WERE THERE STARS

for Salem

Were there stars in your hair that night?

I cannot remember,

so taken with your face

and the mystery and the silence and the sorrow

of the tender bell in your eyes

that could summon ghosts

of yesterday’s embodiments to the fire

of any passion that lost itself prophetically

at a rave of shadows among the trees.

You eased out of your wardrobe of rivers

like a snake on the moon

sloughing its skin like the eclipse

of a far more vulnerable shining,

and I couldn’t tell if you were

a doe or a lynx

stepping out of the alder groves warily

to lap the moonlight

that flaked the shore

with the silver petals of an undulant rose

older and darker than nightblood.

I could feel the danger within you,

the abyss of the early grave

that waited for you like a key

to come in out of the pain

that bled you like a shadow

pouring out of an open wound,

that whispered to you like a secret scream

only the dead who owned you could hear.

Your hunger desperately sought salvation

from the eyes

that pleaded with you

to blow yourself out like a candle,

cancel the inevitability of your suffering

with the shudder and sigh of sex.

We lay down naked together

by the willow-stained waters

in that summer of flesh

and sought oblivion from each other

like two compatible cremations

that concealed a ravenous phoenix

ending its fast of fire.

Purified by the depth and darkness

of your intensities,

I burned in you

and felt the flames

of a dangerous angel

who had broken her afterlife like a curfew

flow over me

like dawn at a keyboard of feathers.

Your breasts still come up overnight

like supple mushrooms against my chest

and the moist heat of your mouth

throbbing with flowers like July

as you seized your joy

from the agony of the roots you tormented

to give up their dead

like bruised cherries.

I have never died as fully since

at the insistence

of any woman’s appetite

nor known a night so final,

so brutal with time and beauty

as the pendulous moon swung

like an executioner’s ax

over the nape of its own reflection

swanning on the waters.

We made love as if

we were both defying

the truth we didn’t need to say.

I wanted to plead with you,

I wanted to call out into your emptiness

like a beseeching bird

disappearing into a dark valley,

but my voice ran ahead of its echo like light

and the things I would haved asked you

not to do

had already been achieved.

Heroin, your asp,

at the funeral I stood back

beyond the baffled wreaths of flowers

and the ambivalent silence

of the modest gathering that mourned you,

maculate in the shadows

of the Japanese plum tree

we once made love under

and I kissed the rose of your blood

shedding in mine

like a wound

my love was never sword enough to heal

as they closed

and boarded you over like a well.

I spent the night like an empty vase

beside your grave

until the stars that bloomed above you like wildflowers

thawed my tears in the morning light.

I walked out of the cemetery

through the hard harps and spears

of its iron gates

and I have never been back.

The years since have been

chameleonic as a hooker

who plys her art

on the stairs of a temple

even the priests of my lust

are forbidden to enter,

but as you said I would

as you lay with me that night

like a knife beside the sea,

I have returned to you over and over again

like a witching wand

looking for water in hell,

like a cult of one to a lost island

that holds you like a secret

and wept like a candle of honey

in the dark hive of your unasnwerable silence,

intoning the names

of an impossible god

on a rosary of black suns

until my heart hangs like a bell

dumb with grief

looking up at the stars

you rinsed like a tide from your hair.

And I lean on the crutch and the crook

of a shepherd’s question,

looking everywhere for you

like the wind

sweeping the shadows of fireflies

like the fall of hair from your eyes

that night you tore yourself away from me

like a veil of blood and sorrows

wounded by the terrible light

of the black pearl

that ripened within you like the skull

of a full eclipse.

O my poor, broken angel,

you might have been fat and frumpy by now

if you had lived.

I could have watched your beauty

shed like the moon over the years,

and smile like an island

to remember how lost I was in your tides once,

a constellation of starfish

tumbled like dice in your dark undertow,

trying to shine, god, how

I tried to shine for you, how

I ached to embrace your planet safely

in the mandala of an empowering radiance

that could show you

I was worth living for

if nothing else.

Given the freedom

of the emptiness that engulfed us both,

we could have lived within each other,

we could have evolved our own atmospheres,

appointed our own stars,

written our own myths of origin

on the black pages of that journal of skies

where you scribbled down the events

of your pre-emptive afterlife

as if you wanted to make your ghost indelible.

As it was, the only thing I could do,

was take you in

like the last breath of a summer night

I could never let go of

without following it

like a shadow of you into death.

I haven’t wished for much over the years,

and the dreams have come and gone as they will,

and my hair has gone gray

and my eyes are looped like powerlines

and the sad bells of a heavy solitude

that has yoked me to the grindstone of the turning world

to mill the stars like a tide

on the bloodwheel of a worn heart.

I finally burned and broke all the weeping mirrors

I consulted like half-assed mediums

to see if I could restore you somehow

to the more intimate shining of that last night

you turned and ran back,

your shoes in your hand,

to make sure your final kiss would endure like a temple.

You pitied the agony of shapeshifting

you knew the black water ahead

was about to go through

as it smashed like goblets and crystal chandeliers

on the roaring skulls of the rocks;

you pitied me because you knew I loved you,

because you knew you were already

a future memory

and I was a prophecy from the past

that had ridden beyond itself like light

to illuminate nothing but your absence

measured in the filaments and lifelines

of eyeless oceans

like a seabird

circling a blind lighthouse on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY INSIGHT, THE BIG BANG, AND THE THOUGHT THAT FOLLOWS, A UNIVERSE

EVERY INSIGHT, THE BIG BANG, AND THE THOUGHT THAT FOLLOWS, A UNIVERSE

Every insight, the Big Bang, and the thought that follows, a universe.

Every image that flashes across the moonscape like a silhouette

in reverse of the dark matter and starmud that surrounds it,

a black swan among the white when there’s snow on the river.

Worlds bubbling out of the mouth of a fish through a hole in the ice

that looks like the third eye of a glacier taking a long, hard look

at whether it was worth opening all those lakes

and then filling them like eyes with the runoff of its own tears

as it disappears into a more fertile approach to letting go of itself.

I could always see a human shape hidden in the landscape

and I wanted to free it so I scraped and gouged

and dug my way into it like a dog unearthing the fossil

of a distant ancestor that ran with the wolves.

Even now when their ghosts howl it’s a sad ballad

of the lyrical hills going mad by themselves

and sometimes it breaks my heart like water

in the cleft of a pseudomorphic rock to write picture-music

in striated cuneiform on the cliff faces to sing to themselves

like a lost people with more legend than life in its veins.

I can take a single thread and weave it into a flying carpet.

I can take a string theory and make it resonate with membranes

that occasionally break their eardrums like water from a womb.

There are protocols of the imagination that have been imposed

by iconic means like straitjackets fitted to the inside of your psyche.

Cuckoos in your nest, memes in your mind,

nudging your cosmic eggs out to smash on the rocks below

like the stillborn of the sun. Embryos and fractals,

astronomical forensics sweeping the night sky for fetal stars,

hidden paradigms ferreted out like secrets

that will bloom each in their own good time

like the mysteries of life unravelling

the sequel of a waterclock that keeps on outliving itself

by transcending its own emptiness by pouring itself out

like a serpent that’s always shedding its own skin

or a zodiac confabulating a false dawn

of mythically deflated metaphors, red giants

burnt out into black dwarfs and sink holes

where the stars plunge like butterflies into

the gaping maw of the dragon that consumes them like krill,

knowing its destiny, too, is just a provisional scaffolding of quicksand.

Yes, but how many make it all the way through

like wild salmon responding to the death call

of the spawning ground on the far side of the white hole

when the hourglass gets turned around like a fountain

instead of leaking out of a mortal wound in the side of the universe?

The morphology of knowledge is the history of shapeshifters.

Cosmology is an aesthetic expression of enculturated preferences.

Zero among the Hindus the form of the abundance of their emptiness.

Among the Greeks, a political exile. And for a Westerner

far sighted enough to see in aerial perspective,

the bluing of a way of life that’s always over the next hill.

Sight is a kind of love I once read on a poster the sixties.

So astronomy for poets. And poets for astronomy.

Observatories on forbidden mountain tops

opening their eyes like blind prophets to the visions

engendered by a seven year eclipse of their visuals.

Who hasn’t stepped out of their own well lit doorway

and walked up to the high field on a cold winter night

and watched their breath mingle with the Milky Way

like a tributary of a river on intimate terms with the mindstream

we’re all flowing into like red-tailed hawks

riding our own thermals for the sheer joy of it

down the helical stairwells of our own polished bannisters of dna.

Twenty years a Druid in a vatic college learning

to speak to trees in the demotic of their own alphabet,

poetry isn’t the calling of a clown or a gleeman

amusing the whimsical caprice of the king’s court,

it’s a summons to risk your life exploring the mystery

of every facet of what you’re doing here turning jewels

like stars in the translucency of your own light

reflected in a brainstorm of parabolic mirrors that bloom at night.

Haul yourself up out of your tidal pool of awareness

into the rarefied bliss of a whole new medium that exceeds

the planetary boundary stones of the space time continuum

you’ve been so far, by devoting your disobedience

by bringing back enlightened serpent fire

from the hearths and the middens in the starfields

of the gods who first domesticated it like a selective ordeal of birth

in the imagination of a hungry human thief enough

to root a new kind of lightning in the earth that bears

all the birthmarks of the compassionate fruits of insight

into the nature of a mind that embodies all this

as if one moment the crescents of the moon were scars on its eyes

and the next, the talons of an owl flying out of the abyss in the grip

of a nocturnal imagination that’s as wise as it is dangerous.

All my thoughts have fingertips. Blood your abstractions.

Lavish your mindstream on the available dimensions of the future

as if what you wanted to achieve were already behind you

like a star in pursuit of an earthly excellence.

Humanize the uninhabitable as if it were just

another room in a spatially enchanted palace

you haven’t finished yet like Thomas Jefferson.

If you look for the cure in the heart of the disease,

by corollary, look for the disease in the heart of the cure

like the lesser vehicle in a pathology of grails.

Safer to drink from your own skull to an eclipse

that patched the eye of the moon with the crossbones

of its colours, than sip rainbows from the goblets

of lilaceous irises blooming like an effulgent halo

around the pupil of a black hole on a starless night

anticipating a cadaverous moonrise

like the dark beginning of death breaking into

the unimaginable radiance of another side to all this

that makes the light seem a mere carbon copy

of the shining that can be emanated by an enlightened mind

that never hesitates to contaminate the purity

of its numinous ignorance for the sake

of opening the gate like an exile to a secret garden

everybody must enter at the crossroads of a threshold

without the screening myth of a backdoor to duck out of.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LEAVES TREMBLE

The leaves tremble at the tips

of their half-denuded branches

against a flat gray sky,

the ruination of yellow and green

and the maples afire.

The house to myself;

four hours to myself. My head

jammed with the business

of swarming blackflies,

the crucial trivia of the morning,

crankshafts and cabs,

fitting the lid

over the spoon in the coffee can,

drinking brewer’s yeast

to coat my neuronic synapses

with vitamin B

to counteract the stress

that just handed me the single rose

of an unrequited cold sore.

And I’m chain-smoking

contraband cigarettes,

and I’ve got enough money,

I’ve got enough smokes,

I’ve got enough food to last until tomorrow

and the coffee’s not bad

and I don’t even mind

this ashen hour of October

as I wait for the mud in the puddle to settle,

the turmoil of the soiled cloud,

the ecliptic commotion of the meteor shower

to stop smearing and smashing

the silence of the eyeless mirror,

and my feelings are waiting for mouths

like the interlaced fingers

of a Druid who doesn’t know

what he wants to say

but knows how to say it

a hundred and fifty ways.

I look for the column shift

and put the world in park.

I look for my heart

and it’s a small, scuffed planet

trying to throw a curve at me

as if I were nothing but space.

I’m the key to a forgotten lock

in the spirit’s lost and found,

and part of me likes it this way

because for several eras now

the sleeves have been too long

on the winter straitjacket

time sized and knitted from my solitude,

and I hate the stingy herb of the colour.

I have lived like wings without a sky,

fire in the heartwood of a weeping willow,

and the birds piled up on my windowsill

like the craven junkmail

of an insincere migration that kept turning back

and my tears were always pall-bearers

at the death of water,

and I couldn’t understand,

couldn’t fathom the shallowness

of the infinite interpretations

that sprawled like lavish waves

across the sandy inclinations of my mind

with shells and starfish and seaweed for proof.

How could everyone not be right,

each according to the ruler of their spine,

a full measure of the truth?

The universe five ten and a half feet tall,

and flowers that taste like stars to the blind,

and wounds that heal like scalpels

in the hands of the surgical moon,

and emergency rooms full of clowns,

and shovels like iron valentines

indifferent to gardens and corpses;

and the beautiful arches of the women

who collapsed like aqueducts and bridges,

the stones of their plundered geometry

collaged into the gaps of makeshift hovels

to keep the cold night drafts out?

And I put it all down as a poet.

I was faithful to the vagrancy of my voice.

I offered the first born of my blood

to the law of my heart

and my soul was an ardent shapeshifter

with the wardrobe of a theatrical poppy

forgetting the lines of a dream.

I was an arsonist waiting in the dark

for the bell of a woman in the doorway,

and my cells were haunted

by the ghosts of the vacant thrones

of dark intensities

that swept me like rain over the masks and hills

of faceless domains.

I squandered myself

like confetti, fire and cherry blossoms

at the weddings of water and gasoline.

Everywhere was threshold and door,

and the world a ghetto of exiles,

a refugee camp for stars and humans alike,

an oildrum under an urban overpass

where I spray-bombed the hunting magic

of the beast masters

who danced to keep warm

under the horns and hides of their sacred shadows.

I have never been anyone

I ever thought I was.

Alone and alone and alone,

the hidden eye under a robe of light,

gazing out at the world from the inside,

I could never claim my thoughts and emotions as my own,

and without realization

I could be the vision

but I could never say that it was mine;

and slowly I was poured out on the ground

like blood and blue wine

and what was left was space, was

the whole palace in a single cornerstone,

a way of keeping everything in mind

and mind in everything,

of holding the world with an open hand,

letting the rivers

slip through the delta of my fingers

back to the sea they issued from

and I was always the last drop of water

to leave the moon. Empty and dry,

I lived on ashes and salt, a gnawing thing,

breaking its teeth on minerals,

trying to build a house of transformation

with glass nails, speaking

in the liberated tongues of broken mirrors.

How many days, deserts, dragons,

surviving on the marrow

of thorns, fangs, claws,

on the exhausted fruits of the fire,

on the flakes of blood

I shed like brittle roses,

like the paint of a condemned post office.

There was no more meat on the bones of the gate

and my heart turned into a loaf of coal.

My annihilation was perfected

in the crucible of my skull

by an excruciating isolation

that wept like the swords of diamond clarities

and the women and the children and the books,

and the abandoned shrine

in the tiny grove of my name,

fell away behind me

like wharves in my wake,

points of departure,

everything I’d ever cherished

lost in the undertow of the abyss.

Days of defamation and reptilian discretion.

I lived on nothing, a habit of breathing,

my heart a looping reflex,

terrified by the carnivorous gray of everything,

the short somewhere in the house

that would burn everything down,

the unforeseen event

that would snatch me

from the auroral approach of joy

by making me stand at the window

behind the stone curtains

of a harsher delusion,

always returning me to the same moment

as if a lesson I hadn’t quite mastered yet,

convinced again and again I was a chronic clown

proofreading the encyclopedic obituary

of someone who didn’t know when to quit.

PATRICK WHITE

PSYCHOBABYLON WOULDN'T TRADE ONE REAL STAR

PSYCHOBABYLON WOULDN’T TRADE ONE REAL STAR

PsychoBabylon wouldn’t trade one real star of his implausibility in

for the smallest flake of that tinfoil spiritual life you’re passing off

as an iron pyrite cure all. PsychoBabylon knows the serenity of the dragons

who’ve learned to make peace with their own fires

even when they’re bringing the rain to temper the swords

they forged in hell to kill people back into life

who’ve stuffed their pillows with too many feathers

and not enough scales to be credible even to the shadows they cast,

not to speak of the torment they put their dreams through

trying to divine and sign them like a message from the dead

for their eyes only. PsychoBabylon suppley practises

a discipline of subtle tenderness and recurrent doubt

in the face of his ambiguous revelations of what it’s all about.

PsychoBabylon might tilt at the hull with the mast of his moonboat

from time to time, thinking he’s whaling with the Kwakiutl,

but he doesn’t turn his lions loose on the blackflies of insinuation

knowing their prowess depends as much upon

the quality of their enemies as it does their friends.

And surely it’s the folly of flowers and stars that have led him

to certain incongruous conclusions about life that constitute

enough of a starmap of independence to go his own way

like a rogue planet sustained by the dark abundance

of his own homelessness as if every orbit he jumped

like the looping threshold of the mystery of life discharged

another photon of light on the black matter of space and time at hand.

PsychoBabylon would rather light candles and fireflies in the abyss

with his incendiary insights than blow them out

with the kiss of a fraudulent angel who traded her harp in

for a fire-extinguisher foaming at the mouth like a rabid cloud

to smother the protected species of hell in the first snowfall

of a nuclear winter. PsychoBabylon doesn’t demonize

the third man on the match for smoking in No Man’s Land

in front of a firing squad looking for scapegoats as a way

out of the irreconcilable dilemmas that keep breaking them

like wishbones and the horns of the lapis lazuli bull harps

strung between the crescents of the moon like spider webs

disguised as dreamcatchers apprenticed to Venus fly traps.

Sick people go to hospital. Bad people go to church.

PsychoBabylon heads out to the woods by himself with a noose

as often as he does a telescope. He risks a wary kindness

toward everything he sees, and even more excruciatingly

he doesn’t replace the thorns of the wild rose bush

with the fangs of the rattlesnake coiled under it

that struck him in his throat in the middle of a song of longing

like a rat snake in the nest of a nightbird whose blood

has just turned to moon rock in a transfusion of toxins

to counteract the mystic elixirs of his enlightened lunacy.

If you can’t hold the prophetic skull of the moon

in your own two hands by now, without fretting it

into foretelling a lie, PsychoBabylon blues his view of you

in the aerial perspective of his compassionate distance

as the victim of your own siege works when you’re the first

to start throwing stones at the windows of your own crystal palace

because where there used to be chandeliers of stars

radiant enough to open up the chakras of the dead

now there’s nothing but a mobile of swords above your head

and all the tongues of serpent fire you split like cedar shakes

to go witching for enlightenment in your celestial watershed

are now swimming on a different wavelength like a holy book

someone read in passing, and like a folder of soggy matches

that smouldered, but never flared, threw into a cosmic ditch

along with the angelic road kill and the rest of the spiritual junkmail.

PATRICK WHITE

MORE PAST IN MY BRAIN AS I GET OLDER THAN FUTURE

MORE PAST IN MY BRAIN AS I GET OLDER THAN FUTURE

More past in my brain as I get older than future,

intrusive memories like ghosts come seeking absolution

I still can’t give them sincerely after all these years

of irrelevant tears evaporating through holes in the ozone.

Things I’d wholly forgotten about, returning to this seance

convened by the mother of the muses in her crone phase

like stars and flowers come back to make you smile again

for something as simple as remembering their names

you thought you’d lost in the grass like rings on a key chain.

Painful images I wish I’d never lived to see

but came to understand slept just under the eyelids

of the things most people dream of damaging

by inflicting the worst wounds on their own savage humanity.

Lovers that reoccur in the night air like fireflies

recalling some moment when we touched illicitly

double-crossing all of our mutual taboos to risk

the burning bridge of the dangerous blessing

of the passionate dragon on the far shore of our urgent flesh.

The riverine sediments of the mindstream’s starmud,

an encyclopedic compendium of outcomes and random eventualities.

Any single one of these mystic details is the table of contents

of a whole other life than the one I’ve been living so far,

stars matted in the hair of the leafless willows mad with despair.

Joy, pleasure, tenderness. Sorrow, anger, recrimination.

With the planet tilted a feather’s weight more toward joy

on its axis, or we wouldn’t have anything to cry about

when the season passes. When the wild irises

burn out like pilot lights in the urn of the furnace of the phoenix

losing its will to rise again out of its own ashes.

And through it all, so many afterlives arrested by the mystery

of what we were to each other now that kept

calling us back to each other like wolves in the fog

on opposite hills of the heartscape we couldn’t find a way out of.

There’s still generosity in my fingertips

when I touch the eyelids, the lips, the lunar thorns,

the feldspar pictographs that have been carved into me

like the braille cartouches of the dynastic royal houses and scars of love.

I like to err on the side of a generous spirit as if

there’s always a factor that stands outside the equation

like a fulcrum maintaining a balance that has nothing to do

with equality, but deeply affects the course of a parallel universe.

And I can see through the eyes of the chorus of a hundred voices

chanting like a mantra for me to look at it one

of a thousand other ways to say yes what happened between us

was meant to be, and hear all these fanatical pamphleteers

trying to exonerate the culpability of what we had to do

to survive one another like two separate shoes going their own way.

As sorry as things often turned out, I celebrate the intent

because that part was honest, of who we really wanted to be

to each other, and hoped we were, before the labour

grew too intense, and we took off the pretence of our life masks

and stared into each other’s faces like black mirrors in full eclipse.

And I don’t need a philosophy to back me up on this.

It’s just the way I prefer it. An artistic flourish of the soul, perhaps.

Blue chicory by the side of the road instead of poison ivy.

Strewing more rose petals on the starmap of the path

we walked together for awhile than thorns.

Trying in everything to ennoble the way

I’d like to see myself when I’m on my death bed,

not as some mean-hearted ghoul living under a bridge

but a man who lavished himself like poetry upon life

as if he were sowing stars into the abyss of the wound

love opened up in him like the chasm and chrysalis of a loveletter

always addressed to someone on the other side

of this surrealistically romantic starfish of a universe

where we first met in a ghost dance of enchanted binaries.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WOULD SAY

WHAT I WOULD SAY

What I would say to you if you were near,

if this definitive namelessness that walks me down to the river

to add my tears to the flowing, to sit on my rock

and stare at my self in reverse on a throne of water

enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire

to poems I never wanted to own,

every burning lily of paper floating away

like another crown I’ve set free

from this domain of air and shadows

to seek its own regency, its own unknowable moment of shining,

weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.

I would say to you in the pyres and the petals

of these wild wounded swans, in the black down and ash

of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes

of these poems that confess their love to the flames

with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke

gone to smudge the sky of the stars that brought them here

in the form of a man, I would say,

it was always the hive of your silence

that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey

rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.

And I’d try not to talk too much,

letting the fish jump for the two of us,

and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away

like things not said into the water

and I’d draw you in under the bough of my arm

that was never much of a yoke

as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,

and hold you a long time in the vastness

before I turned to kiss you for everything

and fall down back into the silver grass

to make love to you on the moon.

And you in my arms again, your cheek on my chest

your leg across mine, my hand, a wing of tender caresses,

I would mingle blood and starlight

with the wine of your body and being

like a chalice lying empty by the river

that has brought us both to drink from one another

like the deer that will come out later from the grove

to drink from their own reflections. And gestures of life and death

would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds

among the sceptres of the cattails,

and I’d want to thank and accuse the incomprehensible sky

for this night of being human long enough

to understand its brevity is its beauty

and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,

burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,

like the course of the river, as the limbs of the fallen oak

look as if they’re trying to swim, and one poem

more enduring than the rest,

floats downstream under a frozen elbow

raised to take the next stroke,

and with a final flare as it comes to the end of itself

levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha

into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment

that grasps at nothing. Form

is emptiness; emptiness is form, and the poem

had a good death I suppose as a lifeboat in flames,

and though you’re not with me now,

we’ve never been apart, as the shadow of an unknown bird

lands on the water, and then another,

and I think of them as you and I

arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night

and the bright vacancy

between the sidereal knots

in the nets of the constellations, to drift among the stars awhile

weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing

love is I wonder what love is,

as the fireflies flash their assent,

and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,

and the frogs spring away from their flints. And I come here

as much for the island that spreads the stream

into the water legs of a woman

like the orchid of her sex, as to be alone with myself

like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,

to launch my fleet of poems

like the blossoms of the abandoned orchard on the far bank.

I like being a child alone on the shores of things,

turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance

among the whispering flowers, ruling my loneliness like a stick.

And I’ve always asked questions no one could answer,

awed by the fact of being here at all

under stars I can name like personal friends, but here,

everything’s got a mouth of its own to answer,

and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I’m never as old by these waters

as I am anywhere else, and the dusty apricot of the moon

you told me to watch as you would

is always so much more on this undulant black mirror

than a window will ever be able to say to a man at a desk.

There’s a birch and three willows

and the third of the three is you

dipping your hair in the water

as if your roots weren’t enough for the glass.

And it’s no surprise to know you know how

to drink the whole river in a single gulp

and swallow a whole star with your eyes

in a single glimmer

the way a solitary drop of water

at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass

entirely fits the entire skin of the sky

because I already know how you can consume the whole of me

from the night song in the flight of the bird in my voice

and from a single hair of your head,

or the eyelash on your cheek

that is all that separates us now,

from the ashes on the last breath of a single burning poem.

I can be here with you as I have always been

on the other side of death

where everything in creation

above and below this river of night,

from the furthest galaxy

to the dragonfly on my right

is expanding like a lily of fire into us,

as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.

So it’s easy to know where it’s all going,

releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,

raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream

rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing,

it’s always, like birds and stars and fish in the flowing,

been going to us.

PATRICK WHITE 

LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT

LETTING THE STARS FROM LAST NIGHT

Letting the stars from last night

settle in this morning’s puddles

so I can see more clearly once

this turmoil of starmud precipitates out

as mental sediment in a mirror

skybound to a vast blue abyss

and, as they say in Zen, the eternal sky

does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

I want to be a bird that dissipates

in the mauve distance like water in the air.

I want to be a fire whose flames

never stop aspiring to the stars,

though every time they’re almost within grasp

they disappear like petals on the wind,

the pages fall out of the book I’m burning

like a sacrificial rose of galactic hydrogen,

and I’m left with a handful of ash

I can stuff my pillow with like the down

of a phoenix in the urn of his worst nightmare.

And being strong seldom helps.

Or feathering your dragons

to convince yourself they’re bluebirds.

Strong means condemned to solitude.

Hanging on to the mountain with one arm

to keep it from falling to its death

in the valley it dug like its own grave

in the valley below. Biting the bullet

like a crystal skull until your back molars break

and you’re swallowing little flakes of glass

like the beginning of a snow squall

even as you’re smiling like a grimace

on a death mask trying to hold its tears back

like a glacier trying to discipline the mindstream.

Strong means you don’t use the fossils of other birds

as crutches for your lapwings. Your calender of scars

begins to smile more affectionately at you

as you get older like waxing crescent moons

and this avalanche of meteoric life

looks more like a windfall of ore and apples

with seeds like snake-eyed dice inside

or the seven come eleven of a coal mine

that finally clarified its darkness like diamonds.

When bad news comes you fall on it

like a hand grenade in a daycare center

as you strain to keep yourself together.

Strong means being taken for granted

like the solid cornerstone that can take the weight

of the world that towers above it like quicksand.

Strong means you don’t hesitate to eliminate

your distinctions when someone’s drowning,

whether they’re a fly in a toilet bowl,

Icarus falling out of the sky because his wings

were insincere, Narcissus plunging into his face,

or a siren caught up in the undertow of her song,

you show up like a lifeboat with a lighthouse

full of fireflies for a lantern, words for a rudder

and a star to set sail by and pull everyone in

to your emptiness, happy you’ve finally found a use for it.

A holy book says that no one’s asked to bear

more than they can carry, and it’s probably true

from one direction of prayer, but I swear, lately,

one camel isn’t enough to shoulder what

it’s going to take a caravan on the moon to walk

this cargo of heavy metals to a nuclear dump site

to the dark side where it’s always midnight at noon.

One moment there are funeral bells dissolved in the rain

like sugar-cubes of acid in a wishing well

and the next, a spear of insight penetrates my heart

and I can’ t tell if it’s a pin meant for a butterfly

or a voodoo doll, or as a dance floor for the angels

to learn how to waltz without bumping into each other

like Canada geese taking off from a trashed corn field

as if they needed an air traffic controller and a runway

to bear the souls of the dead west and south

as I begin to wonder if death really is too pricey a ticket

to unload all these camels of their burdens

like sacs of genetically modified bee pollen

I’ve gathered radioactively from the starfields

so it doesn’t derange the hive or taint its honey and flowers,

and travelling lighter than life, go with them.

Yet I know I won’t because my heart’s

mortared into my Mongol blood like a brick

in the Temple of Life at Samarkand

and I would think of it as genocide

to kill even so much as a single human

who’s ever stood nightwatch in a crow’s nest

for a fleet sailing into a divine wind.

Sooner or later I’ll be washed up

on the event horizon of another black hole

at the center of a galactic starfish

all my lucidities will stick to like myriad universes

nacreously gathering their pearls

like planets and new moons out of the nebulosity

of these lunar sandstorms whipping my eyes

with the radiance of a hundred billion burning stars

that get thrown in my wounds to cauterize

the scream of my fountainmouth hemorrhaging

in the dead silence I keep like a vow to myself

not to shriek out in pain at the arrows

that strike the hearts of the clear-eyed hawks in autumn.

PATRICK WHITE