO CONTROL THINGS

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Water on rock

a fist can’t do anything to stop the rain

that keeps washing its bloody knuckles

by kissing the raw red buds

of the pain-killing poppies clean.

Anger grows ashamed of itself

in the presence of unopposable compassion

just as planets are humbled by their atmospheres.

The soft supple things of life insist

and the hard brittle ones comply.

Bullies are the broken toys of wimps.

Power limps.

But space is an open hand.

Mass may shape it

but it teaches matter how to move

just as the sky converts its openness

into a cloud and a bird

or the silence nurtures

the embryo of a blue word

in the empty womb of the dark mother

like the echo of something that can’t be said.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

Not a posture of giving.

Not a posture of receiving.

Not a posture of greeting or farewell.

Not hanging on or letting go

but the single bridge they both make

when they’re both at peace with the flow.

It’s not the branch it’s not the trunk

it’s not the root it’s not the fruit

but the open handedness of its leaves

that is a tree’s consummate passion.

Isis tattoos her star on their palms

like sailors and sails

to keep them from drowning

and into the valleys of their open hands

that lie at the foot of their crook-backed mountains

the aloof stars risk the intimacy of fireflies

and fate flows down like tributaries into the mindstream

as life roots its wildflowers on both shores

as if there were no sides to the flowing

of our binary lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

You cannot bind the knower to the knowing

as if time had to know where eternity was going

before anything could change.

X marks the spot where all maps are born

to lead you back to yourself

like a treasure you forgot to bury.

An open hand is a ploughed field ready for seed.

An open hand is the generosity that is inherent in need.

An open hand is and is not an open hand.

No hinges can define it

because it’s not a two-faced Janus

standing in the doorway of a new year.

An open hand doesn’t look forward.

And open hand doesn’t look back.

What opens like a flower doesn’t close like a door

and when a hand opens

it opens at the urging of a light within

that makes the light without

glow like the mother of wine.

An open hand isn’t the writing on the wall.

Moses came down the mountain with a stone tablet

but an open hand makes

an avalanche of the ten commandments

and goes its own way without submission or regret

like a vine with a prehensile grip.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when things are out of control.

It isn’t a day of yes followed by a night of no.

There’s nothing divine or infernal about it.

An open hand is all that humans need to know

about their own nature

when they let their gods and demons go.

Nothing missing.

Nothing complete.

An open hand is enlightenment.

A fist puts a bad spin on ignorance.

An open hand is a book older than the Bible.

An open hand isn’t a tool

or a new kind of stealth weapon.

An open hand isn’t a weathervane

or a rudder in the wind

or one wing of a bird

with a secret twin.

An open hand is the only way to control things

without killing them for their own good.

An open hand does not say thou shalt not

or you should.

An open hand is not a white flag of surrender

a victory flag or a sloppy salute.

It’s not the price tag you look at

when no one is looking

on a second-hand suit

you’ve been wearing out like a body for years.

An open hand isn’t the hesitant offer of an uncertain friend

held out like a placebo that can’t heal anything.

You might have fixed the palings

but you still haven’t mended the fence.

An open hand is the way things feel when you’re truly alive.

It’s got nothing to do with how the fittest survive.

An open hand is the afterlife of a fist that died in defeat

trying to unseat an older power

that swallows it like a god

dissolves a cube of sugar in water

and finds it sweet to be absolved of the deed.

An open hand is a cup that could hold an ocean

but never overflows.

An open hand isn’t a relic of the thorns

that pinned a butterfly messiah

to the webbed cross of a sacrilegious spider

or Ciceronian appendages nailed to a senate door

like a bill that didn’t pass

or Che Guevara’s hands cut off

by the people they laboured for like rebel fruit

that went against the grain of the tree

that poisoned everybody like a jackboot.

An open hand isn’t a proposal for reform.

It’s not the new norm.

It’s not what not to do

when people are watching you

to see if you’re the same as them.

An open hand is the only way to control things

when you don’t know what to do

at the genetic crossroads

of cosmic and domestic things

that weigh on your mind

like the dirty laundry of evolution

piling up in the corners

like falling standards of confusion.

It doesn’t question anything

so it never rejects an answer.

It doesn’t pretend to be the sign

that beatifies its own suggestion.

An open hand isn’t trying to make

a housewife of an iris

or trying to nail things down

to get a grip on things

like a man who knows how to suffer like a floor.

An open hand isn’t something

worth living or dying for.

It won’t save your life.

It won’t take it.

It’s not a lifeboat or an anchor.

Four fingers and a conductor for a thumb

don’t make a choir of flesh

that will make the angels come like groupies

and just because

you’ve got runners on four bases

doesn’t mean you can hit a home run

like the stand-in umpire

behind the home plate of your palm.

Four men out and one man on

and the thumb bunts to the outfield

in the last inning of a pre-fixed playoff game

that shaves the score like a pencil into points.

An open hand is the only way to disarm a fist

that buries the road you’re on

like an improvised explosive device

timed to go off in your face like a hand grenade.

The only way to control things without controlling them

is with an open hand.

An open hand does not deny or affirm.

An open hand legislates like the light

and judges like the rain.

Five fingers are the roots of a hung jury.

Five syllables of an incommensurable life sentence.

An open hand isn’t the servile agent of a wilful mind.

It doesn’t do anyone’s bidding.

It isn’t the delta at the end of a long river

whose life flashes before its eyes

like an ancient civilization

as it disappears into the sea.

An open hand doesn’t squat on the ground

like some denuded navel-gazer

who mistakes his belly-button for his third eye.

An open hand says as much to the deaf as the blind.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is the sign of a mind at rest

with what it doesn’t understand.

An open hand isn’t a contract with anything.

An open hand isn’t a flatlining fist.

An open hand is a loveletter that doesn’t insist

on being returned like a dove

that’s just discovered land.

An open hand is the fairest image of a god

ever created in the likeness of a human.

An open hand is the omnidirectional threshold

of the homelessness we built

on a cornerstone of quicksand

like water moonlighting as a rose.

An open hand isn’t celibate or promiscuous.

An open hand warms itself

around the cold fires of the stars

and tells tall tales about the constellations

of scars and callouses that have sprung up

like villages along its lifelines.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand is a myth of origins

that ends where it begins.

An open hand makes no distinction

between matter and mind.

An open hand is the enlightened gesture

of a human who knows without grasping

what they don’t understand

and welcomes without expectation

all those who cross over it like the floor

and pass under it like the roof

of a house without a door or a window

to keep anything in or out.

An open hand is as certain as doubt

it doesn’t know what it’s all about

but the only way to control things

when they’re coming apart

and coming together

is with a hand

as open as an ample heart

that gets it by letting it go

one breath one death

one footstep one heartbeat

one spring one autumn

one hail and farewell after another.

The only way to control things is with an open hand.

An open hand rests in its power like the flower

the Buddha gave away to Ananda

as all he could and couldn’t and wouldn’t say.

Seekers look for starmaps to paradise

like the night looking for the day

that shines all around them

and blinds them.

But look as they may

an open hand is always the way that finds them.

The only way to control things is with an open hand

that binds us to the boundlessness

of letting go of who we are

like a star on the lam

that poured itself out like insight

to say to the night I am.

This is my hand.

It’s open.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

THE NIGHT IN THE WOUNDED MIRROR

The night in the wounded mirror

is only a childhood away from my face

and there’s always a shattered window

between me and my starless shining,

and a dead bird upturned on the sill

as if the sky, too, had its quota of roadkill.

Looking back from all these

lightyears and constellations away,

on the black day I was born under an eclipse

like a flower clenched into a fist,

an eye without an iris darker than a shark’s,

I suspect there was a lot more suffering back then

than I was able to live my way through,

estranged in the corner of a kitchen

that was a feeding frenzy of knives.

I still can’t leave one out on the counter

without fearing it’s just another punctuation mark,

the claw of a comma in a long sentence of blood.

At best, it’s the silver scar of the moon

that slashed me open like a well-honed loveletter

that wasn’t meant for me.

And I still don’t know how to approach

the child I was, the child I still am

time-travelling through himself like a glacier

as if he could put a stop to evolution

or survive his extinction

by keeping to himself like ice.

I look upon his solitude and silence,

the unaccusing indictment of his face,

like a cold, brass plaque

commemorating the unidentifiable victims

of an atrocity that can’t be understood.

He’s still seven and I’m looping through sixty

like the spine of a calendar

shedding me like autumn,

a picture of turning leaves on every page,

until there’s no way of telling what age we are

in this season out of time,

and I want to love him, I want

to say things that could heal us both like water

before I take him with me into my grave,

but I don’t truly know how,

and there are secret vows of violation

that are taken without a mouth

and assassins of intimacy in the shadows

and children sleeping in snakepits

who make up their own bedtime stories

and dream of things that can’t be told to anyone

who hasn’t been devoured in their ancient infancy

by the furious innocence of the sea.

Dark-hearted jewel

of a child in the night,

older than light

who has made more of me

than I can make of him,

when I weep for what he knows

and will not say, what am I,

what are these words

in the inky shacks of the trees

but the lengthening shadow

of the darkness that pours out of him like blood,

or duct-tape like moonlight

over the mouth of a scream?

And if I come back now

like the legend I have made of his sorrow

to gather him up in my arms

like a harvest under a full moon,

and if I sit with him all night

without saying anything

here on this skull of a rock

until each of us is the memory of the other,

could it make anything better,

would it take the thorn of the moon

out of the eye of the dragon

that sheds its skin like childhood skies,

not knowing where things end, things begin?

PATRICK WHITE

EVERYBODY SAYS I'M TOO INTENSE

EVERYBODY SAYS I’M TOO INTENSE

Everybody says I’m too intense and I say

you sure as hell aren’t.

And since I was sixteen in highschool

and before that in the local neighbourhood

in the bosom of my family

people have always thought I was mad.

My highschool graduation yearbook says

most likely to become

a mad teacher mad scientist mad poet mad.

An oracular assessment of my peers

that has haunted me for years.

But I say crazy is the only antidote

to the extreme chaos of conditioned consciousness.

Look at the world.

Lies lies lies.

A coalition of lies

that calls itself

the history of civilization.

Crazy wisdom.

The tantric insight

into the fact

there is no nature to things.

You’re not a very wise human

if you don’t understand ignorance

is the clearest expression of enlightenment.

You see what I mean?

It’s hard to speak of unity

in the split tongue of a snake

without making an oxymoron of it

at the fork in the roads

it mistakes for a direction.

Regard the dead parachutes of Babylon

no one can understand you

I said to myself one day dying with a sneer.

It’s the moral obligation of a writer to make things clear.

I forget who said it.

But he was a nitwit.

One of the lice of literature

that makes your mind want to scratch itself raw

for the next half century.

It’s that word moral that bothers me.

Not his preconception of clarity

though when it gets down to that

you smear the mirror

when you try to be clear about clarity.

I said that.

It takes an amateur madman

to be a good shrink

and make reality

try to correspond

to what you think.

But what an impoverished way to live your life.

What a distortion of humanity.

If you’re mad enough

there’s plenty of room in the asylum

to embrace sanity with decorum.

When in Rome do as the Romans do

and try not to make a spectacle of yourself in the Colosseum.

It’s been my experience

that so much of what the world calls mad

is only freedom

with the courage to open its eyes.

Most people look into the eyes

of spontaneous freedom

and it terrifies them.

They don’t want to know

what’s not there.

The world ends at the back of their eyelids.

Things just get too deep

and they drown in their sleep

like pearl divers on the moon.

At every moment of your life

life is more certain than death.

It’s all you can say about

where you expect to be tomorrow

and where this is now.

Everybody always wants things

to look the way they seem.

They want to live the dream awake.

They don’t go along with their own mindstream.

They’re shore-huggers.

They live at the edge

of the great sea of mysterious being

in sandcastles with blowholes

that burp like tiny volcanoes in the receding tide.

Herculaneum and Pompey

are mummified in the flow

down their pygmy mountainsides

but it’s easy to see where they hide

thinking they’re out of reach.

But who am I to preach

quicksand to cornerstones such as these?

Everybody always tells me I’m too intense

but they’ve never been through a nightstorm

far out on the Pacific

where the moon’s your only lifeboat

and it’s just gone down

like a bright penny in a wishing well

like a last longshot in the slots

of an odds-making hell.

And it’s seven to five you survive.

They’ve never fallen in love with a hurricane rose

that’s built like a fortune-cookie

and paints her eyelids

with the blood of ex-lovers

who were sacrificial enough to propose.

If you go looking for the meaning of life sincerely

sooner or latter it will find you

like one fact final enough to delude all the others

into thinking it’s ultimately true.

Complete one act well

and you’ve accomplished everything

because one act begets another

until everything is done of its own accord.

Because your birth isn’t terminal,

your death is ongoing.

And the same is true in reverse.

How do I know this is so?

I let go.

I blossom like the memories of a dead branch

in the apple orchards of the Hesperides,

everyone of them

a full moon.

I see how innocent my doubt is.

So even my darkness

is a singing bird on a green bough.

I’ve looked at drops of water

at the tips of the blades of the stargrass

like the thin-skinned tears of the sky in childbirth

and everyone of them

was the seed of a new world.

Worlds within worlds

whose only conventions

are the creative dimensions of the perceivers.

Not one size fits all.

I don’t put my finger to my lips

like an ego-I

to eclipse the great silence.

I let it say me with its eyes.

And we both come as a great surprise to each other

when we’re standing

on the same side of the mirror

on the far shore of the mindstream

like two eyes of the same seeing

astonished we’re here at all

without lying to the miracle

about our reasons for being.

Have you ever considered the enormous distances

in the body of a small bird?

Or how strangely intimate a star can be

from thousands of lightyears away?

A whisper of lucidity in an oceanic ear.

Something you’ve heard for a long time

but never listened to before.

Never this near.

This clear.

Have you ever wondered which of two sisters

is the older of the elements.

Fire or water?

Or why spring lies about her age

when she’s as old as autumn

and then claims

to be the daughter of the grain

when in fact she’s the womb of summer?

Is it insane to wonder?

Is it too intense to fear

living my whole life

as if I were never here

to take a good look?

Is it deranged to feel

the enlargement of my seeing

is not the diminishment of my being

because I opened my eyes

and saw they were both

two ends of the same telescope?

It’s one thing to let the light in through the gates of your eyes.

It’s wholly another to let it get this far

into the palace of your imagination

without being announced

or scrutinized.

Life’s a breeze

when you don’t look at it

like a disease you’re afraid to get over.

If I’m inspired by the vastness of my ignorance

to turn a leaf over now and again

like a new page in an old book

to avoid being obvious

am I looking for a happy ending

or am I just delighting in my indolence

when I read it like a map of my own lifelines

by running my finger over it as if I were blind

and it were the one who could see?

If I don’t believe we appear briefly

to disappear forever

because everything here

is a vast collaboration

with creative emptiness

and it isn’t going anywhere

what do I care

if you’re confused by my endeavours?

What’s it to you

if I’m a mirage on a grailquest in a desert of stars?

Or if I practise compassion spontaneously

toward myself and others

as if we were all the same wound

under many scars

and if my lies heal,

are they not the fruit of insight?

If I’m the dark genius

deeply intrigued

by my own misdirection

that you say I am

though that doesn’t change a thing

about the way I can’t help being

and not being myself,

what makes you think

there’s only one star

you can point out

like the needle

in the impoverished compass

of your last course correction

as if there were only one way to go

and the truth were always

somewhere north of you

instead of under your feet

in all directions at once

like the radiance of stars

before the arising of signs?

Today Jesus and the Buddha walk on water.

Tomorrow Lucifer and Kamamara will walk on fire.

But when the opposites

get their baggage together

and realize they can’t lift it

and abandon it by the side of the road

like an outhouse on a trailer hitch

or a hubcap in a country ditch

that’s stopped spinning around

and come to rest in an oxymoron

posing as the full moon

that’s come to liberate

an empty asylum

they both walk on earth

bewildered by their innocence

when they discover

they’ve never had anything to do

with the course of events

that made them who they are.

Wasn’t the Buddha enlightened

by watching Venus in the dawn

lead the sun up

like the morning star

that once was Lucifer

before he took the fall like a ripe apple,

before he stole fire from the gods like Prometheus

the thief of inspiration,

knowing the moment of his perfection

in all realms of knowledge

infernal or divine

was the best time to jump?

And the darkness will always seem like a liar

to those who don’t know the truth.

If I don’t see life as just a bag of water

with nine holes in it

leaking out of itself

as I once used to

eras and eras ago

and you still do

when I look at what remains

of the desicated parachute of a jellyfish

you’ve made of your brains

clinging to shore

next to the sewage drains

that poured you out

and washed you up

and wiped their mouths of the taste of a dead ocean

what’s it to you

if I run so far out to sea

from so high up

on the down side of the world mountain

I’m swimming with dolphins on the moon?

I’m teaching blind starfish how to shine

like dark matter with a mind of its own

and no sign of a constellation

with feet of clay

afraid to leave home.

Say what you want to say.

Be what you want to be.

Enlighten your ignorance

and then ignore your enlightenment.

Don’t drive the darkness out of your lucidity

like a scapegoat into a spiritual desert

you’re afraid to enter

because you’re not bright enough to see

that under every threshold

between the inside and the out

certainty and doubt

insanity and the sane

the trivial and profound

the homeless and a habitable planet

there’s a sphere

spinning on a tilted axis

in the immensity of space

that’s so far out it’s in.

PATRICK WHITE