DANCING WITH AN OLD MAN UNDER THE MOON

DANCING WITH AN OLD MAN UNDER THE MOON

Dancing with an old man under the moon

with nothing but your tattoos on,

as it rose over the treeline like a mushroom

and as beauty is to wisdom,

the blossom of your fire

to the smoke of stacked firewood

waiting to be immolated in the Bonfire of the Vanities

like an library of fingerprints on paper

just to prove that we were here once

long before this autumn made a ghost of us

and we could feel more naked with our clothes on

than we ever have done with them off.

Junkies hitting up in a snakepit of desire,

the Burmese python a heroin addict in a swamp,

the high-wire act of the rose in the circus,

the aerial acrobatics of our noblest emotions

swinging through the unimpeachable air

on a one-handed trapeze that was the axis mundi

of the world in the aberrant orbit

of a lightning struck weathervane.

Your body, a guitar; your soul, an inflammable violin,

when I wasn’t burning bridges with you

like connections we didn’t want to make

we were going for long firewalks among the stars

hand in hand like a couple that grew up

in the same neighbourhood that paid no attention

to whether they went out into the world and made good.

I was improbably inclined

and you were desperately uncertain

and we kept the little that was chaste between us

bucolic with shepherd moons

and major and minor dogs trying to pasture a rabbit.

Some women are beautiful like moonlit gazelles

and Greek vases are, and you stand back silently

as you would before any masterpiece of classical form

cooly and contemplatively as if you were musing

in your amazement on a first magnitude star

it would be an aesthetic desecration to touch

with anything as unshapely as a human in love.

But you knew how to swing your hips like an hourglass

and I’ve always been happy to be suckered by time

into filling in on the night shift for a sacred clown

who had to meet a dead line, finishing a cartoon

of the constellations he drew for a newspaper

like an out of date starmap that had to cut back on its print run.

You came with doves, I saw them, with plaster casts

on their broken wings, deadly nightshade, black orchids

that had once been the shadows of beauty queens,

and the fragrance of big pheromones charging

the summer night in your eyes with an aura of urgency

you kept hid under the eyelids of your innocence

and I could never tell whether you were the salvage

of the witch that was drowned in a trial by ordeal

or the one that showed everyone how easy it was

to walk on water when you had to save yourself.

Intrigued by the dawn of your smile, by midnight,

I was ready to sacrifice myself to the cult of it

like a Druid with a lunar sickle to the apple-bloom

of a tree alphabet deranged by the dissociated sensibilities

of an occult muse just coming out of eclipse.

I was making catalogues of the stars

that lay like ashes in my eyes when you suddenly flared up

like the saline spirit of a green flame burning in all my firepits

that began to feel they had the vision of a young dragon again

to see such foxfire blooming in the eye-sockets of its urns,

after the dark rain and fire storms, the excruciating pain

of living a life of coal predicated upon the possibility of diamonds,

the transmutation of the low into a union with the high

like a snake with wings that could ride, by God, it could ride

its own mystic wavelengths like a plutonic alloy

of the early Bronze Age just as the heroes were getting ready

to cut the umbilical cords with their hysterical, Medusan mothers.

Gratitude? Yes. You braved the taboo of the wizard

like a night bird on my windowsill, like a star

through the bars of my isolation cell

in a covert observatory buried underground

like a radical theater in a dead planetarium

staging doomsday scenarios for an unenlightened think tank

that never turned the light around on themselves

to discover that their third eye isn’t the lens of a telescope.

And maybe you were the last hurrah of my flesh and bones

but, baby, you didn’t leave anything elegaic in my blood

to prove it and I think it came as no less of a surprise to you

as it did to me, beyond the shadow of the searchlight of our doubt,

love had removed the black spot from my heart

like a planet in transit across a Venutian sun

and put it on your cheek like a beauty mark

in the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Beneficent

to tempt Hafiz into offering Samarkand

to a young slave girl if she would only take his hand

among the rose bushes on the banks of the Ruknabad

even if it meant he had to account to the khan

for what he squandered like gardens on the moon.

Born with wings on the heels of my cowboy boots

instead of spurs, who so club-footed

or cloven-hoofed and sodden

as camels in a B.C. gold rush

as to dance with you in sensible shoes?

Your hair was autumn. Your eyes were spring.

I lived for awhile, o who could know how to thank you,

for six months like a supernova in love with a black hole

at the vernal equinox in the thirteenth house

of the zodiac I still consult like a starmap of your tattoos

when I’m out walking in the woods alone

with the full moon that hasn’t paled them in its light

even after all these years, still dancing with you in the night,

an old man circumambulating the fires of a dark bliss

by himself, certain he knows who he’s dancing with and for.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO MYSELF

TIME TO MYSELF

Time to myself.

The first half hour feels

as if I’m sitting at a bus-stop

waiting for something that’s never going to come.

Thoughts like stray threads of hair on my shoulder.

Old love affairs that have gone grey in my absence.

After the last flashflood I scuttled the ark of my heart

on the moon, like a dog far enough into the country

it couldn’t find its way home again.

Love’s always a mystically unique reality

but the cosmic urgencies of the pain

I endured demonically in the name

of things that were too feeble to believe in,

eventually came to hum like white noise

in the background of a boring curse

where all you could do was dogpaddle

in the flotsam and jetsam of incredible trivia

that floats up to the surface of a shipwreck on the bottom

waiting for the next lifeboat.

No one locks their doors in the country

unless they’re living a field away

from a hobby-farm, hillbilly crackhouse

that’s been handed down like the story

of a body in a lost housewell somewhere on the property,

so if someone were to step in out of the night,

I wouldn’t stand my ground like a ten point, white-tailed buck

on a hill that’s been posted against hunting

with grenades, and feel too sure of myself,

but just the same, I’d watch from a distance for awhile.

Like a wolf made shy by intelligence,

I wouldn’t come down from the timberline

until I was convinced by the probable concourse of events

there was no bounty on my head

and no judas-goat was pleading in a leg-hold trap.

Sounds brutal when I say it, but not to those

who’ve been shot at by shepherd moons

trying to cull the pack like asteroids into extinction

whenever it tried to snatch the golden calf by the throat

and bleed it like a rose of transubstantiation in the snow.

The most insane things I’ve ever done

in a world that specializes in absurdity

I’ve done for the beauty of the madness

that overtook me like the acids of a Venus fly-trap.

Sometimes love can be a lighthouse on the moon

with no one to give a warning to, it may be a mermaid

but it’s been singing the same old song on the rocks too long

and I’m poet enough to go down with the ship

but not as a creature of habit. The scratched guitar

with a warped neck in the corner

that made a benign hobby out of a way of life

that was once the death call of the music

that only endangered species could hear and dance to.

Love needs a wide screen to feature

the wingspans of its emotions so any sky

you might find yourself flying in fits you like skin.

But me? I can see a masterpiece in the paint rag of a parrot.

And there are worlds within worlds within worlds

so unanimously unconcerned with us

they have to read ancient history just to prove

that we exist as an unexplained anomaly

of the cosmic background hiss of radiant annihilation

deconstructing into the echoes of its original inspiration

like birds crying in the throat of a valley

that holds its notes too long

to keep time with the pace and passage of life.

Love’s a melodic state of mind with a percussive heartbeat

and no one’s ever really missing from the band

on the road like religious icons of democracy,

even when they get homesick for their girlfriends

and the drummer is moved in his heart of hearts

more by paranoia and lust than he is love and music

to end his calling in a bus station with a broken phone,

trying to make sure his girlfriend’s there

when he gets home at two in the morning.

Not especially bitter, and only occasionally longing,

but I remember the happy day my Greek chef friend announced

he no longer worshipped at the feet of the great goddess sex,

and died of cancer five months later, and how

even Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t pacify the hydra

of his sexual desires by lighting little fires

all around him when he slept on a pyre of women.

Worse than celibacy is abstracting the flesh into a hungry ghost.

To damn the body with the faint praise

of a sin of omission that denigrates its earthly excellence

as an instrument of God in the hands of rank amateurs

trying to weave flying carpets on the loom of a guitar

to add their wavelength of lament to the disappointed stars.

Where the bullet comes to rest

in a cosmic game of Russian roulette

is forensically irrelevant. Who

got it through the heart and who

got it through their head can go on arguing forever

who suffered the deepest death

when the daffodils began behaving like periscopes

intent on torpedoing the love boat

zigzaging through the sealanes of a wolfpack.

Open-armed as the bay of a seaworthy sailor,

I embrace love these days lightly with a kiss

like a ticket in a lottery I’m not expecting to win

but revel in like a Zen poet dancing with the moon

as if he were water, and it was taking its sail down

over the treetops, to stay awhile on his enchanted island

where delusion is not an obstruction to bliss,

and enlightenment isn’t anymore of a seer

than the scars of the star that stripmined your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

LONG DAY PAINTING BY MYSELF DOWN BY THE LAKE

Long day painting by myself down by the lake

where I used to paint with you many years ago,

and now your absence haunts my solitude

as I grey my greens with cool alizarin red

and though the trees and the water are the same

it’s a much eerier world just to know once

you who were here with me, are utterly gone,

and what has carried on without you, though

I’m affably intimate with its creative characteristics

is wholly estranged from the name I’ll write on this painting.

As if an era in art had passed. Dreams and assumptions,

things you take for granted because in living them

you sometimes must, like love and oxygen,

and the presumption of life going on between us,

for the most part unplanned,

but a commingling of waters nevertheless,

a sharing in the other’s quiet amazement

that the other exists as they are in your mindscape at all.

A heron rises from the cattails in the shallows.

A fish jumps at a dragonfly on the tip of a sword

of the wild irises in a muddle of mystic indigo

and a sulphur butterfly struggles in the thick pthalo blue

of the sky I slashed in with my painting knife

as if I were grouting the canvas like a mason

to lay a fieldstone wall that wouldn’t keep the birds out

that have learned to ignore me like a scarecrow

in warpaint ghost dancing at an easel

spreading its legs like a doe

come out of the woods

to drink quietly from its own reflection.

Everything seems thriving and deserted.

The waterlilies still clutter the wild rice

like prolific constellations of the frogs

whose singing doesn’t sound all that bad after awhile.

I’m a curiosity to the fox

that’s been taking a profound interest in my work

all afternoon as if I were some kind of savage impressionist

and it were a cultural savant with a few pointed suggestions.

Two raccoons luxuriating like moss on a femur of oak

behind me, watching me underpaint the lakeshore rocks

like two kids through the wire fence of a construction site.

Events of the day. Transactional armies in the grass,

bees and ruby throated humming birds

enabling the daylilies like pyromaniacs

and soon, the green dragon of the sumac

will burn in the auto de fe of the fall as well.

But you are not here to mention it to

and compared to the quality of the isolation

I once lived here with you in paradise

the beauty of my painting lacks the highlights

and finished details I used to attend to

knowing how they’d shine by the light of your eyes

as an effect of the atmospherics you brought to the scene.

And though everything appears the same,

it’s uncanny not to be heading homewards

with the shadows and the crows

as you and I did so many nights

well pleased with what

we laboured for all day in the sun

to a farmhouse full of paintings

whose windows cling to the remaining light

as we did like waterbirds for awhile

around a lake full of constellations

as the Eagle, the Swan and the Lyre,

went down behind the abstract expressions

of the sad geometry of the barn roof

weary of rusting like wavelengths of rippled tin,

not knowing whether it’s holding out

against the wind, the rain, the field fires

or still holding something empty

as an urn full of stars

that were scattered like chimney sparks

on one of the coldest nights of my life, in.

PATRICK WHITE

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

DYING YOUNG IN AUTUMN

Dying young in autumn,

the ideal death of a flower or a star

whose beauty’s still as obvious

as a door that’s been left ajar at night.

The fireflies are search parties

out looking for someone

who’s made an escape through the woods,

or they’re lamp lighting deer

out of the dark into the glare of their insights.

Train whistle in the distance

works its ghost to death

Doppler-shifting its lament

into an infra-red eclipse of existence.

And then the stars in the eyes

of the recurring storm of the trees,

flaring over-eagerly like candles and dragons

to burn for the sheer delight of it.

I make my way through a labyrinth

of foliage and moonlit shadows

to nowhere in particular

with a rocky slope glacially graded

down to what the locals say

is a fathomless lake none of their childhoods

were ever deep enough to plumb.

I lie down upon the cool poultice of the earth

and I can feel it drawing

all the fever out of me like the effluvium

of swimming the thousand polluted mindstreams

I’ve become osmotically enculturated to

like a dendritic form of spiritual gangrene.

The moon puts a new dressing on my wound.

I urge the pain to rest like a homing bird

on a limb that’s healing like the rafter of a house

that broke under the weight of what it upheld

when a three alarm fire in the heart

sought sanctuary from an ice storm

and it was nobody’s fault but my own

that I didn’t let it go out like a flagging comet

with the rest of the daylilies

that died in harness like parachutes.

I’ve kept it alive for lightyears

like a book of the occult in an industrial library.

I’ve cupped its light in my hands

like an ancestral offering

to the enlightenment of my peers

and though the clouds have raved

and the wind turned vicious

it still burns in me like a dragon in an aviary,

a canary in a mine, a muse in a lantern,

a genie in an old lamp, a female demon

that only blooms in fire like a black waterlily

with nothing to fear from the new moon.

Or the fireflies trying to find it on a star map.

PATRICK WHITE

SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

Some things you weep over forever.

Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.

Others last as long as it takes the rain

to get a flower to bloom and perish,

with promises of good things to come.

Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.

Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,

since the womb, and a good chance earlier,

things coming apart like a mother giving birth

to the ghost of herself she gave up

to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.

Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.

And who knows how many lifetimes

had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were

so you could show up here so uniquely?

Point is. Goodbye’s always half of the greeting

and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life

as it does to let go of it with.

Our entrance is a back-handed exit.

We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism

depending upon which way the wind

is blowing our mother’s ghost in our face.

Out of sorrow was born compassion

as our eyes were born of the light

flirting with nerve cells, as the sky and the stars

adapted to our ocularity and soft-bodied animals

grew shells and thousands of scales like eyelids

and the Burgess shale became the communal gravestone

for millions, and all the new angels

were snow blind lab technicians in white coats

and the goddess who embodied life

in a ceremony of picture-music

became a particle and a Hox gene.

Do you see how it all transmorphs surrealistically

as it sings you to sleep in a dream of life

that fits the typography of your mindscape perfectly

like the skin of moonlight brushing up like a feather

against the skin of water, mutually realizing

the millions of waterbirds that arise

like oceanically enlightened emotions from them both?

I’ve heard the sea weep. The sky release the tears

that others pray for like rain. The earth groan in its agony.

I’ve sat at the bedside of dying friends

and said nothing the numbing silence

wanted to overhear whether it was wisdom or a prayer.

Here. Then it’s There. Now it’s Where?

We die into a mirror we can’t look into.

Or maybe when the light disappears

from our eyes here, it’s because

we took it with us like a star to see

into the abysmal darkness ahead of us

as we bring the future with us

like a perpetual myth of origin

that begins like a snake with its tail in its mouth

inconceivably where it ends.

One drop of blood from the rose’s eye

doesn’t violate the wonder of the child

that’s trying to live on in you, nor death

keep the iron bells of the elegy from ripening

like apple bloom born of grief

sweetening the clouds of their unknowing

even as the wind persists in blowing

what was once attached to us

like feathers to a bird away

as we make constellations of its evanescence

as if indelibility could slow down the rate of change

like the rear guard action of a retreating army.

Born to separate into more elaborate unions,

child of the elan vitale within you, Polaris

of all the indirections it took to find you,

the epiphanous life force that wears your body and mind

like the lifemask of a creative imagination

that has a flare for painting the world with its eyes,

but in all its works can’t find a similitude for itself

that suits it for the moment any better than you.

It’s a mistake to think that you’re the only one

that’s wearing your face, or a lack of identity

is your most cherished possession, or your sorrows

aren’t shared by the rubble of a thousand shattered pietas.

Celebrate death like a lunar fire dance at the entrance

to the creatrix of all exits. Truth can’t improve

the lack of things to a heart that’s only tasted

solitude and sorrow and clear cuts the crutches

on the mountain sides of all its legless tomorrows

hoping they might abide for awhile as trustworthy cornerstones.

Sorrow can be an emotional road

suffering from its own erosion. Tears

that were clarified by the flowing of their radiance

can turn into a festering stasis of ditchwater

if they’re left to stand too long among

the purple loosestrife and lost and lonely hubcaps,

deathmasks of the rogue planets that got left behind

when everyone went on without them

riding a four-wheel drive eclipse with three full moons to go.

Vehicular witchcraft. Or divine intervention.

Or the probable concourse of both,

the mind will nacreously secrete either

a black or white dawn of insight around it

to bury a thorn in a pearl of compassion

as things you couldn’t imagine the day before

flower out of a black hole like a blind rose,

and people fall away helplessly without life boats

like the rafters of an abandoned temple

better left to the birds than the prayers of the unfaithful

victimizing the martyrs of outrageous morphologies.

If sorrow ripens into compassion, the moon

enlightens the seed forms that orbit the core

of the green star of the apple and it’s chilled

by the stars of the night that turn

its taste buds into nanodiamonds

that can discern the flavour of the Pleiades

burning like a spice on the Silk Road.

If sorrow isn’t always a closed gate without a fence

trying to enclose a garden in an urn of ashes

it’s neglected like a cosmic egg for light years

trying to get over the disappointment

of finding the holy grail only to notice it was chipped.

If experience isn’t mentored by sorrow

deeper into the source of joy in life

that’s the voice coach of the exuberant birds

that are nine parts aubade and one part threnody,

and there’s frost on the windfall that isn’t stardust.

Set sorrow loose with an apple branch

to witch for wells on the moon

that have closed their eyes to spring in Aquarius.

By an overt act of sustained imagination

let sorrow root in you

like a wild grape vine

in the encyclopedic duff

of your last autumn on earth

then cry in your cups

as your tears turn into wine

remembering all the blossoms of the moon

that had to fall so you could taste

the moment of this sweetness

as if your own bloodstream,

its shadows and shining alike,

were a Gulf Stream of stars

that loved being swept away

by their own momentum

whether they’re photonically discharged

from a halfway house of decaying orbitals

like tree rings, birth marks, ripples and moon dogs

or moved by the dark energy

of their shape-shifting sorrows,

the ripening wavelengths

running up and down

the xylem and the phloem,

the ida and the pina,

the solar and the lunar threads

of their spinal cords like serpent fire

to reconfigure the world

through the third eyes

of their enlightened tears.

PATRICK WHITE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

It took me light years to trust my voice

to say things my thoughts had to catch up to

like the unrehearsed understudies of hidden harmonies

making their presence manifest in the way

their dark matter bent space and made the words move

into place like water finding its own equilibrium.

The discipline, then, was not to interfere,

but listen when the wind turns the Byzantine green

of the Russian olives silver in the turmoil of its passage.

To pour yourself out of the mirror like the tear

of a weeping telescope when the Milky Way

gets in your eyes like the smoke of a hundred billion stars.

Or the ghost of a summer radiance

summoned to a seance of mediumistic fireflies

trying to fill in the gaps on their spiritual starmaps.

Last night’s full moon has sliced off

part of its waning earlobe shrinking

as it ascends from cantaloupe orange

to a pitted plum of cadmium yellow value eight.

I’m standing in a gravel driveway outside a storage shed

in the industrial part of town, my back turned

to a floodlight in a riot of insights that act like

frenzied insects, and I’m looking for stars

through the feathered ribs and scales of clouds,

toned by a copper moon rise in a cool acetylene sky.

The moon is rising over the roofs of a parking lot

full of transport trucks, and the contrast

makes the view even more surrealistically poignant.

Intensely so when I spot Arcturus burning

solely on its own in an immensity of peacock blue sky

turning Prussian blue and indigo

over a garishly lit garage that specializes in transmissions

and smells like an abattoir of oily orchids

sacrificed like sacred bulls in garlands

on the altar of a pneumatic car lift

where eternity intersects time as history.

Twenty feet from the driveway

to the perfectly latticed wire fence

sequestered on a reservation of useless land,

a pharmacopeia of every weed that grows wild

in southern Ontario, huddled on the crest

of a bull-dozed hill fort in self-defence.

And in one quick swathe of the bush-hog,

stunted runt versions of the same plants

blooming like symbols of underground resistance,

common mullein, tansy, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch,

viper’s bugloss gone out like pilot lights on a gas stove,

and the sabre cuts and slashes of the tall grasses

waving green banners from their slender masts

and unbroken aerials as fragile as a heron’s legs.

Beauty and utility in a coincidence of contradictories

where abstractions haven’t been multiplied

beyond necessity. The earth turns as it always has

and the moon and Arcturus move accordingly

as the Summer Triangle emerges from the cloud-cover

like the brain child of a birdwatcher

with a taste for myth and mathematics.

Perennializing events in a trivial frame of reference.

And just as the bugs have their communal rapture

in the light, I stand here alone gazing at the stars

trying to see my way into other worlds

by closing the distance with the intensity

of my overwhelming wonder and longing to know

if there might be some poet out there tonight like me

watching the moon rise over bucolic machines

and the space needed to sustain them

at the expense of the trees and weeds and wildflowers

as he’s mystically weirded out by the relative parity

of disparate elements in an impersonally unified field.

And he like me, Arcturus, the trucks, the weeds

and the moon among them, living the ambivalent beauty

of an eternity that breaks its truce with time

once and awhile, to adorn what’s been defiled,

and let unity come forth by itself to forsake the difference

in a voice of its own the storage units trust

like the sacred syllable of a lock on mundane things

alloyed like haloes and horseshoes of stardust and rust.

PATRICK WHITE

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

Get these golden nets, these chains, off me,

these dreamcatchers, cobwebs, suspension bridges

swaying like sticky spinal cords across the shoreless abyss.

I’m smothering under these pillows of sunset

you keep pushing in my face to soften

the impact of my meteoric heart

trying to induce a new species

out of my own extinction

that might accord me a retroactive purpose

for having lived like a root

in the dirt of their flowering.

More compassion spent on lies

than truths, the sun might come up

in the morning and pour honey

all over its head like bees in the dawn,

but it isn’t the same for active volcanoes.

Half the world waiting to receive

what the other half wants to take from them,

via positiva, via negativa, sure

all roads lead to Rome eventually

like most rivers make the sea

but haven’t you noticed the mystic path

is cobbled like a calendar with the lunar skulls

of birds and gurus all along the way

who mistook the windows of opportunity

in their third eye, for the real sky up ahead?

I know you believe time heals all things,

and day after day, this implacable pace

can be construed as some kind of advance,

and even the dust on the windowsill

will be redeemed as the pollen of windblown stars,

if someone would only give love a fighting chance.

May it be so, sweet one, but life isn’t

the agenda of the blossoms, it’s in

the corporate boardrooms of the roots

trying to put a good spin on death

like the propaganda of decay. But even

castigation has lost its joy in life

and the sages that might have saved us

yesterday, are muttering like madmen to themselves

in murderous alleys that end

in cul de sacs of laughing children

without any idea of how absurd

it really all is for them as well as the homeless

they stab in the back in their sleep

for ratting life out like the black plague of their dreams.

Even if I had no legs, I wouldn’t want to spend

the twenty or less autumns and springs of life

I have left, if that, walking on water with golden crutches

like the principles of the dilemma I stand on,

I stole like oars from a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that had no more use for hope. I don’t

want to cook the books of my cosmic home recipes

and make a diet a messianic way of life

that greets the moneylenders at the door of the temple

and feeds the people the tongues of doves.

I was born into life raw as a new wound.

The same insights that touched your eyes like fireflies

were runically striated across mine

by surgical glaciers without any anaesthetic.

A street gang flashing its smile

like an iconic switchblade of moonlight

trying to leave its mark on life like scar tissue.

I’ve seen diamonds on the fingers of adamantine saints

turn back into infernal coal bins of ungratified desire

as soon as someone blew the candles out like photo-ops.

I’m wary of good people these days.

I’ve mythically inflated the illusion of my isolation

up into a rogue planet of habitable solitude

where nothing’s ever wrong or right

but endlessly intriguing in an interstitial kind of way

like a fish that swam out of the sea

or a bird that flew out of the sky

to adapt myself to the inchoate spaciousness

of a new medium of transformational events.

I’ve jumped the synaptic gap

between the earth and the heavens,

like the sound of one hand clapping

at its own performance, the sonic boom

that ruptures the eardrum of the sky

like a clown shot out of a cannon

without a safety net to disqualify the risk.

Whether I’m Zen duelling in the snake pit of the Id,

or studying the logic of the lightning

in the mirrors of prima donnas putting on their make-up,

to let the trees in the open fields know

where it’s going to strike their nervous systems next,

I don’t cling to things like a bat in the burdock

or a monk enduring the earthly ordeals

of his immaculate detachment like spiritual velcro.

I live in a world without handles, where the atoms

free associate into elements of their own choosing

and base metal can as easily be seen

as the grey dawn of gold, rather than

the long, hard discipline of learning how to be

self-destructive creatively and calling it a sacrifice

to the new moon on the altars of occult learning.

I don’t sail my poems down river like

paper-mache swans in a labyrinth of locks

trying to make their way gracefully to the sea

without waiting for a gate to swing open

like a crane on a backwater loading dock.

I shed them like the blossoms of the moon on a lake.

I can’t dance to engineered versions of this lunar ballet

that can’t walk on water without

feeling vertiginously out of its depths

whenever the road leads through a black hole

like the easiest way around the mountain of the world.

Slavic enough to take the whole burden

of the integrity of pain upon myself

as one of the eventualities of suffering

it’s as crucial to live through as it is not to,

I still reserve the right to shake my fist at the sky

like an extra gang railroad lineman

at four every afternoon before I fling a shovel

like an inkwell at the decapitated sun,

all the fruits of my labour you shall know me by

surrealistically Sisyphean as the tracks I’m laying

keep on decoupling my thought trains in the wilderness

as if this were as good a place as any to jump off.

PATRICK WHITE