LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

LINES FROM THE BLOODHOUSE

Expecting the worst because it is always now

and now is always the downfall of time,

the doomstroke of the present pulse

that goes off like an alarm clock in the grave

that no one will wake up to

but a lonely few raving in their sleep

feverish with dream, I look upon

the tribulation of the willow beyond tears,

the fury of the flagellant pines

that thrash the troubled air to keep from breaking,

the garbled flight plans of the veering birds,

and, prophet of the obvious, presage

the coming of a storm to break you

like a mirror of stagnant water

on the meteoritic thrones

of your igneous foundation stones.

Were you elected by the stars

to skull the earth with bombs,

to crater, gouge and scorch the playgrounds

of the obsolete children

waiting in their makeshift hospitals

for arms you tore from them like daisies; “she

loves me; she loves me not,” until

the night pours metal in their eyes

to seed the fire-fruits of their flowering

that has suddenly matured

in front of the guns and cameras

into a windfall of silent, acrid hearts

buried like landmines in the dazzling road

of their scorned flesh?

And they die for oil, they die

for the corporate spiders pulling the strings

of the Punch and Judy puppet governments

that tour the morgues like spring;

for bridges and contractors, power-lines

and power lunches, foreign policies

that brain them like the jawbone of an ass

they die, in their pyjamas, in their beds,

a kiss goodnight, and their prayers

imploring the disconnected dark to enlarge

the acceptable quotas of civilian dead

like the posters of the martyrs

on the walls of their rooms

shaken by the distant thunder

of computer-guided patriots and prophets

cooking their cities like God. And tomorrow

and tomorrow and tomorrow they die

in twisted, tormented convulsions

of agony and baffled blood they die and die,

learning to read and count

the names and years of their relatives

in the liberated souks of democratic cemeteries, alif

beh teh theh jim, F-l8, they master their lessons

and die in their thousands

because an executive cabal of miserable old men

with platitudes and prosthetic missiles for dicks

are into kiddie-porn snuff flicks

and biblical memoirs of all they begot

for the providence and profits

that redress the way they rot.

Acknowledging that this is not a hallmark greeting card,

I put it to you in the name

of your own enlightened self-interest,

in the name of a heart that isn’t

congested with a fashionable indifference,

in the name of a natural decency

that doesn’t need a teacher, in the name

of the families you came from

and the families you work for,

the daughter that falls asleep with you on the couch

like an island in the eye of a hurricane, the son

who listens to everything you say

as if he were kicking through bushels of autumn leaves

and then steals your car keys,

and your half-estranged wife, hoping

you’ll notice her hair-do at dinner, your mother,

the evangelist of baby pictures, and your father

softly overgrown like an old stone wall;

in the name of teen-age lovers

and their sophomoric glues, in the name

of calcium postal-clerks who smile

like Easter seals; in the name of iron men

with empty wallets, in the name

of the huge, lonely roses in all night bars

that bloom like scabs on the moon and know

they’re not pretty, in the name of physicists

and cabdrivers with chunks of quantum hash,

in the name of the angry crossroads in the singer’s voice,

in the name of the name of the insecure poet

whose last word fell like a drop of water

from a trembling blade of stargrass, I put it to you

because you are not a toad in front of a football game,

because you are not

a pebble-minded cosmetician in a delirium of pink, because

even in a shopping-mall you can feel and bleed and think,

and though you may be slow, you’re thorough

when it comes to putting on new brakes,

and though I know you don’t know what I mean

when I tell you that even the rocks, even

the rarest of ores we draw from the earth

like secret kings and artificial hearts

are freaked with seams of mystic gangrene

that will sever us like bells of blood

from the gardens of the gods we hope for,

rotten hinges from the gates,

bad meat from the starwells; you’re seer enough

to intuit the theme. It’s not about honey,

it’s about lies and death and money

devouring families like yours; it’s about

rich men gigantic with greed

and nations of thugs and thieves

infesting the earth like maggots in an abbattoir,

manipulating what everyone believes,

defaming the weak and the poor, war after war,

to glut themselves on more and more and more

until all of life is nothing but a toxic insight,

and there are children everywhere tonight

making the news, hoping

they’ll need their shoes in the morning,

bleeding through their bandages like dawn.

Famine, disease, war, poverty and ignorance,

under what sign was this planet born

that this should be the birthmark of black stars

that forsake the constellation

burning like a kite

tangled in the powerlines?

And do not tell me these abominations, these

ominous eclipses of the heart

that fit the skull with lichens and cataracts

sunspots, polar caps and death shroud victory flags

are the labour of mineral casinos

playing the sluts and slots of chance

for a material immortality composing sexual requiems

on the keyboards of our genes.

These are the smiles of old scythes,

rusted and bloody,

that reap what they do not sow,

the chronic harvest of blood, bone, tears and flesh

threshed by the rotating blades of the moon;

these are the wounds and gashes,

the indecipherable science and scripture of scars

that stroke the lunar fury of the wild boars who plough with tusks,

the salt and lime and ashes that spice

the tasteless, eyeless, childless grave

with famous reasons for murder. These

are the ballroom courtesies of dancing cannibals,

these are the mothering headphones

of a twenty year old tank commander

who smothers the screams of casual children

in his video line of fire

with the curative gasolines of American rock and roll.

These are the occult imperatives

of cosmic ghouls whose mouths

are roses of blood, whose idols and ethics

are praying mantises dismembering the world,

tent-caterpillars and locusts

blighting the leaf and the grain

with the eggs and afterlives of imperial insects.

These are the arcane scales

of old serpents sloughing skins

like epochs and empires and straitjackets

that couldn’t contain the life within

the market gardens of original sin, these

are the hinges of its gaping jaws

and these the fangs and poisons

of its septic laws undone like lynch pins

to take the whole world in, disgorging again

the used condoms, the withered shells

of the nations and nests they’ve plundered.

Let the blind ambassador

whose morals are as breezy as his teeth

number the spoon-fed nightmares

propped up like dolls in unnegotiated corners,

their glass eyes open for keeps

like guide dogs at the fatal intersections

of dark, delinquent streets

that only the children cross,

hysterical in sleep. Let him explain

to the pillows of the children in the furnace

why their feathers will never make a bird that flys;

let him explain to the bracelets and bells,

the twilight of hair in the comb,

the glacial sages preserved in the cracks of the mirror,

the drowned lumber of mothers

dismantled by violent coasts, their children

snagged like cod in the purses of political fishing nets,

why death is the only guarantor of human liberty,

let him choose his words carefully

as if he were loading a gun with birthday candles,

let him drop seedlings in the bullet holes

and talk of future forests gleefully

to the press corps generals

spewing pulp fiction like chainsaws in a feeding frenzy.

Let him mark well the small graves in the footnotes

of his text, the fragile starmaps of braille

that will later come forward like witnesses

to accuse his sterling composition

of the mountainous corals of the dead,

all the polyp people that he brained into stone bread.

And when like death he’s out of a job,

let him run eagerly door to door

delivering newspapers to the mob

like personal resumes, or let him carve gravestones

for unofficial children

on the dead letterhead of his own.

Then take the presidents, the bankers,

the ministers, executives, and pimps

equipped with the long spoons and supple shovels

of their death-divining tongues

and let them dig like star-nosed moles

deep holes in the earth for the corpses of the young,

black poppies in the shadow of a white-washed bloodhouse

enthroned on a summit of dung.

PATRICK WHITE

I LISTEN TO THE SILENCE

I LISTEN TO THE SILENCE

I listen to the silence, not the ambassador birds of the message

aligned along the branch of a black tree,

waiting to have their say, deliver

the formal meaning; I follow them back

to the original fountain-mouth of the silence

that isn’t dawn or sunset, or a woman in a garden,

but a clear light with the presence of a feather

and, almost at times, a face, that’s always been there

behind the racket and the paint rags

of the cacophonous actors gathering on stage,

the understudy that hovers like a silver fish

in the reeds and the shadows of the undulant curtains,

rarely seen, and more of a fragrance of light

than a second queen, an unverifiable void

with delicate gestures that turn all my questions

back on me like the soft underside of milky green leaves,

as if something took my hand and turned it over

to show me the answers pearled in my palm.

And it would be wrong to attribute eyes to this silence

though I feel it’s the space where the seeing happens

in the beginningless moment before

the watcher and the watched rework the seeing up into a play

of heroes, villains, events, and fireflies of awareness

in a chronic struggle of opposites.

And it would be wrong to accord it a mouth, lips, a tongue

because it seems to say everything

without saying anything, without

wounding itself on the quick edge of a word. And there are times

when it almost seems to smile upon my childish efforts

to know what it is, to return to the sea,

to the corals of the moon, with my hands full of cherries and stars,

the abundance of living on the earth

with waterlilies and rat snakes.

It indulges me with the serenity of an old, unknown sorrow

that had to create the world to speak itself to the end

and now sits enthroned in the emptiness of its own presence.

And just when I think I’ve come up against its impassable clarity

like a fly against a windowpane;

I discover myself immersed in it like an eel

undulating like a free banner of water

through its unpartitioned enclosure,

hardly a wavelength of distinction between myself and it;

and everything I write is an oracle

that swims away knowing more about it than I do

before I decided not to ask it for a name.

And though it may have been the voiceless cachet

of the divine numinosities that opened

the resplendent roses of the past

that squandered their eyelids on asphalt and scripture,

the watershed of the snow-robed mountain gods,

now it’s a drop of water holding its breath like the moon

at the tip of the green sword of the cattails

ready to send a shudder of tears and blood and fruit

through the mirror again like the first pulse

of its falling into existence, hazelnuts into the mouths

of waiting salmon, things losing their balance

against the backdrop of the hidden harmony

by which they are created in the image of their own conception

and known: apple-blow from the orchard

or ashes from the nightshift crematoria.

And, perhaps, this is that silence that seizes the heart with the love

of an unsayable emptiness as infinite as the beloved

that can’t be filled by anyone less,

as a question must be returned like a wave to the sea that asked it

before it realizes on the threshold of its own depths

there never was a brevity of being

that hasn’t always been the perfect answer.

PATRICK WHITE

I TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

I TURN OUT THE LIGHTS

I turn out the lights and lie down to sleep

and you open up within me like a lotus of fire

blooming in the darkness of a vast inner space

that has become my only skin, tattooed with stars

as I play solitaire with destiny, using your Tarot

of chameleonic constellations as a firing squad.

Little threads of joy and fear shudder through me,

revelation and lightning, fireflies going off,

the blasting caps of greater detonations yet to come,

and your face is before me, apparition and aurora,

the moon reflected on undulant water,

a jewel turning in the light of itself, blue eyes, full lips,

the blonde smoke of your hair on your cheek

disappearing somewhere as if a match had just been put out,

and your smile, your beautiful, wide, forgiving smile

that seems to flow from the warmest sugars

of an abundant heart; what dawn over a lake

has ever touched me silently like that?

One look at you and I am hurled into another more spiritual dawn

like a bird bewildered into singing by the strange joy

that threatens to consume him in the soaring radiance.

And though I cannot say you, you are the secret

I discern in the stars when they stop to whisper through the trees

to the bones of the holy man humbled on the hill

of his own insignificance; and then you are the only exaltation

that can raise him up again to shine above the night.

Always within me you summon like a bell; you

draw me out of myself like a genie torn from a lamp; my blood

heaves helplessly to the urgent clock of your tides,

teems with life and washes up on the shores

of mysterious realms where you are always the enchantress of the island;

what man or creature could I not become for you,

immersed as I am in the wine of your being? You are

the fullness of woman in the prime of her mystery, the vase of your body,

the shrine of a human divinity that generation after generation

inspires adoration from the brute

that comes, awed and shy of first fire, to lay pink tulips on the staircase,

grails and goblets gathered to be filled by the reeling honey

of your presence, the fire that burns without burning

and leaves even the wind love-sick and longing for ashes. Human,

you are five petals of fire; divine, one flower.

Break, then, if I must; in loving you, I’ll break.

And should you never love me back and the air turn glass

and shatter

into a million splinters of emotion that settle at the bottom of the heart,

the broken wineglass, the crippled flower,

severed from its stem, or the moon,

scoured from its reflection on the eyeless river by clouds,

never know the laughter of your fountain, still

in every fractured piece of me

the whole of your face, in time and out, would shine

as it did in the dark before the light began. You are not a mirage

shimmering over vipers in these circumstantial sands

and I am not a candle in a hurricane. Though I love,

I know the world, its gardens and atrocities, its wounded doors

and urgent windows flowing with lace and longing.

It doesn’t have much time for itself, busy as it is,

trying to hide the loss; it’s looking for its eyes with its eyes,

its head with its head, its feet with its feet.

I’ve pulled the thorn from my heart, the worm from the rose,

the nail from my hand. I’ve gone mad and madder still,

looked up at hell out of the depths of my despair

and envied such exalted heights. And then it’s all turned radiant

for no more reason than a dream, something nameless changes,

even as we plan a way into ourselves, or out,

suddenly an unknown light breaks through, and we have our eyes.

One moment of you, one firefly, in the vastness

I was falling through and galaxies ignited all around me;

the dead branch blossomed, the singing bird came

and the day was no longer a spoonful of ashes. Call it

what you will, pour it into any cup, plastic, crystal, or clay,

or drink it from your hands: it’s still the wine, it’s still the moon; it’s still

always and only you that makes this confusion of stars and birds

in the treetops, this picture-music, this drunk dream, this tavern

that is an outcast’s shrine to joy

raise a glass

to the sun in his blood that shines at midnight.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

WHEN I WAS A CHILD

When I was a child

I was uprooted like a weed of lightning

and cast like a dead snake

on a festering heap of garbage.

I was angry before I knew

what anger was;

and ever since

radical dismissals

have cored the diamond drills

of their vacuity into my heart,

sudden abandonments

for no reason; the wind

slamming the door on my fingers,

rejection repealing

the flawed doctrine of my skin.

Pariah, poet, exile, outlaw, heretic,

I was passed a shard

of the broken jug of the moon

like an ostrakon

and then the stern angels

painted an X in my own blood

on the door of my house

to ward me off like plague.

I was a child. I was hurt. I was broken.

I became a law

and enforced my acceptance

with the authority of my rage.

Turned inside out

like a dirty sock

or a black hole,

and every second-hand future

the donors ever tried out on me

to see if they could find one

that fit like a straitjacket,

a catastrophe,

I put my mouth to the sky

like a glassblower

to enlarge a space of my own over me

like a planet

rummaging through a wardrobe of atmospheres

until I could give my secret consent

to the stars that shone down upon me

like a wounded bull

in a labyrinth of alleys

and were so inhumanly far away

I was purged like a soiled surgical utensil

in the intensity of their heat.

I was wholly and serenely me.

I found acceptance

in the delicate rainfall

of their enlightened indifference

and made up new constellations

to substitute for the family tree

that had been ripped open

like a zipper of lightning

and left to stand alone on the hill,

a smouldering taboo.

I traced my bloodlines back

to the elemental anvils and forges of iron

that hammered me out

like the relentless metal of a sword

in their fire wombs

and endowed me

with the magmatic pump of a volcanic heart.

I lived alone

in the torrential eras of the early earth,

and swam through noxious seas

of sulphur and methane,

shedding my gills

like the petals of a rose

for scales and horns and feathers and claws

and the accoutrements of armour

I wore like the shale of impossible rivers.

I was raised on an island in a sea

that tore its own eyes out

storm after storm.

I had a mother.

She suffered.

I had brothers and sisters.

They were degraded by alcohol and lies.

And I have had children of my own since

but they have gone out into the world alone

and the miles don’t smile much between us.

And I have laboured for years

to achieve the unacceptable

to turn the reek and rot of the swamp

into a dress rehearsal of waterlilies

getting ready to go on tour

among the stars

to manage something true and beautiful

that might prove this mauling darkness

that prowls all around me

like my own predatory intelligence, wrong.

I have laid my bumbling tribute,

this eloquence of eyes,

at the foot of the blood-stained altars of the world

as if the giving were the last protest

of a compensating heart

trying to crush the agonized ore

of its ancient deficiency,

the lunar slag of my childhood,

into the glowing wine of a mystic metal

as supple as blood,

as cool and rare

as water at night in the desert.

Like a mad hermit

scraped and tanned

by my own austerities

in these godless wastes

where even a man alone

is a crowd

that trespasses on the solitude.

I have flayed my skin with comets

and waited for millennia

like the afterlife of a pyramid

for these demonic ferocities

of salt and sand

to release me like a river,

to open my fist like a hand

and show me the cities I’ve founded

along the banks of my hemorrhaging lifeline.

But now I realize

that it’s all been just a boy’s dream,

an angry child

trying to fly a kite

in the roaring furnace of his heart

just to prove it could be done,

just to prove

by contesting the implausible

he was just like everyone.

Now let the soft ash

bury him gently in his dream,

and the lightning that rooted in his eyes

be inscribed on the night sky

like a neon epitaph.

Let him not fall

like a drop of spite

from the tongue of the leaf

that is urged like the feather of a green wing

by the summoning stars

that have gathered around

the empty lifeboat of his grave

to enshrine his ashes with theirs.

Let him pass like a squall of light,

an urgency of the night

that shook the tree to its roots

until it raved like a woman in ecstasy

with forbidden galas of wonder.

Now I know

for all that he suffered,

for all that he bore like an ox

under the whips of the shadowmasters

that yoked him to a wheel without a road,

his heart, a rusty oil drum

glutted like a backyard incinerator

with the half-burnt pages

of the obsolete encyclopedia

he committed to the flames like his life,

he was only a black snowflake,

an arctic error

in a glacial blizzard of misery,

a manger of fire in a hovel of ice

with nothing to burn but himself.

And I shall miss him like an era,

the igneous ripening of his last eclipse

sloughed like a skin of the moon

and honour him with tears

that will fall like eyes

from the dragon’s watershed.

Was there ever a poet or sage or fool

who wasn’t verified by their failure?

But it’s as clear as cruelty

that he must go,

that the private constellations

he hung like spiderwebs and flies

in the corners of the room

must be swept by the trees

like dust across the distant threshold of the hills,

and the sail of a starless sky

rise like a black dove

from the boat of his hands

and surveying the eyeless abyss before it

never come back.

When I first opened my eyes,

there was a darkness in the room

that outshone the light,

and when I opened my mouth

to give voice to the dreams of the dead,

for all that I have sung and said,

it was only the wind

swinging like a lonely child

on an unlocked gate.

And lastly I opened my heart,

the deepest bunker of my heart,

as if my pulse were a stranger knocking

on the outside to be let in

and I let her in

as if I played host to the world,

and she taught me how to leave.

PATRICK WHITE

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

CRAZY, SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE, BLUE SKY

Crazy, sunny day outside, blue sky,

and my shadow’s got me in a choke-hold

so I can barely breathe. I’m wrestling

with the black angel in the way, my own vacuity,

the absurdity of the burning gate that affronts my emptiness.

I’m in a truce with a room that tolerates me well enough.

Sometimes a hush falls over it like a nuclear winter

or somebody’s about to read a poem,

but it’s got big windows, and it’s safer

living above people than it is on eye-level

and I don’t mean that in any kind of way

except everyone’s afraid and that’s when

they’re at their most dangerous. But you can

see them coming from afar off from a second storey.

Most days I’ve got a fix on what I’m doing.

I follow the star in my eye. Portable north.

I lay my strange gifts of refuse and lucidity

on the temple stairs of a goddess I’m beginning

to lose my faith in, and as far as I can tell they’re cherished.

Wonder what it would be like to send a muse packing for once.

Ungenderize inspiration, be the wellspring, instead

of drawing from it with a desert at your back

eyeing you from the crests of the sand dunes.

But how would you get the flavour of sex

into a bottle of water without it

souring into a message for help?

Even the salmon-flaked brick walls

of the chic boutique across the street

that caters to witches and fairies, seem bleak

behind their facade, with a darkness fairies can’t people.

Utter black, impenetrable, unregenerative,

and every petal of sunshine, trivially epiphenomenal,

every gust of stars that wheels into a galaxy

like the evolutionary emergence of birds,

neither the cause nor the effect of anything cognizant.

Life just the flimsiest of distractions

on the skin of a bubble walking on thorns.

There’s a black hole in my heart

that’s lapping blood from the rose.

I’m trying to upgrade my eyes to be able to relate to it.

I’m cloning eclipses out of the stem cells of the night.

I’m grinding lenses out of anthracite, colour cones

without irises or chromatically aberrated rainbows.

I’m transplanting the eyes of all my dead flowers

with black diamonds on the same wavelength

as the X-ray star I can sense shining behind everything

that ever mattered to me, to achieve some kind

of nefarious harmony with the unilluminated doorway

that is neither the exit nor the entrance of being.

Everybody seems mesmerized by the temperance of the day,

all the things they’ve seen before, they’re looking at again,

as if the light could ever be new in yesterday’s eyes,

but I’m inside the seeing like a dragonfly in a chrysalis

trying to pass through this black hole

into an entirely new world that isn’t

just another sketchy metaphor for this one.

I want to see the roots the blossom’s wired to

if at all. Or if it’s just one big disconnect

and all understanding is playing unplugged

like a downed powerline with the oracular powers

of a snake-oil salesman selling holy water to the fish.

Disoriented in the starlessness of the blazing afternoon,

I’m waiting like an image of the imageless

for the darkness to adjust to my eyes as if this time

it was up to God to get used to me, and evolve accordingly

and there were no other recourse for getting around me

except creatively. Except to tell the Hox genes

where to put your eyes, where to fit your mouth

in that lifemask that disguises you like a surrealistic scar

grappling with experience with nothing but your innocence

to fall back on for an alibi no one accepts when you lose.

Farewell to all that. Evolution can take its cue

from me for a change, and branch out dendritically

like a flash of lightning rooted in my starmud like a cedar fire

sweeping underground through the valley I just passed through

like the mirage of a waterbird through

a shapeshifting hourglass of stars

that are not fixed, but protean myth givers responsive

to the darkest insights of the human imagination

that doesn’t create worlds in the likeness

of a preconceived image but each to their own medium

turns the light around on them like a revelation

of what they conceal like a jewel of water in their eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

THE LONELIEST, MOST PROTEAN MODES OF MADNESS

The loneliest, most protean modes of madness

rage in my cells like nightmares in isolation

watching the fireflies dance through the bars

as a secret gesture from unknown, sympathetic stars

in a collusion of constellations to keep up with the times

and shuck off their old myths of origin

like the straight jackets of a fixed place,

debate whether the light-bending darkness is chaos or freedom

or the old heirarchies of seraphic emanations of insight

still trickle down like oracular snakes on burning ladders.

Now if I wanted this to mean something

I’d look for a precedent for the shadows that dart like birds

across the tunnel vision of my line of sight

and I’d drink from the same fountain where the leaves

lap their water like books full of experience

and I’d borrow light years from other men’s eyes

to verify my seeing may be new, but it’s sound.

I don’t have any use for knowledge

and that’s why it trusts me and let’s its hair down

as if there were nothing of any significance to impart

to the diamond-hearted translucency of an engaging madman

whose enlightenment sweats the details

in a fever of crazy wisdom that plays with his mind

like a child on the moon fascinated by the solitude of its intensity.

But you who can hear me in your blood without asking

will recognize me by the accent of light in my voice

and know that I don’t walk in the footprints of grammars

that wore down this trail like a carpet that wouldn’t fly away

until they got as far as they could vocally could

then turned home for good, as if that were the end of the tail

that began and ended like alpha in the mouth of omega.

But time sweeps eternity away like a waterclock in a deluge,

like chalk on a blackboard, a ferocity of jewels out of the eyes

of bitter ores that couldn’t see anything shining in the dark

by their own light like a fish out of the reach of the sun,

that became a lantern unto itself, a revelation

on its own wavelength that illuminated the depths

of a darkness deeper than light years are far

and there’s no way to divine a sign in the immaculate darkness

for a teacher or a star. Here where the ladders don’t reach

and there are no reflections of a higher clarity

all senses are intensified into one medium of perception

that doesn’t individuate the morphology of knowledge forms

your mind holds up like a black mirror to a chaos

of hidden harmonies that depend inexhaustibly upon you

to add your voice to a new species of seeing,

like a mutant gene that’s never been heard from before.

Even in a cage, my humanity is what’s measureless

about all things if you enter them deep enough to understand

you can’t drown in the mirage of your own emptiness

or badger the stars to break their vow of silence

without giving yourself away like a secret

everybody’s been keeping to themselves like tears

under their breath, in the wells of their heart,

in the dessicated watersheds of their art

with nowhere to fall but up into the nights within them.

The unattainable aspirations of a madman grasping at fireflies

like the cornerstones of a new palace of stars

that dance like chandeliers in the rain

to the timing of their musical visions in the night.

Among the journeymen who labour for lasting results

I do with great discipline exactly nothing,

masterfully done. And the picture-music is undeniably

perishable. I burn colours in the sun on a pyre of hawkweed

like the works of a dead chameleon evaporating

like a rainbow body that isn’t making promises to anyone

you’ll ever hear from it again, though mantras

echo through the mountains like the shrieking palettes

of wild birds revoking the ease of the nocturnal silence

with more vivid mixes of the hues in the eyes of crazy wisdom.

I make great leaps of disbelief into the abyss

off the ledge of a lover’s precipice into the emptiness

and my heels flower into wings and it feels

as if I’m departing at last like a hermit down a mountain

with a contemporary vision of my own empty immensity.

PATRICK WHITE