AND IT COMES AND IT TAKES, IT LEVELS AND IT DEFIES

AND IT COMES AND IT TAKES, IT LEVELS AND IT DEFIES

And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.

And not all the sorrow in the world

is enough to cool the burn. Will death make

as big a splash as birth did when it jumped in the pond?

How will you die? At home in bed

with your kids banked around you

like a zodiac of grieving signs, head on

at seventeen into a drunk ambulance

like a suicide you backed into like a ventriloquist

afraid to call your own bluff? Heart attack, cancer,

eating the Angel of Death like the wrong mushroom

in a rainy spring, your extinction, one of seven

horrible oddities of random selection to make the news

like a public health warning not to take the chance?

And you, having just finished medical school?

The wise man dies, the fool, the lover, the glutton and baby.

Death plays solitaire by opening and closing doors.

Death is not amused by the meaning of our lives.

Death doesn’t read the menu

of what we’ve avoided and cherished.

It comes and it takes, it levels and it defies.

Are you going to die like an old woman

evaporating in her sleep like a dream lingering on a lake

until the dawn mistakes her for a ghost

and brushes her aside like a spider-web?

Pity the poor body’s infantile helplessness at the end.

Pity the terror in the eyes of the imprisoned one

who could feel his chains slipping away like a spinal cord

into an immaculate freedom ungoverned by circumstance.

Even the stars, chalk on a blackboard, and death,

the brush that wipes them away before the next class.

As it is with the flowers, the jewel of life is slowly

pried out of our hands with soft crowbars of sunlight.

God, how we labour to leave something behind

like a fragrance of our having been here once

like a human on a hillside deeply in love with the clouds.

Death panics us into believing we’re achieving

something enduring and benign, but truth is,

given that one good can adumbrate another that’s tragic,

we’re just setting our heads on fire like matches

to add our blazing to the darkness of the blind.

We strike, we ignite, we flare, we fade like a daylily

into an abyss of stars we’re all apprenticed to

and the light goes out like a firefly in a black hole.

Or we’re as indelible as a menage a trois of water.

The triune identity of existence, three phases of the moon.

No onceness to our being here forever.

Persist in beginning and you condemn yourself to death.

The jewel turns you in the light of your infinite facets.

Your eyes turn to you and ask what they’re looking at.

Death wants an explanation for what you’re up to.

And life couldn’t care less whether you had one or not.

A dead child can lead you to enlightenment

and a live one to despair. Two hinges of the same gate,

putting their hands together in prayer like birds on the wing.

We live in pain. We live in unexpected bliss. But what we are

is imaginations beyond this. We embrace life. We dis death.

We separate. We hold lanterns up to the fog

like empty lifeboats far out at sea at night but what if

everyone swam safely ashore as they did

in their mothers’ wombs? We aren’t drowned out

like the cosmic hiss of negligible wavelengths

that once accomplished mighty things. The senses

don’t age into old colours and old sounds.

Whatever you reach out to touch is as new and forever as now.

Has it ever been this day before you woke up to it?

Did yellow die overnight? Did red have a heart attack?

Inside. Outside. There are no walls in this palace of space.

No doors you have to enter seriatum. No locks to undo.

No ordeals to endure. No sod to turn over like a gravedigger

to lay a foundation stone that’s the whole of the building

as if you buried a turtle under its own shell.

A song bird under an iron bell. The sacred syllable

of a black pearl under the tongue of an oyster. To no avail.

The wave rides you like a flying carpet, not a sail

that has to wait for the wind to arise again or the tide to crest.

It’s just like a photon of insight. When you look at it

trying to grasp it as something fixed in your mind,

it acts just like the particle you were expecting to see,

but as soon as you turn your eye away from it,

it slips away from you like the cosine of a snake

back into its own chameleonic medium of water and light.

Everywhere is the centre of your boundlessness

like the nave of a wheel on a hearse

that doesn’t equate once around the sun on its axis

with the distance of the journey in time and space and mind

it takes to realize, whatever size of the circumference you make

like the ripples of interlocking bracelets of rain

or tree rings in the heartwood of a black walnut

that all fixed points in the wheeling world turn on zero.

That there’s not a wavelength of difference between

what is and is not, that you’ve been attributing an identity

to things that emerged with you from the polymorphous perverse

in order to recognize a self distinct from the universe

that mothered it into existence out of nothing

but the dark nature of life to fuel the mind

with the radiance of diamonds burning in the light

without anyone or anything ever being consumed

or the night diminished like an ageing constellation

by even so much as a single vital sign

of unending exploration carrying forth of its own accord

The lamp bears the flame that lends the lamp its eyes.

When the flame goes out, everything it’s every seen

and been and tried to mean goes with it into

worlds within worlds that keep adapting themselves to you

like stars to the eyes of those who keep looking back at them

as the source of their own shining by a river

that’s constantly changing shapes in its flowing

to reflect the mind’s protean approach to the inconceivable.

And it comes and it takes, it levels and it defies,

but you can look upon it with the luminous eyes

of enlightened mirrors that can see whole worlds

abounding in every piece it breaks to improve the view.

PATRICK WHITE  

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct.

PATRICK WHITE  

CINDER IN THE SUN'S EYE

CINDER IN THE SUN’S EYE

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

You plunge into the light like a moth on a mission

and it’s the sun that disappears to shine at midnight

in the black mirrors of your eyes. Dark light, intense,

starling, charred swan, you know as well as I do,

the occult approach to the optimism of an eclipse

is to act radically in the name of things you can

only unattainably conceive of. Love on your wrist

like a hawk whose wing you healed, dwelling

in your homelessness without a fear of eviction.

No truth in the mouth of the snake that’s pulled

the fangs of its conviction out of the sky

like crescent moons, pins from the eye

of a voodoo doll you’ve nursed for light years

on the nightshift of a morgue that’s aroused by death.

Milk of your left breast kills. The other practices compassion.

Whole snakepits in the shrines of the wavelengths

mourning the death of Medusa, as if snakes too

had something to mourn that makes them shine within you.

Ten thousand photos from an orbiting satellite

with X ray vision and a spectrographic trajectory

couldn’t improve upon the license of your beauty

like a black pearl at the magmatic core of planet

trying to make herself as habitable as she can to visitors.

And for those who aren’t used to your kind of light,

you hand out sun-visors and starmaps

and black candles to show them the way home

through the same old doorway they came in by.

You’re an ambassadorial firefly from the third eye

of dark matter where the roots of the light are embedded

and you’ve got a message for the blossom

that looks like a love letter. The moon

budding on a dead branch like a crack in the door

you left ajar like an orchard in waiting on a cold spring night.

And who but you could stand eye to eye with the bravery

you practise like a World War II canary

in an underground armaments factory that isn’t bomb proof?

There’s nothing yellow about the skin of your ammunition.

You confront cosmic dangers in the intimate details.

You ignite and defuse the supernovas and black holes

that endanger the lives of those who follow you like a cult

and though you like their company, you’d much rather be

maculately alone with someone who can see for themselves

that those who were driven out, exiled

into the emptiness of the unknown extremes of the mind

often return with their hands full of the strangest gifts

that time and distance have ever offered anyone

to prove how off course the shore-huggers are

in assessing the course of a life as far out

and comprehensive as the sea. Deeper than stars.

Emotionally more expansive than the immensity

of any shining that can be palmed off cheaply

in the pawn shops of the retinal tidal pools clutching

to the relics and icons of disembodied crab claws.

You don’t live like the collateral damage of the sun

and the sea. You don’t ask amputees to show you

a way out of the labyrinth by the light of spent candles.

Cinder in the sun’s eye, there’s fire in your tears.

A luminosity that flows unceasingly

from the watersheds of broken mirrors.

You just have to cry. And dragons as immutable

as diamond cutters take up flower arranging

in a Zen teahouse enlightened by the rain.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T COVER YOUR EYES

DON’T COVER YOUR EYES

Don’t cover your eyes when the stars begin to fall; don’t

orphan your fire in a well. Your heart is not a museum of roses,

your love not a misdirected airdrop over a refugee camp.

Friend of these sidereal affinities we spread like table-cloths across space,

friend of these lonely silos in my eyes and this blood that breaks like bread,

still, you are the flower in the vase, impassioned, an urgent poppy.

All the blind librarians of the morning star agree

you are not who you say you are

when you show the shadows of authority your passport rainbow.

Sometimes the tongue of a forsaken seer dances like a drunk at a funeral

down the liberated allies of a sleeping ghetto

while the moon watches like a cat on a windowsill

high overhead. Shy bird feathered by your sudden flaring, your heart,

young and quick, darts easily from branch to branch

barely a presence behind the green jubilation

of a million silver leaves trembling with rain on the reborn tree.

Before the bird sings, we hear it. Before the star shines,

the night is fully enlightened. And home is always a bridge

where we wait to be rescued from hurling ourselves off

into our own desperate reflections. Let the fall save you.

You are the priestess in the shrine of mysterious apples,

sybil and empress of opulent oranges. No matter how many alphabets

enshroud the fairies in the legendary brilliance of ancient skies

and over the telephone cancel the sacred islands in their eyes,

your blood will bind them to this vital afterlife of now like fish

swimming through the flawed water palace

of a drowned engine. You can bet your lies on it;

your sorrows are not the face-paint of weeping clowns,

nor your natural humanity a moat around a zoo for dwindling dragons.

When you sprawl like a wave of wine across the living room floor,

unspooling the honey and gold of your body’s flower-mine,

I see orchards in your guitar, wheat fire,

the landscape of a small, borderless country

trying to decide which of all its trees should form a government.

Compassionate zero, water your only foundation stone,

you string a harp between your fangs

between the unblooded crescents of the moon

and sink your music deep into the heart of your astounded prey.

Little killer, don’t you know, little killer,

let me tell you,

the saints are crueler than the sinners, the virgins

cheaper than the whores, and reason in its nest of crows

a bird that never soars. Through dangerous doorways, under

lethal skies, the ghost dance of the blind tiger, the white faun

while the widows of light pawn their eyeless rings

in the brutal crucibles of dawn. You want some advice?

Only the great fools who plead for nothing

know all the words to the song.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU DON'T COME

YOU DON’T COME

You don’t come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart

plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward

to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps

from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back

of a winged horse. You don’t come and such

is the nature of love

I go out of the plane not knowing

if I’ve got a parachute on and my heart

pulls the rip cord to see if there’s any salvation in the fall,

any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory

or dandelion seed, or this is just another

mode of acceleration to death. You don’t come

and my heart candles without a reserve,

I haven’t packed a spare dawn

and though I will make every effort to understand

there’s a grave waiting down below like an open mouth

and the void is laughing at the persistent folly

of my believing you would come,

and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore

sends my mendicant self-image out

wandering over thirteenth century Europe like some flagellant

on a pilgrimage of flogging, ribbons of blood running down my back

from salted wounds, and though I know

the expectation and the disappointment are both delusions,

birdshit on the claws of a sphinx, and I will try to be

intelligent and wise about the whole thing,

tugging my heart out like a garbage-scow into deep space

where it will be laced with explosives and scuttled once again,

and I will be awarded another paradoxical brownie-badge

by another scout-master Tibetan rinpoche

for knowing how to survive alone in this empty wilderness,

a tiger of will, a Viking of resolve,

an aging clown without children or laughter, a jester-king

officiating from the throneless butt of his own joke,

a poet with nothing to praise, a painter

with cataracts in the eye and flowers in the sky, I

know there is nothing I can tell myself, no spiritual weed

I can poultice over the vacancy that goes on forever

to draw out the infection from my heart, the gangrene

from the broken pillar of the foolish temple I erected

to serve the goddess in any of her lunar phases,

and though I struggle like a diminished thing to accept my dejection,

to imbibe the toxins from the left tit of the Medusa

while trying not to turn into stone, while trying

not to avert my eyes from this crone-form of the moon, let

Kali drink my blood, in the name of insight, clarity and courage,

good wolf, I know this, too, is delusion, another

projected holograph from the third eye of the pineal gland,

and kick the chair from under

the useless fruit of my head in a noose. Back to earth

without a heat shield. Impact. You don’t come

and your absence is filling up with people I like as far as I know

but don’t want to see, people who walk into

the sad forests of my solitudinous melancholy with chain-saws

for conversation, stupid lost bored people who just can’t help it,

looking for cigarettes and companionship in the life-boat,

the leper-colony, stars on the Titanic, and I am compelled up

from the depths of my cosmic despair like a white whale in a holding pen

to jump for the tourists, make a big splash, make

anything happen to amuse them, and I try, I honestly try, regretting

even the shabby sincerity of my own incapacitated efforts to love them

by pulling something out of the guts

of my own anonymous dismemberment, a hand or an eye or a smile,

and it all feels like the work of a tired ox grinding social corn

on the zodiacal millstone of its own heart

but everyone leaves like a gray day anyway, the sun eclipsed

and I am returned to myself like polluted water

running like a desert flashflood through the dry creekbed

of your undeniable absence. You don’t come. You have forgotten me

as you said you wouldn’t and all the promises

of intimacy and vivid affection

are unleashed like a plague of locusts on the moon

to devour the open-faced swordless clocks of the flowers

I planted there for you to know eternity in the hour.

I am eaten alive by a million mouths

and even yesterday’s demons banished from the feast

are called back from lean exile

to this jubilant feeding-frenzy that consumes without mercy.

You don’t come. And I don’t blame you. I understand

the flux of time and circumstance, I understand

how a man goes to bed at night thinking

he’ll be drinking wine in the morning

and winds up being offered vinegar on a cross,

I understand that there are events that appear like sharks

in this water droplet of a world, that there are crossroads

that baffle the journey with traffic cops

and starless unknowns, with roadkill and dangerous vagrants,

that there are off road shortcuts across the far fields

that seem to take forever to return us to where we began. Alive

fifty-four years, I understand what it is to walk this road of ghosts, a refugee,

carrying your own body to a shower in a concentration camp,

to mistake the apocalypse of a nuclear explosion

for the advent of dawn, to mistake the knot in a river of wood

for a ship on the horizon, an island in the stream. Castaway again

on the cold rocks of some extraterrestrial shore

to follow my own footprints back to me, every life form on the planet,

including myself, a fossil of nirvanic spontaneity,

some indecipherable glyph broken off

the loaf of some lost continent like a crumb of stale bread, a bone-fragment,

a dead civilization, to feed the curiosity of time-travellers

who fix like junkies on the mystery of their passage

through empty alien rooms, though I burn like a library of reasons,

and mock my own scholarship, mustering arguments against myself

to excuse your absence and justify another fleet of coffins

sailing to the rescue, I do understand. You do not come. This negligence

is unintentional. You are young, free, a gust of wind and a leaf

that flares up in a back-alley throwing gold-dust in your eyes,

fire-fly north that can’t be constellated, a dolphin off the bough,

and I am no fisherman with a net, no obvious lures,

who’s trying to draw you up on deck out of your element,

but a captain going down with the ship, his hands at the wheel out of habit.

You have not come and I am a thousand years older and more correct

than I was on this delirious bird-mad morning,

lyrically awaiting you, than I am now looking upon all these sad eggs

smashed like a junkyard of embryo suns and broken crowns

at the foot of a nest in the bent axle of the cosmic tree

where I hang like the pagan god, Wodin, a sacrifice unto myself,

one pathos to another, inaudibly whispering last words

into the ineffable silence of a non-existent ear.

You have not come and all your reasons are valid. Brutally,

I understand the firewalk of this excruciation on crutches,

limping over hot coals to transcend myself for clarity’s sake,

for poetry’s sake, your sake, my sake, love’s sake, the seeing’s sake,

I have worn out the road and the bridges of my feet

with my walking across the rivers of hell to understand:

I am aging and the ignorant insane children of this black spring,

brought up on logos and T.V. only come to look through

the rubble of Tintagel for the lost jewels of Merlin,

for any heart-stone they could pull the sword out of

to establish their own thrones once again

in the fields of glory beyond the round table of the calendar.

I have drunk from the cup and passed it on and all the shining skies

that I have ever walked under, all the legends of my stars,

my former radiance, in their eyes, are cemeteries of dead stars,

black dwarfs and the holes of exhausted graves in space, the blue-white

of their ingathered light that once could stir a planet into life,

now the braille of an effaced epitaph runed on a poet’s tomb.

And it’s not as if they don’t come bearing gifts when they do come,

flowers and compliments to the green patina on my erudition,

small obeisances at graveside, gratitude

for my gray-haired kindness, token offerings to the dead,

to the prophetic skull of one of their ancestors

consulted like the weather or Moses

on the future of the promised land that I’m forbidden to enter. No blame

in their approach to the disembodied, no fault

on either side. I understand. You do not come. No word

to allay the silence, no sword to fall upon in the stoic shadows

of your portentous eclipse, no way to scry, haruspicate, divine

the meaning of the darkness that overtakes me

like Herculaneum under the canning-jar ash of a volcanic heart

putting up preserves. My dick falls off at forty. At thirty

the colour runs from my hair like a sunset. At fifty

I’m a desert in an hourglass. Fifty-four and my blood chips off

like flakes of paint from a dry rose. Two thousand a.d.,

at the turn of the millennium, my eyes turn into clouds,

my tongue, the spent autumn of a leaf on the wind. By forty-nine

all that I remember is on display in a museum, my eviscerated heart

sinks through a convenient tar-pit and my brain, cracked mud,

orders a modest sarcophagus and rents a small room under an affordable pyramid

close to the valley of the kings. Today

I shed a few tears tinged with acid that die

like rain looking for roots on rock and bury my riddle of bones and vertebrae

under the snuffed fire-pit of a cave floor

for an archaeologist not yet born to guess at what I was.

You do not come. I understand. Tired of scratching at my coffin lid,

I must get out, I go to the Perth Restaurant and call to see

if you need a ride even though the wheel

is ten thousand years in the future, fire hasn’t been discovered yet

and I’m back in the Jurassic, a tiny mammal, trying not

to be stepped on by a stampede of doomed dinosaurs.

Wrong number. Wrong life. You do not come. I understand,

the flag of my heart at half-mast on the pole of my spine,

and no one but strangers and hired mourners,

mirages and self-inflicted nightmares

to carry me out of my hapless resignation into a waiting hearse.

PATRICK WHITE

NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

NO SHELTER FOR THE HEART

No shelter for the heart, the wind

is a wound of torn birds.

Too long in the dark

the star blooms without eyes.

I break a vow of silence with my solitude

and poems materialize

like lifeboats on the moon

in a sea of shadows.

I light my last candle

and the darkness in the room

holds a black mass for what I’ve lost.

Sensitive as a window

the sky changes like a mood ring

and my muse is an albino chameleon in eclipse.

I keep an abacus of skulls

to remind me what year it is

but the hours go by

like pilgrims to their death

and I can’t relate to this eternal view of things.

The ghosts are used to me by now.

I keep the spiderwebs at bay in the corners.

I teach those who died young the names of the stars.

I remain undiverted by death

as the lesser of two differences.

And what do I know of love

I wish I didn’t when the longing returns

to come down like a hard rock from the mountain

into the valley like a rogue foundation stone?

My memories are all the first drafts

of lives I’ve scrapped like bad addictions.

I made a bad play

out of my encyclopedic sorrows

and closed it on opening night as a farce

and everyone on stage applauded for an encore.

Leave a gate open and I’ll walk through it.

Otherwise I’m the stranger at the fence.

I’m passing by. I’m where the road

runs out into the wilderness

and I won’t stop until I’m irrevocably lost.

I’ve decultified myself from my identity.

Even my own mind doesn’t recognize me.

But I’m one of the sacred clowns of words.

I jest with the sublimities of the absurd

to outwit the pain of going mad without a loss of face

or losing my voice to the echo of a death mask.

I sit in the dark like a fire that’s tired of dancing.

I’ve forsaken mystics to hang on to my senses

and I can see colours through my fingertips

that only the boney keyboards of the blind can imagine.

I’m a high-browed home-spun lunatic in a looping universe.

Profound as play, I hone my hunting skills

by painting magical trances on my skull wall

where the slayers lie among the slain

as if an explanation belittled the mystery

of lovers flint knapping the moon into spearheads

to sanctify the rose of blood they both live by.

What’s madness but a diversified neglect of sanity

in the name of counter-intuitive inanities

that break open like Zen fortune-cookies sometimes

or the koans of cosmic eggs giddy with the bliss

of kensha, satori, enlightenment, moksa, the blaze,

for turning your mind over at last like a white stone

to see what lived under it, with lives of their own.

Who says you can take your freedom too far

for the chains to reach? I’ve dragged the whole prison

along with me at times when I had to,

happy to die like an alarm of futile compassion

in an air raid of pre-emptive meteor strikes

trying to chip a diamond in the rough away

from its own image of shining. I was

choosey at the beginning of my entrance,

but the exit’s one size fits all like your next of kin.

I like being astronomical about my intimacy

with the women who cherish the boyish charms

of my effortless buoyancy in avoiding black holes

by never sinking into them like a cue ball,

though there’s no need to mention this

like an old planetismal theory I abandoned

for the more random action of aberrant orbits.

Not very acquisitive, I haven’t accumulated

the brittle polyps of a lunar barrier reef

to keel haul the moon when she’s riding low

over the extinct lava beds of her last rapture

for the cost of an atmosphere and the loss of an ocean.

I’m dog paddling in space without a life jacket on.

People look for words to express their feelings.

I’ve had to transmute a whole new grammar

out of the stem cells of my voice just to

hear myself think without anyone else talking for me.

So you fussed with language over a lifetime?

And you reek of poetry like a cheap cologne

you synthetically distilled from your garden of transplants

not wholly adapted to the soil they grow in

though you’ve uprooted all the weeds to the letter.

But what’s that compared to speaking in tongues

people haven’t been born to speak yet?

You can only write about so much life

as has mastered you at first sight

and if none of your emotions is crazed with hunger

the winners don’t get to plead for a second chance.

The garden is torched by dandelions.

The hydra-headed hollyhocks are toppled by the wind.

I exalt in the liberty of an unattainable excellence.

I fail greatly at everything I achieve.

I believe in what makes the night bird sing

as if its longing weren’t a secret the aspens

didn’t keep to themselves. I can see

no purpose to autumn, no clear reason for spring.

Whenever I forgo my intention, I accomplish

so much more than I could assess in a lifetime.

Never had a thought that wasn’t shadowed by a feeling

but I’ve never resorted to espionage

given my awareness is intelligent space

and the clouds of unknowing soon dissipate into stars.

I don’t look for periodicity in the clock of the rain.

The puncture wounds of childhood outgrow their scars

like expanding universes hype the Big Bang.

I build telescopes out of broken windowpanes

unaligned with the axis of the earth.

I made a quantum leap of faith into the unexplained.

I’ve got a unified field theory I call my mind.

I’m the remaining eye of a delusion that illuminates reality.

Just like a star. By the time you see it, it’s left you behind.

PATRICK WHITE