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

sixty-three 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. Sixty-three and my blood chips off

like flakes of paint from a dry rose. Two thousand twelve 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

WHY DO YOU CAST ME IN THE WORST LIGHT

WHY DO YOU CAST ME IN THE WORST LIGHT

Why do you cast me in the worst light possible

when you know I treat you like the navel of the world,

the Pleiades, the ghost of a mountain

that was once my heart? Why do you lie to me

when you know there are doors beyond the truth

I’ve already walked through

like an initiation into a darkness

that will adorn your breath with stars?

Nothing mundane, nothing extraordinary

and yet I find myself here with you at sixty-three

having run out of mirrors and windows to read,

believing there are no more eyes

like wells in a desert to drink from, no further

delirium of the spirit that won’t prove me a clown

if I were to believe in it at my age

when every hour is either a funeral, a storm, or a crisis.

And yet how much I do want to believe,

how much I long to discover

rain on the moon, mystical fireflies

in the punk and tinder of the cattails,

sacred keychains on the ground at my feet,

a phoenix in the ashes of the blue guitar. At times

everything is ecclesiastically vain, contaminated

by the insight, bad meat in the mindstream,

that everything I ever cherished and tried to emulate

is nothing more than the shabby dream,

the random action of expiring illusions

indifferent to their embodiment in blood or blessing,

child, martyr, suicide or saint,

prick, pariah, or prophet, all

without exception, true to the vision that is them,

even the madman convinced of his private verities

as the apple-tree is convinced of its leaves

and the sun espouses the flower. Is it not absurdly vain,

knowing all things are vain

to feel abandoned by the assurance,

so blithely and brightly assumed when young

among the junkyards and the orchards

that life has not been endured and transcended in vain,

that the tender transience of the fire, and the shadows that it cast,

the myriad transformations, the chrysalis and the coffin,

and all the ore of ardour refined

by the pursuit of an igneous excellence, the grace

of a virtue slowly attained like the taming of a wild gazelle,

or a chair well-made by a man

with the soul of a tree, were not without the grandeur

of a hidden harmony more crucial than the obvious,

no life lived that was lived to no purpose?

I can give myself like a seed to the wind, I can

sit down at a table of elements with the atoms

and toast the bonding ceremonies of carbon;

and I can shine into the vast openness of an endless night

with the exaltant ferocity of a ray of light

certain there are vital planets

in the path of my shining,

astronomers, lovers, sailors, and birds

to mitigate the expansive vacancies

in the breach of intelligent eyes. And behind

the order, the law, the function,

the dazzling billboards,

I can wander for hours aimlessly in the dark fields

stretching forever beyond our accommodations of chaos.

In the wyrd of perceptions,

sensations, thoughts, passions and ideas,

the mysterious abundance of my sentience,

I can depose the petty elector of myself

and confess like a key to my homelessness

there never was a threshold to cross,

or a door that didn’t open

to greet the emptiness either way as guest or host.

There never was a country, a shadow on the wall,

to obey or rule, nothing

but a devastating freedom that longs for chains

that cannot hold us in our passing because

we alone are the chain that binds us,

the stone that shuts us in,

and even the most infallible of prisons

in the glimpse of an insight, is dust on the wind.

And yet I long, as I have longed for you

and implored intrusions of the night to stay,

for a sweeter affirmation, even of chaos,

than these diminishments of seeing that turn me grey.

In a waste of fear and fire, against

my own unknowing

I long for a lie that’s worthy of the truth, a truth

that masters the masters of illusion

by revealing a place to hide

that is not hidden, an infinite openness that yet embraces

the hard crystal in the heart of the dream-catcher,

and a law that doesn’t condemn

the selflessness of everything that it’s forbidden,

and a mystery that discloses without an exegete

who you are, who I am, what a rose is,

an origin that isn’t a defamation of the end,

an impersonality with the face of a friend.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN'T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

THE GRAVE UP AHEAD HASN’T CHASTENED MY LONGINGS

The grave up ahead hasn’t chastened my longings,

nor joy become an offence to the probity of death.

Life’s not a protocol I’m trying to master

to approach the eternal orthodoxy in good form.

It’s important to bow up once and awhile to keep

your gratitude from growing reflexive. Time

might be the shedding serpent that was generated

like a wavelength out of my flashbulb of a skull,

but I’ve always kept a good enough grip on its head

to feed it its tail with no fear of being bit. Besides,

who’s ever known from the very beginning

whose hour this is for anyone though we blithely assume

we’re all living co-terminously. The Pre-Cambrian

just as it is now existed in the Renaissance

or the Middle Ages among the Pre-Raphaelites.

Cosimo Medici greets Dante Gabriel Rossetti

passing through the bus station, eras striating their minds

like glaciers, Viking runes on the back of the mirror.

I analyze my lust sometimes when I think of you.

I muse upon time as a fountain and a gutter in the same breath.

No waterclock is flowing the wrong way.

Winter stars in the heart of the green apple.

Crocuses under the snow. Like our senses, eventually

I came to understand that all four seasons

are wholly focused without distinction on now.

And now can burn a hole through your skin

the size of a third eye if you’re not careful.

But as Janis Joplin and Dogen Zenji said

seven hundred centuries apart,

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

And ever since I’ve been living this moment as if

it were the afterlife of forever and even meeting you

where the rubber hits the road, the print hits the paper

like a graffiti kind of shorthand, seems to me

written in the indelible hand of the unscripted evanescence

that mingles my mind and heart like blood and ink

in the inexhaustible watershed of my art.

Dreams of you. Fragrances of emotion

from these sidereal wildflowers rooted

along the mindstream that gets to where it’s going

with no hand on the rudder or wind in the sail.

Are those daylilies or wild irises in your flames?

Deadly nightshade in the umbrage of your eclipse?

How many burning bridges did you have to cross

in the shape of a crucified swan

to get here like the Milky Way without dying?

Pandora’s box or the Pierian spring of the muses,

beatific desire in the fire of the witchcraft of love,

or was I born a ghost too late

to attend upon you like a seance,

to get you humming to my unearthly resonance

like the witch hazel of a tuning fork

divining water that breaks

its vow of silence on the moon

to reveal the secret of life is a woman’s body

when she reveals it like a sacred syllable

to open your eyes down to the blood roots of her rose?

I taste the air, and I can sense the enormous vulnerability

that is the inversely proportional index

of how potentially dangerous you are to anyone

who hangs their heart like raw meat

on the first and last crescents of your claws

like a sacrifice to ensure an abounding harvest,

like a lure to a mermaid that’s never been caught.

Who could take hold of you like the moon by the earth?

The golden fish that swims from one extreme to the other,

depending on where it’s being looked for,

jumps into the drifting lifeboat by itself

the same way apples fall into your lap

with no intention on the part of the wind

to knock them down. Whenever I intuit your presence

as if a room just walked into a person,

you’re always such a windfall

stampeding through my gut

like mass amorous extinctions making a comeback.

Neuronic lightning flashes along my axons

like the discharge of a high voltage cloud of unknowing

illuminating the black mirror of the midnight lake

that sees everything through its third eye like a sky

whispering stars intriguing enough to make you

want to overhear their voices like fireflies of insight

that can’t be attributed to any sign of the zodiac.

And as far as I can tell from what I’ve heard so far

you could be the proto-nostratic grammar

of a new mother tongue with the grassroots vocabulary of a star

I have to leave more space in my heart than my eyes

to reach out and touch as if even my ashes

were still the green initiate of these immolations

where the mystery burns like a dragon in love

to prove its heretical innocence, and everything

is only as sacred as its taboo is revealingly dangerous.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

Like a river in its running, like life, like time, like mind

no point of departure that isn’t also a moment of arrival.

Toxic parasols and meteor showers shot precisely

out of the green radiants of the candling umbrellas

and half-hearted parachutes of the water hemlock.

Starbursts of flowers that scald like welding sparks.

Bouquets thrown backwards over the shoulders of mean brides.

Alone in the high, wild grass, I just want to lie down in the sun

until half of me leaks into my watershed and the other half

evaporates into the cerulean bliss of the oblivious sky,

just breathe myself out into unfathomable volumes of space,

a riff of sacrificial smoke from a guitar on a pyre

as unconcerned as fire about where I’m going from here.

I like the metaphors that spring up like wild irises

along the mindstream, so I guess this is flowing,

though I could as easily be walking down a dirt backwoods road

feeling many of the same things, as I exalted

in the early blossoming of the chicory as a cosmic event

with mystic implications for those who can see

eternity embodied in the earthly simplicity of flowers

and that time, in the long run, has nothing to do with enduring.

I’m going to trample out a deer bed and lie down here

sketching starmaps of this year’s flotilla of waterlilies

until the light of the isoscelean Summer Triangle breaks

like chalk on a blackboard. I want to clear my mind

like the Nazca Plateau and let the fireflies build runways

like well lit jungle zodiacs for the extraterrestrials.

Not expecting the wind to whisper secrets in my ear.

The trees can keep their secrets to themselves.

I’m not here to read the private life of the moon

left open like a diary of telescopic wavelengths

too intimate to be revealed to the one-eyed peeping toms.

Just want to settle into my own wake awhile

like dust kicked up by a wheel, numb the turmoil

on the wonder of things that embrace me as if

I were a stranger to myself the same as them

and our chief function in life, if there’s one at all,

were merely the expression of our presence here

arrayed in the eyes of all like moon rise in a drop of water.

Things flashing into this openness like constellations

of fish and dragonflies in a mirror elaborating their ripples

into flying carpets of musical effusion

that are never out of hidden harmony with chaos

even when seeds are scattered like dice

on the ghost of a chance on the wind lamenting its luck.

Don’t want to mean, or be, or do.

I’ve been through those doors so many times

I’m beginning to think my feet are retrogressive thresholds

or stone mill water wheels grinding out my daily bread

like a Mayan calendar with a new moon at harvest time.

Nothing’s resolved except perhaps you perceive

how the sublimities of life arise like Arcturus

out of its utter insignificance through an opening

in the crown of the black walnut tree you’re lying under.

Whatever I am, whether I bear a message or not,

or I’m just a witness that wasn’t called upon to testify,

comes a time when it seems more fruitive to let

the medium adapt its grammar to me to say what it wants

than I should try to shape it to the unsayable

that always leaves the taste of abandoned books in my mouth.

It’s possible to flute your emptiness through the top

of an empty whiskey bottle making nautical sounds below decks

like the s.o.s. of a lifeboat in distress. Or you can percolate

like a breakfast clutch of black-capped chickadees in the willows

trying to get them to take something seriously for once,

or mock the crows like lumps of coal too cynically short-sighted

to spot the diamonds in their soul. Or you can

stop imitating yourself as if you were the proto-type

of someone who hasn’t made it to the showroom floor yet.

They’re all feasibility studies in pragmatic absurdity.

Given time, any lifemask you’ve carved out of your unlikeness

will grow to resemble you as space

has become a similitude for the dead.

Me? I just want to lie here until all I’ve got left for a voice

is a bird homing in the twilight, and when I roll over

to look in the water and see what remains of me, is a face

as unrecognizable as the universe.

PATRICK WHITE

IN YOU

In you I come to the end of roads,

and an alphabet of burning wings

falls from an indigo sky

like meteors trying to write

the unsayable in a slash of light,

in a language of luminous scars

the night beatifies with mystic knowledge

that wants to name you

so deeply in thresholds and stars

the charged silence

is giving birth to an indelible mouth,

a doorway of blood,

an ancient grammar of fire

the wind puts on like a robe

to scry the darkness for a voice

that could fill the goblets

of the moon’s dead seas

with the wine of a radiant wound,

so much within me

already the tongue of a bell

that can taste you like blackberries.

The whole of you

in every single drop of your eyes,

you are the black swan

of the eclipse that rares its reflection in water,

the dark orchid in the shadow of the dragon

that sways like a bell in the night,

even your absence a shape of cherishing,

a harvest of shadows beyond the light

of the lamp that burns for you.

Within the deepest abyss of myself

where the heart stands alone

like a single black pillar

in the twilight wasteland of the world,

a mysterious temple to the ultimacy

of having been here once

to suffer the passage of form and time,

everything a gesture of space

that thaws back into itself,

I have written your name

in the hourglass of my blood

like a whisper of secret ink

that once voiced the light to be

and shook the stars like wheat

out of its blind abundance

and will be remembered forever

as the first intimacy of the sea,

and there is the rumour

of a dream in the air,

the fragrance of an approach,

that out of an ocean of light

the tide will embody a woman

like the shore of an island

littered with fingertips and kisses

enmeshed like galaxies and starfish

in the exhalation of her veils

and our lips will meet like archers,

and our bodies will sing like arrows

sunk like orchards through the heart

and long after the last flame of life is shed,

the night will silence the birds

in the groves where we bled like poppies

to open the gates of the mystery

like keys and rain, or the rosary of black pearls

that chants its prayers to the night

like the slow alarm of autumn geese

in the eyes of a human face.

I try to say what can’t be said,

pouring my spirit

into the wineskin of every word,

but my heart is a larger apple

than the bough of my voice can bear,

and the silence

that would erect temples everywhere like flowers

spun from the auroral silks of my soul

and perfume the air with the pollen of sacred fireflies,

every emotion a priest with a shaven head

to honour the moon

climbing the stairwell within me

of a million horizons at once

in every breathless step,

falls away behind me like the wake of a sinking ship

that lowers me into my coffin like a lifeboat

or a message in a bottle

that pleads like wine with the emptiness

for an alphabet that isn’t in arrears to time

to say you to the night

in a lightning breath of life beyond

these elemental likenesses I carve

from a quarry of stars.

And I know I ask for immortal children

from a human womb,

and wide as my powers are

to exceed the sky with homing birds,

to adorn the dead branch with windows

that dazzle the roots of dawn,

I am the ashes of a black star in daylight,

a stone man with a chain for a tongue

when I try to swim like Atlantis

through the depths of your shining within

and the last word, the last life

to flash across my mind as I drown

again and again like a pulse

in the embrace of your beauty

is always the world as it is

before anything was said.

PATRICK WHITE

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

IOTA SUBSCRIPT

Devoid of everything but metaphors,

the bread gone hard in the tasteless cupboard

littered with bees and flies

that struggled alone with death

on the plains of the upper shelf,

I enrich my patrician poverty

with poems and painted moons,

dreaming of the unlikely day

without anticipation

all things will be corrected. Hope is a lichen,

a sea of shadows on the moon

that drains the water from the stone,

the siren from the rock. Despair

is a cuff of black blood

caught in a bicycle chain,

and if there’s a dawn to all of this,

a day when it promises to change,

it always comes up like a bride

getting married at her own funeral,

my heart waiting,

alone with the flowers

in an empty limousine.

And madness is not an option

in these days of disintegration;

the asylums are full

and they’re handing out straitjackets

in the lifeboats of the survivors

who jumped ship

when the sea got rough.

I could drink or shoot up,

but that’s a parachute without a rip-cord,

and besides, who’s got the elevation

to get off on the rush

of their falling? And I’ve grown old

as a foundling

on the stairs

of an abandoned church; I have no faith

in miraculous adoptions

or the emergency exits

out of hell, and the deacons of absurdity

long ago gave up passing me around

from heart to heart

like a collection plate

when they saw how little I rendered

as the lean scythe of the harvest moon.

Now the mirrors leave pamphlets,

celestial junkmail

on the threshold of the mornings

left to live. The years fly by

like an abacus of birds

on the sagging powerlines

that weave compliant lightning

into spider-webs.

And everything I’ve caught

has poisoned me

as the women came and went,

different styles of voltage,

brown-outs and butterflies

surging through my heart

like a new transformer.

Now I remember them gratefully

as so many incubators and used cocoons

beyond conversion

I must be a lousy messiah

or one of the lost wise men

to have come this far

beguiled by an elusive star

without finding a manger anywhere

or saving anyone

from their unsalvageable selves,

least of all me, baffled

as I always am poetically

by these luminous rumours of clarity

that arise like women and waves

to dispose of what I am

and enlighten what I’m not

in the bedrooms and Babylons

and spiritual snake-pits

of a dozen sacred brothels.

Aging is not incremental,

drop by drop,

a succession of moments;

it’s precipitous, a stairwell

of continental shelves

I keep stepping off

into deeper, darker, colder depths,

each, a longer fall than the last;

or it’s like the rain

that fell on me as a child,

and falls on me now,

and will fall tomorrow

to open the flowers

that will languish on my coffin

before they launch my moon-boat

crammed with farewells

into the grave. On good days

poetry is an encyclopedic obituary

you can’t take out of the library,

on bad, a suicide note you can

as soon as you pay your late fees.

My devotion has made me absurd;

and my famous pursuit

of an earthly excellence

has treed me like a pack of hounds,

the chronic yapping

of a literally-minded audience

who want the word made blood.

Out on a leafless limb

I linger here

with only the rising loaf of the moon

to sustain me, believing

for lack of a better delusion

as I scramble the stars like code

it somehow keeps my life

hopelessly important

to bait my own dismemberment

by maintaining this fire-watch

throughout these long nights

in a collapsing wooden tower

erected by reformed arsonists

looking for revelation in a lightning strike.

If I have stayed true to the stars,

to fireflies and candles,

and poems that flare like a book of matches,

and preferred instead

to read in the upturned palms

of the passing storms

not the judgment of a god,

but a cheiromancy of luminous life-lines,

the humour is not lost upon me

nor the danger discounted

that the way I’m going

I might very well end up

reaching out for a rescue

that condemns me to hang

from a rope of my own, as usual

the last to know

in the name

of my misplaced loyalty to everything

I took my own life

to consecrate

the unhallowed ground

of an exalted footnote

wandering from page to page,

looking for a cigarette

and a purple passage worthy

of its illuminating irrelevancy,

its penny of qualification

in the back-rooms, sewers,

short-cuts, by-ways, alleys and gutters,

the addenda, appendices

and mystical errata,

the epilogues and variant recensions

that wait like empty cupboards

and extravagant cemeteries

to annotate these endless drafts

of the unpublishable book of life.

PATRICK WHITE