SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,

a profound tenderness,

something to cherish

in the loneliness of being human

in these vast, cold spaces,

as I read your words

like poppies in my blood again.

What stars could I call upon,

what roses could I ask for their skin,

what darkness charge with radiance,

what ploy of dancing buddhas

could I summon

to let you know

you are all my sky within,

and the assent of my soul in the morning

and the bough of my homing at night,

that there is within me a blind fire,

an invisible flame

that consumes me in the ferocious beauty

of its unseen flowering

even in a flurry of faces

and the business tugging the donkey of the day

braying like a knot in a stream of wood,

and all the objects and forms of the world

are burning mirrors I look into to see

the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,

the iridescent lustre of your shining,

how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,

and a dark shrine of desire

that can wake the valley dragons

with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.

I want to kiss your kneecaps;

I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips

and feel my kisses break like bread,

I want to feel my mouth

blossoming on the nape of your neck

and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields

of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,

I want to taste the silk

of the inside of your thighs

as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,

and approach your breasts like crowns,

and under a full moon

tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue

like a stranger in the doorway

of an infinite longing to make you shudder

like the void into light

with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids

that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.

I am the luminosity and shadow

of your green lamp that glows like the sea,

and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries

over the alluvial plain of your stomach

and touch you like a prophet

running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,

savouring the revelations

that throb like a pulse in space;

and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves

over the blue thresholds of your hills

and root their lightning in your body

like a tree of light, a new map of rivers

for your blood to follow back to me

like the echo of thunder in a well.

And all through the day

with its curbs and functions

I imagine the lilt of your fingers

on the rim of a coffee cup,

the cougar in the glance of your eyes,

the way you put a knife down on the table

like a smile without a script

and what it would be like

to circumnavigate the equator of your waist

with a rosary of kisses

to raise you like a sunken continent

out of your depths

and explore all your tides and passages

with the fervor of a dolphin in a bay of wine.

I want to be tangled like a kite

in the turmoil of your hair,

the night watchman of your dreams,

the one who notices

what no one else looks for,

the stone of the small grave

you sweep with your eyelashes

when the leaves of autumn

lie down with the shadows of spring

and the virgin windows of your tears

that no one has ever looked through

weep like glass over the secret root

of a flower only a child could see.

Beyond reason, gates, words,

where the bridges take off their shoes

to admire their feet in the water

and the waterlilies kiss the thorn

of the star that tore them like skin

and whisper ancient pollens to the night

softer than flour and saffron,

and everything I say to you

isn’t a wound in the light,

a mouthful of shadows,

a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,

fleets of butterflies

learning how to sail the oceans of the rose

like the keels and wings

of love-letters you can read in the dark,

I want to fold you in my arms like the moon

and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes

for a gold rush of fireflies

in the all night boom towns

of a heart that struck it rich

digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR

WHEN THE GERIATRIC DRUNK NEXT DOOR

When the geriatric drunk next door who was

raising chihuahuas to make a living,

but couldn’t part with one them when it came time to sell

came over one day in my childhood,

shaking like an aspen leaf in the fall,

going through withdrawal, to ask if he could borrow

a few bucks, I watched my mother give him five

of the last ten she had to raise four kids

for half of the rest of the month before

the next welfare check arrived, and say,

Here. Don’t hurt yourself. Something to ease the pain.

Though she didn’t drink and he’d been drinking too long

to turn the herd that had trampled him around.

She didn’t judge. She didn’t try to give advice.

She didn’t belittle the man in the way she gave.

She didn’t count how much the giving took off her plate.

She wasn’t indulging her progressive, liberal, altruism.

She wasn’t breaking loaves and fishes on a hillside

or trying to win a popular election.

She just gave like the sea, the earth, the sky,

like fire gives heat and light, all in one easy action

of a heart that has suffered enough on its own to know

we’re all in the same lifeboat on the moon

white-water rafting through the rapids of a waterclock.

And that has been my religion ever since.

Though I’ve never said anything to her about it.

How much I loved her in that moment

of compassionate tenderness, how she pulled

one thread out of the straitjacket of despair in his eyes,

and rewove it not on a loom like the moon but a harp

into a flying carpet of joy so another human

in as much of a mess in her own way as he was

could gain some altitude for a little while above the misery,

and hang on to at least one single wavelength of threadbare radiance

that could still fall on the shit everybody was living in

and turn it into a flower. Indelible,

the understanding in their eyes when he

looked at her incredulously for a moment

and she knew exactly what he meant

as she laughed at herself with a soft, wry smile

as if she’d just seen the sacred fool behind her best sentiment.

That was the whole of enlightenment to me.

The beginning of a spontaneous discipline

and still is, though it’s sometimes bitter to practise,

when your giving is mistaken for having been taken

and you lament how many people can’t tell the difference

between a theft and a gift anymore. How they deprive themselves

of so many jewels of inestimable value,

and that human touch that can pour the heart like gold

from the darkest of ores, the deepest of mines,

or bring meteors to shed hot tears like diamonds upon impact.

Or oxygen and the bases of protein.

Though it be a nuclear winter outside.

Though the bride was left standing at the altar

and there was no one there to lift the veils of Isis

to see the stars in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven even at nadir

like a chance someone wasn’t willing to take.

Though common sense dictate a rational sacrifice,

and Ayn Rand and the Union of Spiritual Snakeoil Salesmen

preach that you’ve got to learn to love yourself first

as if you had a self to nurture that wasn’t rooted

like a mirage in a desert in an hourglass that poured

through your fingers like water when you tried to grasp

the delusion of the flower. Though all the mystics

try to annihilate what doesn’t exist to see God as she really is

as they come before her like busy, busy bees

with money in their pockets and honey in their hives

and all their martyrdom proves to be just another mode of suicide.

You can give a piece of garbage you’ve picked

out of a dumpster like the bruised fruits of the earth,

and when you give it to someone you can eat

from the Tree of Life with impunity without having to choose

between the serpent and the apple, the evil and the good,

or the knowledge you must suffer to be understood

as a human, who can gain altitude by erring on the side

of someone else’s plight without even wearing wings,

to the wonderment of the angels and demons alike,

and occasionally, like me, your angry, eldest son,

who didn’t know until that one moment whether

he should approach the world like a fist

with teethmarks on the knuckles, or

an open palm with lifelines thrown out to another

like billions of umbilical cords woven like a strong rope

into a mother who didn’t need to build an ark to be a lifeboat.

Who could see lucidly through a glass darkly

the veils of her own nebulosity breaking out of the fog

like the search lanterns of the stars

out of the most ancient mystery of love

hidden in her heart without the aid of a teacher or telescope.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child

to the sounds of its own silence

when it thinks no one is watching.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,

poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,

a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,

caught in the updraft of a momentary insight

of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,

and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,

red shift through red, orange, yellow, green

from the outside in toward the trunk, same

as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.

Same as the fires of life returning to the root.

Same as the starmaps of the visionaries

flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.

Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,

or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,

the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver

slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,

a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot

and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping

of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord

at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence

of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins

of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.

But to judge from the windfalls of green planets

shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream

that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse

waking up in a place like here, and a time like now

with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself

as if appearance weren’t just the rind

that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell

of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds

the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions

that have naturally outgrown themselves,

the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky

leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock

tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns

like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream

like a circular waterclock making linear time

take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence

that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life

into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought

and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,

the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap

between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection

on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing

its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream

you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,

though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling

like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead

of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow

by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo

like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light

for the dark abundance of the new insight

into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming

when everything is burning like the sumac

with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.

Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.

And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring

as this new day dances as readily with the old woman

watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,

than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean

swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing

with its river reeds like a lonely child

in the embrace of her imagination,

like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom

flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness

without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses

bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore

being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen

and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring

like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead

taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,

and the lowest of earthbound snakes

are dreaming of feathering their scales

into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars

around the wobbling axis of the earth

on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud

that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE  

JUST WANT TO STAY INSIDE

JUST WANT TO STAY INSIDE

Just want to stay inside. Don’t want to see anybody.

Don’t want to be anybody. Just want to forget for awhile

that I exist. I’m sick of being besieged behind my eyelids

by a hundred thousand ghosts all gibbering at me

because they were reincarnated as blackflies

that want to be treated with the same poetic protocol as swans.

Flake off and find another furnace to thaw on

and take all these weeping mirrors with you

that can’t look at the stars without smearing them.

I’m sick of splashing through them barefoot.

Go puddle on somebody’s else’s floor. I’ve gone

as deep as I’m going to go with you. Don’t want to mean

anything to anyone anymore. Maybe

there’s someone out there you can tie

your umbilical cord to like a leash on a pet submarine.

Just want to get clean. Take a meteor shower

like the Arabs do when they can’t find any water in the desert

to wash their faces for prayer. Tayyamum.

Who knows? Maybe I can grind my eyes into lenses

like Spinoza in his attic for myopic glaciers

that don’t believe in global warming though the proof

is running down their cheeks in tragic laughter.

Want to be crowded out, effaced, erased like the leftover seraph

of a letter in chalk dust on your blackboard

that dropped out of your alphabet like a Mayan glyph

running in the blood of another futile sacrifice

to avoid the next astronomical catastrophe

they brought down on themselves from the ground up.

Feel bad about this. Mean. And casually ungenerous.

My heart was a wild rose a moment ago, now

it’s a withered green star with the bulbous body

of a black widow spider at the bottom of a teacup

that’s about as Zen as venom, leaking out of itself.

biliously weary of prognosticating the future for people

numb as pharmacies in their outlook on life.

Don’t want to reach out to anyone. Don’t want

anyone reaching out for me when I’m not the one

who’s drowning. Just want to be an empty lifeboat

drifting down my own mindstream as composed

as a leaf torn by the wind from a tree like a censored page

of the Book of Life. Don’t want to be there at dawn

like another excited bird breaking into song

when the sun comes up like the Taliban

and splashes acid in my eyes because I can read

the signs of our demise in three dead languages

and one that’s on its deathbed mouthing the sacred syllables

of its last words fouling the air with lies about the disease

that it’s dying of like everyone else listening to a guru

like a poultice to draw the infection out and break the fever

of the nightmare they’re sweating in. I don’t need a holy man,

selling snakeoil like an antidote to the dragons of serpent fire

running through my veins when I’ve got

home remedies of my own I can administer to myself

like the breast milk of the Medusa that can keep me

from turning to stone with a tincture of the lunar serum

I can drink from my skull cup, bottoms up, in a single gulp.

Spare me your alibis. The interrogation’s over. Forego

the duplicity of your two way mirrors and all your mea culpas

enraptured by the felicity of your own happy sins or not.

All the lanterns of the truth in the hands of the nightwatchmen

are nothing but fireflies covered in soot. Chimney sparks

flying out of a black hole of creosote to tar and feather the stars.

I’m out of here like the heigh ho Silver of yesteryear.

You might hear me howling late at night

like the last of the hunted wolf shamans on the wind

high above the timberline where the air is lucid and thin.

You might be a snakecharmer but I can still shed you like skin.

PATRICK WHITE

ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS

ANGRY, SMASHING ANTIQUATED CROCI LIKE FABERGE EASTER EGGS

Angry, smashing antiquated croci like Faberge Easter eggs.

The air is rationing its oxygen, and even the wind begs.

I’m holding it all together like an abandoned barn,

but there are flashfloods in the mirror trying to humble

my lack of concern whether it rains for forty days

or all goes up in fire as I’ve been forewarned.

Don’t care if it’s nuclear winter, or just a passing storm.

I’m not mining diamonds like stars in the rifts of the clouds.

They can do without my eyes for awhile. Looking

for a white hole on the other end of this black one

like a ground hog with two, or the flip side of a telescope

shining at the other end of the tunnel the dead go through.

Madness imparts a significance to everything I do.

The spiders are weaving dreamcatchers and badly tuned harps

between the antlers of a dying caribou, and here

in this cow pie of starmud I call a brain, the warp and woof

of my axons are hairbraiding dead protein

into straightjackets for the two-headed wavelengths

of my meditative theta snakes. And it hurts to write this

like an exorcism of myself without fireflies in attendance

or the scribes of the wild grapevines

intoxicated by their purple passages of blood.

But I’m the only ghost writer left in this scriptorium

of solitude, where the beeswax candles dripping

with lachrymose honey keep confusing their wicks

for the stingers of drones defending the hive

like the Golden Dome of Jerusalem. Though it comes

as no surprise when I tell them God’s not on anybody’s side.

Wild crab apples crushed underfoot with no appetite for war,

it’s flight or fight in the woods once you get past

the autumnal equinox like a truce between day and night

to give the herbivores a chance to squirrel away the dead

before everything slips into a coma with the raccoons

and the bears, and the houseflies cluster like black dwarfs

into a galaxy of anti-matter between the walls

of the hovel that’s all that remains of the pioneer ice palace

two farms over and six generations down the sway-backed road.

Sickly sweet, the smell of decay, like the corpse of an angel

under a tumulus of fieldstones shrouded in bracken

to keep the wolves from digging it up like grave-robbers.

And all around it the clarions of the daylilies

with their flaming swords and trumpets

all tapped out at sundown like collapsed lungs.

The lake has less to say now that the loons are gone

and the trashed cornfields are pitstops for the Canada geese

bumping into each other without a traffic cop on take-off.

Joy always receives a warmer welcome than despair

when it comes like guest to the door, but, in fact,

one can be as dangerous as the other when its car breaks down

on a lonely dirt road, and yours is the only heart

for miles around, where it can seek shelter for the night.

So how could I set a place at the table for one above the salt

and the other below. When guests come. Receive them,

knowing you can delight in a disease that intrigues you

and sleight the cure because it tastes of hopelessness.

I celebrate the graces of joy and observe the protocols of despair.

Butterflies and bluebirds yesterday. Alcyone in the Pleiades

now Algol bloodied in the fist of Perseus. I break bread with both.

Yesterday I wined and dined with the stars like a chandelier.

Tonight I’m gnawing on an avalanche of moon rocks like a glacier.

PATRICK WHITE

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

NARCISSUS LOST HIS FACE IN THE MIRROR HE STORED HIS IMAGE IN

Narcissus lost his face in the mirror he stored his image in

while Lady Nightshade was saying grace over the wrong coffin

rats from the shipwreck were rowing ashore

in the last lifeboat with a trapdoor in it for an emergency exit.

The holy men who couldn’t speak our language

without trying to fix it with an accent of their own

were recruiting for an army on the moon

to start a new crusade against futuristic infidels

who didn’t share the same direction of prayer

as the wavelengths that reached the ears of the extraterrestrials

with high ideals encoded in a scripture of esoteric starmaps

that spoke like oracles stoned on volcanic gas

so when you asked how things were going,

they always answered, perhaps, in an ambiguous tone of voice.

I was sitting in the window of a burning house

trying to write poems that smelled like smoke to the Holy Ghost,

when you showed up like a stranger’s doorway

out of my solitude like the bell of a three alarm death knell

with the smile that lingered like junkmail on the threshold

of a black hole that said jump right in, there’s light

on the other side of sin if you go through this

like a death in life experience in love with cosmic bliss.

Who could forget that day you came like a muse

up the leaf strewn stairs of an abandoned orphanage

looking for a heart you could inspire with the ruse

of the poetic refuse you left in the wake of your pilgrimage

like the desolation of your absence from the earthbound

that languished in the eclipse of your innocence

like a spiritual lost and found trying to make sense of itself

like a horse with a broken leg on a zodiacal merry-go-round.

I felt the fangs of your crescent moons pierce my flesh

like a staple gun under a rosebush in league

with an alliance of thorns that liked to see a poet bleed

as if the great mystery of love were nothing

but a conspiratorial intrigue of sword dancers on drugs

though I did everything I could to prove to you I was wrong

about the moonrise, you weren’t strong enough to be right for once

without starting a pogrom that interrogated

the light in my eyes for all those dark winter months

I never confessed, I never cried out as if ice were my only alibi.

I sat in the corner like a left-handed guitar with a dunce cap on

and wrote out lyrics that sang like the stars with a lisp

on your celestial blackboard until I felt like Sisyphus

a note shy of pushing my heart like a moon rock over the top.

It was the immanental sixties on a grailquest

for the objective correlative of a universal paradigm

it could fight under as the sign of a revolutionary new design of chaos

that made love not war to the thunder of home-made sonic booms

in a battle of bands with saturation bombing riffs and rimshots

that urged us to surrender to the enemy as if

they were dragonflies and quarter-notes of music

in a riot of helicopters dropping tear gas over Watts.

Even the madness wasn’t enough to mollify the sadness

of what we lost when everyone turned the lightshows out

in the concert halls and went back to the their atavistic law schools

to get a grip on the necks of the things they had let go of for a lark.

And the last time I saw you, before things went totally dark,

you were trying to set fire to my voice-box

like a lightning rod with bad wiring shorting out

like a bass amp on the stage of your burnt out farewell

to the audience that made a gracious bow to your frantic id

and headed for the exit like an arsonist long before you did.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.

Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.

Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.

Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.

The autumn’s new, but it’s the same old passage of things.

Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons

of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground

with seeds that are going to take them down

a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind

like a home movie that’s happening as fast as I am

playing the role of everybody else in the universe

all at once as if every ray of light incarnated

in the emanation of an essential existential insight

into the nature of every mystically specific human being

could all be traced back to the root of the same star.

And what does the star do when the many return to it

if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.

Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,

doesn’t mean they’re not dreaming and scheming

to wake up from themselves

I’m firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.

I’m alone in life and it’s not as bad as I thought.

Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between

the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems

the most engaging waste of time I know of.

I think about love more as an event than a thing,

and I’ve made enough attempts in my life

to convince me it wasn’t for lack of trying

that I’m walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus

trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.

But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally

as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.

A gust of stars and the desert’s full of fantasies.

A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo

like a queen bee looking to start a new hive

and I’ve seen enough oases with hourglass figures

turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens

that don’t have any weeds in them that might

uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake

as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.

Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap

of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative

in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender

toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.

Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum

as I am like the star in the eyes of the women

who’ve drowned me like a firefly in their tears,

I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum

like the last of the New England asters this time of year.

Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass

but the madness stays clear as the waters of life

in the womb of enlightenment giving birth

to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop

as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse

for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage

I stumbled through like the blessing

of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you

for what’s to come, or who. I must have loved them

better than I thought to miss them as much as I do

now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,

oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull

they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket

to remember what we were to each other once

before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck

to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I’m more a pirate

with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch

and a parrot that’s teaching me to keep my mouth shut

than I am a navy even if there isn’t a rudder on this lifeboat

or a bay to sail into of my own. And I’m not looking

for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope

that’s stayed under too long to know where it’s going

without a starmap. I’m not interested in exploring decay

from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I’ve sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.

And I’m not about to strike my colours like the maples,

lay them down like the burning blades of the angels

at the gates of dying garden. I’m going to hold out

long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows

to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts

where the judas goats train the tigers to jump

through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.

It’s wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death

like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners

among the extinct so the dead don’t sink into oblivion

like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism

as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.

I’m as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos

as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,

lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds

as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin

he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song

as far as I’ve learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.

The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate

as long as they want, and all my summer visions

can turn into hard cold facts. I’ve still got a dragon of serpent fire

walking my spinal cord like a high wire act

without safety nets because I’ve always made it

a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast

to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star

a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar

that’s made it this far into a wounded future

without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course

of my desire not to live like yesterday’s flowers

strewn on the corpse of tomorrow’s hearse.

PATRICK WHITE