NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

NAMELESS TONIGHT, NOT ME, IMMENSITIES

Nameless tonight, not me, immensities

beyond my reach. The windows

thawing in the heat. Blue moon

above a junkyard of farm machinery.

The pioneers’ bones have been exhumed

from the land they settled. Empty

the graves of those who slept in these hills,

lunar lichens plastered like playbills

over the closing night of their names.

Echoes we all disappear into like waterbirds

soon enough, skipping out over the lake

like gravestones in the hands of those

who effaced us from our own history.

I can’t place myself anywhere,

alive or dead, no homestead of my own,

where I can watch the raspberry bushes

flourish year after year and listen to the rain

drumming the tin toolshed roof into a trance.

I’m unselfishly disciplined when it comes

to rendering the unsayable communicable

through events of form that shape-shift

to the counter-intuitive logic of metaphor

that transcends physics in post cosmological realms,

but that doesn’t mean I’ve got the will of a socket wrench

to go on tightening loose bolts the rest of my life.

Rocking fields they won’t let me die in.

I like knowing the pioneers used wildflowers

for soap, Bouncing Bet, Pride of London,

Lady at the Gate, and if I were ever

to survive a nuclear war, I’d put this knowledge

to good use like a lantern in a housewell

to keep the hand pump from freezing,

potato peels in the fire to desiccate the creosote.

I’d eat staghorn sumac and briney frogs for breakfast.

My mind would be an assortment

of different size nails and screws

I’ve saved for years to meet any occasion

I might have to keep things together anti-dramatically.

In the meantime I explore these old farms

the way a raccoon exploits an abandoned barn,

listening for the torrential wavelengths of snakes

fleeing the rain to hunt mice in the dishevelled bales

of sour hay way past dreaming of mangers.

After the original occupants die

and the last born son has left the farm for good,

we’re all strangers in a used solitude.

The indignant silence makes everyone a trespasser.

Names on gravestones. Names carved in barn beams.

A scripture of old curtains hanging from the windows

like the priestcraft of spiders that haven’t been disturbed in years.

Prewar magazines espousing the miracles of magnetism

in relieving the agonies of rheumatism

and hairline fractures of cracked vertebrae

that took the load upon themselves out of pride

one too many times without thinking

of their own cornerstones and rotting floor sills.

A roof collapsing. A door on one hinge like a drunk

trying to hold on to something upright and final.

Schools and churches, pews, desks, and woodsheds,

everything as functional as the hives and houseflies

that cluster in the walls like those born to follow

the tried and trued, straight and narrow road

through the winding woods reweaving it

like a loose thread that unravelled the labyrinth

of the spiritual lost and found that dug up their bones

for hygienic reasons that had nothing to do

with how deep they were buried in the land

before their corpses were washed away from the soil

that clung to them like faithful hunting dogs

that slept on their graves for weeks after they died,

not knowing, how the city would come to them,

even in their homegrown deaths, like roadkill and erosion.

I’ve seen crucified barn boards warped by the sun and rain,

pull their old fashioned square-headed nails out

with their own teeth like dogs extracting porcupine quills

from the voodoo dolls they’ve made of themselves

like a self-fulfilling hex of hunting magic gone wrong.

And I admire all that the way I admire the palatial virtues

of the strong who live like glacial hills among

the heaped tels of Sisyphean rocks beside

the valleys they dug for themselves and their children

expiring in moats of scarlet fever, to lie down in

like time capsules without a table of contents

that could have anticipated that all they laboured for

would cast them away like strawdogs after a moribund ritual

that would not let them rest their heads on the rock of the world

and dream they were returning to the wild

like their gardens that have gone on blooming without them.

Salt of the earth with bedrock hearts, I come

like the deus ex machina, as you would have seen me

in terms you could have understood, late in the day

like a ghost to a morality play on tour in the country,

looking for a clearing among the trees to view the stars

long after the applause has died away. And the longer

I stand here surveying six thousand photogenic stars

burning without fire permits in the summer dark,

mourning your exorcism, the more I feel crowded

by your absence as if the Summer Triangle

were missing an eagle and the Seven Sisters

in the orchards of the Pleiades, carried away by the wind,

like Sabine maidens, had pruned the horns of Taurus

by deboning the land of the humans

they’ve torn out of it like the stumps of the locust trees

that used to sing here at night, bright with blossoming stars

and the occasional night bird like me

on its way to somewhere else,

and in the morning, was backed-up

by the ecstatic choirs of the born again honey-bees.

PATRICK WHITE

GALACTIC DARKNESS

GALACTIC DARKNESS

Galactic darkness. Luna moths

drawn in by the zircon oases of

candles on the coffee-table

burning behind plate-glass

like the muses of consumer longing,

given how far it is to fly to the stars,

though nothing blocks the way,

their wings spread on the windows

like death masks and decals on a suitcase,

stamps on forlorn loveletters

that can labour over every sacred syllable

for effect, but still eat

the ashes of neglect for real.

But, then, again, how can you fail

if you’re mad, if you can feel

in your blood, how the stars

can start fires here on earth

using the fireflies for chemical fuses?

Or the moon, her moths, for proxies?

Bless the beatific insanity of crazy wisdom

pursuing an earthly excellence

in the eye of inviolate perfection

to add its petal of light to the shedding

of the unsayable rose that ignites the soul

to the dragon of longing and devotion

that dwells within like serpent fire

waiting on the wind, that’s you,

to give it wings with every breath you take.

Just because you can name all the trees

in the forest, doesn’t mean

you’ve explored a wilderness

or suffered the dangerous ordeals

of your rite of passage through it

to uninhabitable states of mind

your adaptable presence

spontaneously humanizes

with the unlikelihood of you even

being there with your mountainous outlook

and sidereal overview about

the apparent impersonality of the universe

putting its roots down in you like fruitful tree

with a windfall of sustainable planets at your feet.

O little mystic, in midnight shades

of Prussian blue, it isn’t true if you

were to look into the face of your god

your eyes would burn like an oilspill

on an ocean of of prescient wavelengths

that will turn on you like a snake

from the burning faucet of a toxic housewell.

Embrace what consumes you like fire at the stake.

In the blast furnace of the universe they peer into

like the source of the mystery that absorbs them

the astronomers have recast their eyes

into philosophically ground lenses and pyrex mirrors

silvered by a quarter ounce of their vaporous spirits

looking for clarity in a cloud of unknowing

the way the morning air cleans its stardust off with the dew.

Nothing less than everything all the time.

What does the world hold back in reserve,

or your bodymind all you need and prefer

to be as lost as a feather in the shadow of a sundial

as the nightbird you are now, afraid

of where the wind might carry you

far from the aviary of that golden cage

of a voice-box that’s trained you

what to say to strangers who ask

when was the last time you went looking

for continents in a flood, or even

went down with one like Mu or Atlantis,

the kingfisher captain of the ship?

Take a cometary approach and leap

from your black halo into the sun

as if you were jumping orbitals

from a burning bridge where

the serious arsonists come

to commit suicide by flinging themselves

like fire on the water to see if,

like the reflections of the stars,

they can get over their hydrophobia,

by realizing the pilot lights of their fever

can never wholly be put out once

they start spreading like a wildfire

through the zodiac, house by house.

But you don’t need a fire department

in the inflammable amethyst village

sequestered in the coffin of your spiritual life

like a seed afraid to come out of itself

like foxfire after a cosmic conflagration.

You don’t need to dream your totem alone

in a fire-tower in the woods,

high among the crowns of the trees

polling fireflies and meteors by the minute,

to see if you’ve got what it takes

to get something started within yourself

that isn’t just another demonic firecracker

you throw at the ghosts of your afterlives

like pebbles and beans, to scare them away.

Pinocchio runs to the pyre of his karma

in the sacred ashes of someone else’s lifemask

though the flame at the end of his nose

is a dead giveaway he’s attached too many strings

to the box kite self-immolating in the power lines

he thought he could do a quick fly over

like a transmigratory bird avoiding a snake pit

that’s trying to catch its eye like a liar’s holy book,

two minutes with a hook, then dead air

when the hits are shelved like golden ashes

in the urns of an elephant graveyard

where the poachers come to salvage

the tusks and crescent moons of their mnemonic relics.

Any fool can make a religion out of a salvationist alibi

by telling themselves that we were all no good

before we were born, and we all need to be recalled

like Toyota suvs for legally culpable emergency repairs

at mystically specific authorized garages

and shrines with forklifts for spiritual vehicles

to have their undercarriages inspected in the pits of hell

by gurus with Jiffy Lube all over their coveralls

greasing the wheel bearings of the celestial omnibus

to turn round and round and round

like the wheel of birth and death suspended in mid air

and going, as the crow flies, nowhere.

Don’t scorn the fire in the darkness of the coal

that burns on the inside when there’s nothing

but diamonds freezing at the door on the outside

or looking down in longing like the stars

at the flurries of chimney sparks rising

like intimate insights with the lifespan

of enraptured gnats at dusk, to illuminate

the fixed assumptions of the mythic shining

with impromptu constellations of their own

in a smaller darkness closer to home

that glow at night like astral plastic stars

stuck to the ceiling of a child’s bedroom

made infinitely intimate and wondrous

according to the orders of her intuitive seeing

when she walks in the starfields, following

the fragrance of whatever’s she’s dreaming

whether the road evaporates like smoke

from a fire on a cold night in the distance,

or unfolds like a starmap of wildflowers,

a bird with a library of feathers for wings,

she embraces the vast, vacant, interstellar spaces,

the sublime, empty vastness of the tabla rasa

of her imagination, the light emerging out of the void

into the eyes of the uncarved lifemasks

of the most tender and homely of things.

PATRICK WHITE

ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

ARE YOU TRYING TO CONVINCE ME

Are you trying to convince me

that kindness does no good?
That no good deed will go unpunished,

that I should do a good deed and duck,

that trying to love and understand you as a friend,

give more than you dared to ask, have the power,

but not use it to reply to you in kind

when I pull the sacred syllable

like a pin out of my heart

and hold it tightly in my hand

like a white phos grenade I don’t dare let go of

because this starlight’s so blue and hot

it can burn right through your skin like the Pleiades?

You rage pre-emptively as if in everything

you were defending yourself vehemently

against some bootcamp of an injustice

your childhood went to to learn how

to stand up for yourself even when you’re in the wrong.

Do unto others before they do

what you imagine reflexively

they’re about to do unto you.

I get that. So many times I’ve blunted

the edge of the sword on the rock of the heart

I drew it from, bent its blade for the grave,

tempered it in a trough of hot tears

I shed like a dragon for what you

had suffered alone at the hands of those

who were supposed to love you

but always seemed to find a way

to bungle it in the second act

of a tragicomedy for angry tricksters.

So I’ve treated you like a dove

in maculate feathers for the last ten years

and stood down like a scarecrow

whenever you lured me away from my watch

to amend the commotion of a lapwing.

I’ve been a good friend to you in all things.

There when you called. Generous

when you needed, streetwise wolf doctor

when you asked for an oracle

to howl at the moon with you

in an agony of unanswered wounds.

And I know it’s hard to be proud

and grateful at the same time

as if needing someone’s help

as we all do, were conceding

to a weakness in the hill fort of your vulnerability.

So I’d put out the white flag

from my window first to make sure

you didn’t have to conceive of surrendering first.

Anyway when you walked in just now

fuming like a star mass

of inflammable hydrogen gas

I was feeling like a firefly

for the first time in a long time

remotely at home in the universe

as it went off in my face like the Big Bang.

One moment I’m on an endless firewalk

following the signs the stars left me

to catch up in my own good time

and the next I’m listening to an arsonist

make up alibis in her own interrogation room.

And I’m asking God, after you return me

like a splinter of my former radiance

that won’t wash out of my third eye

because it’s lodged like a nail in a jellyfish

candling like a parachute in its own tentacles,

to the relentless intensity of my abysmal solitude,

thinking hard, hot, flashy thoughts

that cut like the sabres of a meteor shower

through the ionically charged upper atmosphere

where my spiritual aspirations inflate

like weather balloons disguised as ufos

even as my demonic descents back to earth

are making a big impact on an extinct species.

God, I say, apostate, heretical, or demonic

I may be. Do ut abeas. But I didn’t ask you

anything back for this kindness I do left-handedly

not to ameliorate doing my time standing up

nor as an infernal sacrament on the altar of hell

that rebels like a lion lying down with the lamb,

but just to put a smile on the absurdity of it all

as if there were no harm in trying it your way occasionally

by stopping the war between

ceremony and the sanctimonious

long enough to remember we’re all

dying of one thing or another in the same lifeboat

floundering on this fathomless night sea

of shoreless awareness we’re all immersed

over our heads in like the tears of the unblessed.

PATRICK WHITE

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