YOU DON'T COME

YOU DON’T COME

You don’t come. Your absence is a guillotine. My heart

plummets from the altitude it risked in looking forward

to a day with you outside of time and circumstance, jumps

from the edge of paradise, the flat earth, the back

of a winged horse.

You don’t come and such is the nature of love

I go out of the plane not knowing

if I’ve got a parachute on and my heart

pulls the rip cord to see if there’s any salvation in the fall,

any flowers for me in the bag, morning glory

or dandelion seed, or this is just another

mode of acceleration to death.

You don’t come

and my heart candles without a reserve,

I haven’t packed a spare dawn

and though I will make every effort to understand

there’s a grave waiting down below like an open mouth

and the void is laughing at the persistent folly

of my believing you would come,

and my fear of not being worthy of love anymore

sends my mendicant self-image out

wandering over thirteenth century Europe like some flagellant

on a pilgrimage of flogging, ribbons of blood running down my back

from salted wounds, and though I know

the expectation and the disappointment are both delusions,

birdshit on the claws of a sphinx, and I will try to be

intelligent and wise about the whole thing,

tugging my heart out like a garbage-scow into deep space

where it will be laced with explosives and scuttled once again,

and I will be awarded another paradoxical brownie-badge

by another scout-master Tibetan rinpoche

for knowing how to survive alone in this empty wilderness,

a tiger of will, a Viking of resolve,

an aging clown without children or laughter, a jester-king

officiating from the throneless butt of his own joke,

a poet with nothing to praise, a painter

with cataracts in the eye and flowers in the sky,

I know there is nothing I can tell myself, no spiritual weed

I can poultice over the vacancy that goes on forever

to draw out the infection from my heart, the gangrene

from the broken pillar of the foolish temple I erected

to serve the goddess in any of her lunar phases,

and though I struggle like a diminished thing to accept my dejection,

to imbibe the toxins from the left tit of the Medusa

while trying not to turn into stone, while trying

not to avert my eyes from this crone-form of the moon, let

Kali drink my blood, in the name of insight, clarity and courage,

good wolf, I know this, too, is delusion, another

projected holograph from the third eye of the pineal gland,

and kick the chair from under

the useless fruit of my head in a noose. Back to earth

without a heat shield. Impact.

You don’t come

and your absence is filling up with people I like as far as I know

but don’t want to see, people who walk into

the sad forests of my solitudinous melancholy with chain-saws

for conversation, stupid lost bored people who just can’t help it,

looking for cigarettes and companionship in the life-boat,

the leper-colony, stars on the Titanic, and I am compelled up

from the depths of my cosmic despair like a white whale in a holding pen

to jump for the tourists, make a big splash, make

anything happen to amuse them, and I try, I honestly try, regretting

even the shabby sincerity of my own incapacitated efforts to love them

by pulling something out of the guts

of my own anonymous dismemberment, a hand or an eye or a smile.

And it all feels like the work of a tired ox grinding social corn

on the zodiacal millstone of its own heart

but everyone leaves like a gray day anyway, the sun eclipsed

and I am returned to myself like polluted water

running like a desert flashflood through the dry creekbed

of your undeniable absence.

You don’t come. You have forgotten me

as you said you wouldn’t and all the promises

of intimacy and vivid affection

are unleashed like a plague of locusts on the moon

to devour the open-faced swordless clocks of the flowers

I planted there for you to know eternity in the hour.

I am eaten alive by a million mouths

and even yesterday’s demons banished from the feast

are called back from lean exile

to this jubilant feeding-frenzy that consumes without mercy.

You don’t come. And I don’t blame you. I understand

the flux of time and circumstance, I understand

how a man goes to bed at night thinking

he’ll be drinking wine in the morning

and winds up being offered vinegar on a cross,

I understand that there are events that appear like sharks

in this water droplet of a world, that there are crossroads

that baffle the journey with traffic cops

and starless unknowns, with roadkill and dangerous vagrants,

that there are off road shortcuts across the far fields

that seem to take forever to return us to where we began.

Alive sixty-three years, I understand

what it is to walk this road of ghosts, a refugee,

carrying your own body to a shower in a concentration camp,

to mistake the apocalypse of a nuclear explosion

for the advent of dawn, to mistake the knot in a river of wood

for a ship on the horizon, an island in the stream.

Castaway again on the cold rocks of some extraterrestrial shore

to follow my own footprints back to me, every life form on the planet,

including myself, a fossil of nirvanic spontaneity,

some indecipherable glyph broken off

the loaf of some lost continent like a crumb of stale bread, a bone-fragment,

a dead civilization, to feed the curiosity of time-travellers

who fix like junkies on the mystery of their passage

through empty alien rooms, though I burn like a library of reasons,

and mock my own scholarship, mustering arguments against myself

to excuse your absence and justify another fleet of coffins

sailing to the rescue, I do understand.

You do not come. This negligence

is unintentional. You are young, free, a gust of wind and a leaf

that flares up in a back-alley throwing gold-dust in your eyes,

fire-fly north that can’t be constellated, a dolphin off the bough,

and I am no fisherman with a net, no obvious lures,

who’s trying to draw you up on deck out of your element,

but a captain going down with the ship, his hands at the wheel out of habit.

You have not come and I am a thousand years older and more correct

than I was on this delirious bird-mad morning,

lyrically awaiting you, than I am now looking upon all these sad eggs

smashed like a junkyard of embryo suns and broken crowns

at the foot of a nest in the bent axle of the cosmic tree

where I hang like the pagan god, Wodin, a sacrifice unto myself,

one pathos to another, inaudibly whispering last words

into the ineffable silence of a non-existent ear.

You have not come and all your reasons are valid. Brutally,

I understand the firewalk of this excruciation on crutches,

limping over hot coals to transcend myself for clarity’s sake,

for poetry’s sake, your sake, my sake, love’s sake, the seeing’s sake,

I have worn out the road and the bridges of my feet

with my walking across the rivers of hell to understand:

I am aging and the ignorant insane children of this black spring,

brought up on logos and T.V. only come to look through

the rubble of Tintagel for the lost jewels of Merlin,

for any heart-stone they could pull the sword out of

to establish their own thrones once again

in the fields of glory beyond the round table of the calendar.

I have drunk from the cup and passed it on and all the shining skies

that I have ever walked under, all the legends of my stars,

my former radiance, in their eyes, are cemeteries of dead stars,

black dwarfs and the holes of exhausted graves in space, the blue-white

of their ingathered light that once could stir a planet into life,

now the braille of an effaced epitaph runed on a poet’s tomb.

And it’s not as if they don’t come bearing gifts when they do come,

flowers and compliments to the green patina on my erudition,

small obeisances at graveside, gratitude

for my gray-haired kindness, token offerings to the dead,

to the prophetic skull of one of their ancestors

consulted like the weather or Moses

on the future of the promised land that I’m forbidden to enter.

No blame in their approach to the disembodied, no fault

on either side. I understand. You do not come. No word

to allay the silence, no sword to fall upon in the stoic shadows

of your portentous eclipse, no way to scry, haruspicate, divine

the meaning of the darkness that overtakes me

like Herculaneum under the canning-jar ash of a volcanic heart

putting up preserves.

My dick falls off at forty. At thirty

the colour runs from my hair like a sunset. At fifty

I’m a desert in an hourglass. Sixty-three and my blood chips off

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

at the turn of the millennium, my eyes turn into clouds,

my tongue, the spent autumn of a leaf on the wind. By forty-nine

all that I remember is on display in a museum, my eviscerated heart

sinks through a convenient tar-pit and my brain, cracked mud,

orders a modest sarcophagus and rents a small room under an affordable pyramid

close to the valley of the kings.

Today I shed a few tears tinged with acid that die

like rain looking for roots on rock and bury my riddle of bones and vertebrae

under the snuffed fire-pit of a cave floor

for an archaeologist not yet born to guess at what I was.

You do not come. I understand. Tired of scratching at my coffin lid,

I must get out, I go to the Perth Restaurant and call to see

if you need a ride even though the wheel

is ten thousand years in the future, fire hasn’t been discovered yet

and I’m back in the Jurassic, a tiny mammal, trying not

to be stepped on by a stampede of doomed dinosaurs.

Wrong number. Wrong life. You do not come. I understand,

the flag of my heart at half-mast on the pole of my spine,

and no one but strangers and hired mourners,

mirages and self-inflicted nightmares

to carry me out of my hapless resignation into a waiting hearse.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

Something continental within me rising.

Atlantis, surfacing. Pangaea coming back together,

synarthritically, after diversifying its sentient life forms,

from the preludes of the Burgess Shale

to the double-beamed diplodeci of Patagonia.

I can feel the shoulders of an ancient ocean

heaving up beneath me like a Leviathan of life

with the power to smash headlong through

the hull of the lifeboat of my psyche, or tip me

like a seal off this last ice floe I’m clinging to in the Arctic

with four polar bears, Henry Hudson, and a terrified tern.

Sublimely underwhelmed, everything I once transcended

crossing a burning bridge of stars in a long firewalk

now subscended like the underside of a leaf or a starmap

as if my vision of life, and this thread of blood,

this small mindstream at night I am in it, is being

woven and unravelled by the moon I’m giving birth to

in a fire womb of an underwater fumarole

umbilically connected to the magmatic core of the earth,

hydrogen sulphide mythically inflating the scale of life.

I’m heading into a bloodstorm with a ragged poem

like a flag of surrender for a sail on a life raft I lashed together

from the available driftwood that washed up on my shores

like the contorted corpses of those who had drowned in agony,

trying, as I have, for light years, to get to the other side before I die

in this tidal pool of shore-hugging ego that esteems itself

the third eye of the great nightsea beyond it

and when it’s full of stars, the parabolic mirror

of a reflecting telescope in orbit around itself like a deer fly.

The earth is turning into quicksand under my feet.

O, earth, gape! A touch Marlovian, perhaps,

and a sound magician might make a demi-god,

but demi-gods don’t always make the most sound magicians.

My skyscrapers are loosing their footing

like needles skipping grooves across an old fashioned record

of the celestial spheres, striated by retreating glaciers

trying to revive the last word of their literary careers,

like fireflies with enfibulators come to jump start their art

too late, too late, to go south with the other birds.

The mourning dove flees, but the crow winters with its heart

like a continent of coal deep freezing into diamonds

when a dark muse seizes it by the throat like an eclipse

and it cries out in the starless night of the uncomprehending abyss

across the ice-glazed eyelids of the blood-stained snows,

I am the ocean in the eye of a black rose.

I am the prophetic passion of fire in the skull of a dragon.

I am the dark lantern the arks of the stars

send out before themselves as if their myths of origin

were all ahead of them like a time capsule of eyes

to be opened sometime in the future when the light

makes land fall like the Norse at L’anse aux Meadows

before the fishermen anglicized Medusa from the French

in Jelly Fish Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland.

I am the spectral blazing of the silver heart of the moon.

I am the compassionate ice palace of an Inuit embassy,

an igloo in tears, giving sanctuary to the snow blind ghosts

that can wander the tundra for years like exiled dolmens

following the spectral fires of the auroral borealis

without any sign of a seance rising like smoke

from more accommodating fires on the shamanic horizon

of a mystic trickster that ate the eyes of the snow fox

so it could see in the dark the traps that had been laid for it.

Long before I became the funereal usher

greeting the new comers at the one-way exits of the dead,

I was the gateless gate at the entrance of the living

to the longest white nights of their lives in a northern paradise

where nothing was forbidden and the great oracular snake

that Blake said in his prophetic books would arise in Canada

found it too cold to survive and perished

like a wavelength of dark energy red shifted toward the light

in a six month long nightmare no fire could revive it from

like the hallucinogenic smelling salts of the volcano

it coiled around for visionary warmth at Delphi.

But I can tell by the tattoos on the skin it shed

what it would have said if it had been more adaptable

and let more serpent fire go to its head in this cold climate

like chimney sparks among the stars

shining above its last chakra circumpolarly like Draco

growing wings like a wivern of wild grape vines

wrapped around the axis mundi of the wounded earth.

I can heal. I can soothe. I can seduce you to my love.

I can move like a scar over the surface of the earth.

I can run like a wild northern river roiling in the moonlight

I can linger like a ripple in the oilslick of the Alberta tar sands,

or a perma frost speed bump on an asphalt highway in the spring.

I can be the dark angel in your way who drives

a spear of light through your heart so you can

never really tell if you’re just another Barbie

toying with nirvana, or a real voodoo doll in the night

with a deeper insight into the dark arts of cursing and blessing

than either of the shallower mirrors and scenic vistas

of your blood and tears could have managed

on the same event horizon where they stand on the threshold

of a black hole they dare not enter on their own.

I am the alpha. I am the omega of shapeshifters

I am a dynamic equilibrium of fire and water

at peace with themselves without compromising

the other’s nature for rising up or flowing down.

When my feet are in the stars, my head is on the ground.

I am the balancing act of a sacred clown

chequered like a chessboard calendar

of the days and nights of my life

I’ve danced with the full,

I’ve danced with the new moons

as if my ends always came before my beginnings.

Extinction the prelude of inception,

not the false dawn of its epilogue.

Clarity doesn’t engender an opposite.

It isn’t reality. It isn’t a lack of deception.

It just means enlightenment and delusion

have both ceased to exist

as you make your exit, laughing,

with a real tear painted on your cheek that hasn’t dried yet.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS

THE NUNS ARE SLEEPING ON GRAVES WITH THEIR PAGAN LOVERS

The nuns are sleeping on graves with their pagan lovers.

The black walnut trees have shed their leaves

half way between feathers and scales

like arboreal dinosaurs that are learning to fly.

And the branches of the staghorn sumac

that went up in flames like the rest of the greenwood

now look like the ribs of a snake blanched in the ashes.

I tell the hard rocks chiselled down to the lake

as if they were animate, sapient, sentient life forms

I know just how they feel

when they’re dreaming of Carrara marble

and someone steps on them

like a skull of a common cornerstone

you can take for granted, but the birds,

why is it always the birds that are the first

to be alert to things like this, tell me

not to deprive them of their extinction.

So I’m prone to keeping my words to myself

when I’m on a backwoods pilgrimage alone

with too many death masks hiding the face of the moon.

Half the abandoned roads I’ve walked through life

have turned back in upon themselves

like an ingrown hair of a noose

in a claustrophic cul de sac,

like a thread of the mindstream

trying to close the eyelid of a needle that’s dead.

But the other half of the labyrinth

on the dark side of seeing led me into clearings

in the middle of nowhere I ever expected to be startled by stars

that set my heart racing with mystic terror as if a partridge

just exploded out of the bushes in front of me

and enlightenment came to me for an hour or two

with such force of clarity I was breathing light not air.

And I didn’t become one with everything.

How can anyone say they’re one with everything

without resorting to the past tense the moment they say it?

I stood my ground beside unity like zero

because nothingness is the only way

of comprehending one without being excluded by it

like the exception that puts the lie to the whole,

and I amplified its immensity tenfold.

Ask any silo. There’s no limit to what you can hold

when you’re empty compared to what you can

when you’re full. Even on upgraded hobby farms

where the wheat and the corn are stored

in more ample, lightning proof Euclidean storage spaces,

if you look over your shoulder in passing

at the old wooden siloes barely holding their ribs together

with rusting metal bands, cooper’s barrels

abandoned closer to the road that’s been widened since then,

their roofs blown off by the wind like the lids of garbage cans,

I’ve seen fully mature trees, rooted in the compost

at the bottom, rising up like green oil strikes toward the sky

or a clown like me being shot out of a cannon toward the stars

and landing in the safety nets of the laughing constellations

who weren’t expecting to catch anything that night

but a few eyes out swimming too far, too deep from shore.

Just because it’s a long shot, and your aim’s off,

and your not quite as profound or sublimely targeted

as the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs,

doesn’t mean you still can’t make a big impact as a meteor

holding on to the flower in your hat for dear life

like a butterfly in a firestorm of dragons

with a childlike sense of humour marrowed

in the smooth bore barrels of their dusky funny bones.

PATRICK WHITE  

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees.

I affirm and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless humans.

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat.

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

Listening to the nightsong of the silence

in a clearing in the woods that used to be

a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn,

and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations

of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood

as the cold comes on, slowing down into

long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives

the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals

who can’t afford migration, to dream half the winter away,

soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside

from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses

as if they were being whittled out of ice

or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs

into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm.

Chronic boredom of a white screen they’d

rather smear with something than look at nothing at all,

whether cadmium red on a blank canvas,

blood on the snow next to the hollyberries

the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on,

or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal

gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars

spreading the rumour around. Wonder what

the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day

when the cops were afraid to go there,

would have to say about their whiskey barrels

being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias

and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.

Or me out here on my own looking

for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark

hasn’t been distempered by the bottled light of the town.

After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes

I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place

who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness

taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound

like Huron women in the moonlight

beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds

into the bows of their spectral canoes

silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves

before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out.

And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves

just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation,

and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder

so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately

as the deepest intimacy of time you’ll ever experience

in your passage through it. And it doesn’t matter

what the message is, whether you can interpret

the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight,

or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations

for real light, you’re assured, without ambivalence

of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility

startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity

is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough

to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight

as if you’d just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon.

Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid

by denying it. Right now I’m still a seance

of living fire in the woods the shadows of those

who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved,

lived, laughed and died here competently long before me

gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts

turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell

or I were the axial blackhole at the nave

of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me

as if the black queen of the sweetness of life

were founding a new colony of natives, exiles,

and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal

to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises

all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body.

Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years

of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side

of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust

and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese

embody my migratory soul on a long journey south,

there are rituals and protocols of life and death

that must be upheld with a patience and grace

born of understanding how vital it is to adorn

what can’t be understood with osprey feathers,

cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild

in the starfields of our dream mothers

leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors

for the wind blowing through the catkins.

In the beginning was the imagination.

Imagination is the mindscape we’re all aboriginals in.

Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop

looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake.

Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace

with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it’s awake

when the elders gather to name the newborn

after the dancing waters and fire talkers

consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude

in the presence of the inexpressible events

that create the things of the world

like the sensory simulacra of a story

that always dying to be told around the fires of life

in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow

like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon

out of the leafless crowns of the trees

so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.

PATRICK WHITE

FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

FROM THE TREE TO THE GROUND THE SEED IS UNBOUND

From the tree to the ground the seed is unbound

as a bird in a space capsule re-entering the earth’s atmosphere

like an apple at splash down withering like a parachute.

Or the wind uplifts you like a lion with the mane

of a solar corona, and you roar in the abyss awhile

and then it lets you down like a dandelion

in a windfall of paratroopers crossing the Rhine.

Rags of the flags of last year’s nation of leaves

stuck together like the pages of a wet history book

made sacred by the earth I’m walking on bathed in blood.

Nature red in tooth and claw as if the hot passionate colours

that advance to the foreground were more violent

than the more distantly passive violets, viridians, and blues.

Chill out means stop aiming at everything as if

you were a sniper in a belfry with a machine-gun

looking for God with your third eye laminated to the lens

of a high-powered telescope that’s got you in its digital crosshairs.

I’m not seeking freedom to not have to look for anything.

I’m not turning over every stone to see where the angels

keep their ancient places as a junkie-poet once said

in the gutters of Victorian London, or peeking under every leaf

to see where I left my eyes like reading glasses

under a sheaf of poems packed on my desk

like the layers of the Burgess Shale after the first good snowfall.

Things come of their own accord out of a time-zone

that’s unique to them, and delight in their reception

like strangers in the doorway of an open heart,

every step of the way the threshold of a journey

that would never depart like the bloodstream of a ghost

evaporating from the palace it built in the salt flats

if you didn’t give the flowing a purpose, a destination,

the drift of your circuitous blossoming something to find

when you arrive at the place you lost it like an exit

at the front entrance of your mind. Peace isn’t

the consolation prize of a new pair of eyes

trying to make up for the loss of your happiness.

It’s the only cornerstone of the stars

in a desert of quicksand saturated with the mirages

of the tears you keep sinking in like the delusional oceans

of the moon, in a tidal pool of unsalvaged shadows.

Black walnuts all over the ground this year

like incinerated solar systems from a Rumi poem

lying at my feet like unracked cue balls that didn’t break

but I don’t take them as signs of things to come

because things to come come quietly in the night

without making the grand entrance of a moonrise

or heralding their farewell with the garish sunset

of a trumpeter swan. They come on small feet

that barely make a whisper through the grass.

And then they’re gone like a bubble in a mirror

that breaks into ripples on the surface of the mind

once it makes contact with an atmosphere vast enough

to contain it like an enlightened vision of the wind it rides

to ends of the earth like the breath of life within us all

from birth to death, the mysterious door left ajar ahead of us

and the one behind, opening even wider in our wake.

PATRICK WHITE

RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN'T SLEEP.

RAIN AT FIVE IN THE MORNING. CAN’T SLEEP

Rain at five in the morning. Can’t sleep.

Too many shards of broken mirrors

of the way things are in my mind.

Not enough windows to look through

for a star or two between the clouds.

No one on the streets. And the doorways

keeping their thoughts to themselves.

The pipes of the gas furnace creak

like an octopus with arthritis

and the aquarium filter leaks

like a mindstream on the rocks

not the lyrics of a fountain with a dolphin’s mouth.

My eyes observe the protocols of seeing

into the sturm and drang of my awareness

like a lighthouse, but the dragon’s awake

scalding my heart until my blood seethes

like the toxic glands of a cold-hearted reptile

in a cauldron of volcanic mistakes

reversing the spin of the spells I cast

that had more of an air of forgiveness about them

than is seemly for a curse but still too much

the smouldering of the Druidic glais

dedicated to the ashes of the Burning Man

to be a blessing in the eyes of the beholder

who sees his own features in it, good or bad,

depending on how raw or cooked he is.

My subconscious mind surfaces

like the dorsal fin of a sundial

to circle the lifeboat I’m in

like a prophet in the belly of a killer whale

trying to knock a seal off an ice floe.

I’ve disciplined my karma like a martial art

but my heart is a miasma of provisional compassion.

Dead dog’s dream self snarls like a junkyard

of bad performance poetry behind an electric fence

I wove out of the optic fibres

of a discarded dreamcatcher

hanging from a rearview mirror

in the middle of a windshield

swimming against the flow of things

like a salmon up the mountain

in the slipstream of its own wake.

I keep my rage on a chain and a muzzle.

I keep my sorrow to myself like a child

I never wanted to grow up to be me.

I can be a heretic devoted to the freedom

of my own creative apostasy

as a decultified mode of poetic disobedience

but there’s a gleeful buoyancy

in the experience that bubbles up

within me like a tar pit liberated from itself

that says touch even this lightly

in your passage through here.

Listen to the wind in the trees

with your nose as well as your ears

but follow the stars like a shepherd of wolves

hunting in the same high fields

their fires graze upon themselves,

not the wheeling of the world’s wavelengths

in these earthbound coils of renewal and extinction

crushing the life out of me like a beached Leviathan

suffocating under its own weight, or oracular pythons

with their tails in their mouths like the last word

of anything left to say on their deathbeds.

My despair is still contaminated with hope

and the lucky long shots that ricochet off chaos

but still hit the target like the master stroke

of a random God particle, haven’t done anything

to improve the aim of my hadron collider.

The secret of life is confided only to those

discrete enough not to tell it to anyone else.

They wear it on their sleeves like silence.

Their tongues are not candles in the niches of their mouths

they keep blowing out with every breath they take

looking for emergency exits in the fire traps of their shrines.

And woe to the hypocrite that tries

to love me unconditionally as if I didn’t have

a mind and a heart of my own to see

what a ploy it is to climb a burning ladder

up to heaven, only to let people down conditionally

like a fire-escape in a cheap hotel

that stops half way to the ground.

PATRICK WHITE