I SIT AT MY WINDOW

I SIT AT MY WINDOW

I sit at my window

trying to translate the Kufic script

of the shadows of the trees on the snow,

smoking the invisible ink of the light

over the flame of my mind

to clarify my seeing

by realizing there is no deep or shallow

in the fathomless depths of I am,

nothing hidden, nothing revealed.

And it’s not so much that I am in the presence of the world,

but that the presence, the world, is me,

and if I go looking for it,

only my fingerprints will be found

like these violet shadows dusted by the snow

under my multitudinous mugshot in the mirror.

So I open my mind and my eye, my heart and my hand

and let things arise as they will,

knowing that even this is a blunder

that advances my tardy illumination by another eclipse.

This morning blue is the taste of the sky

and I am alive again at my desk

to wonder who or what or why I might be

this wondering spontaneity

circling like a bird in the abyss,

feathered by feeling and thought

for a tree or a meaning to perch in

that hasn’t already been struck

by the lightning of my homeless insight.

Indwelling energy in the turmoil of a terrible silence,

I am an ambassador of water to an unknown star

that foils my blood with light the closer I approach

and I don’t know what the message is

or who it’s from, but every time I deliver it,

my head comes off like the moon.

At some point you have to give up looking

to go on seeing, you must

come to a full stop

if you want to liberate the pen

that indicts you like an assassin

with his ear to the wall.

So I go by night, unheeded and alone,

a constellation of my own

that doesn’t read the braille of itself

reflected like direction in the starchart on the lake,

cored like eyes into the dice of my bones,

or mummified by a legend in a straitjacket

interred in the long-standing consensus of a guess,

knowing I would only be following my own footprints

like the shadows of these words

that flow from the trees in the snow.

And there are squirrels that leap from branch to branch

of these arboreal letters like commas

that don’t know where they go

and wrens that perch like quotation marks

around things that can never be said

that everyone claims they know

as they call out their name

like the echoless vocabulary

of a febrile grammar in a mad dream

as if their whole life were ingathered into one last scream

that might shatter the mirror of the way things inevitably seem.

I listen to the world and hear in each person and form

the mindstream moving through the night

like the voice of a mystic alphabet

returning to the sea

with news of itself

whispered into its own ear.

And if sometimes the stars think

my seeing goes too far,

my seeking exceeds the bounds of the light,

as it turns planets like doorknobs

to open new rooms in a dark mansion

that stands like an abandoned cornerstone of the night on a hill

waiting for me to return like a lost threshold,

or the faceless side of the moon to a window,

then let me here and now confess to my own denial

and knock on the door of the next false address

to see if I can find who wrote

this loveletter that slashes me open like a smile

and reads me out loud to the stars on the wind

as if I were the last flare from an empty lifeboat.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WOMEN I HAVE LOVED

THE WOMEN I HAVE LOVED

The women I have loved,

the taste of old fires in my mouth,

wild orchids

that summoned me

with their fragrance in the night

to mystery, ecstasy, danger and agony,

betrayal and loss,

intensities hotter than stars

that could thaw space like glass

in the coldest, deepest abyss of their beauty.

Seizures of flesh, potions of pain,

delirium of black poppies, eclipses, cloaks,

the sweet doom of paradise

in the effulgent bells of their hips

and their skin always

a starmap back to the earth, luminous braille

only the eyes in my fingertips could read.

Each was a way of breathing

in water, in fire, in stone, on the moon,

an atmosphere that clung to me

like the smell of an autumn night in their hair,

an era of seeing

that rooted like lightning

in the starmud of my poems.

Some were the windows of a palatial awareness

that astonished my heart like a peasant

and others, the rocks that crashed through it.

I tuned all my mirrors

to the high notes

of the most beautiful stars

in each of their constellations;

and the ones I loved best

were the windows

that could see both sides of God

and you could taste it in their eyes.

No doubt I was ruinous

in ways that it’s taken years

of deep solitude and suffering

to clarify, the ore

wasn’t always worth the metal within,

the volcanic rage of my baffled aspirations,

the urge to express, release, affirm, excel,

the way I parted women I loved like seas

in my quest for the promised land

and the way they closed up on me like pharaoh,

like a flower that doesn’t want to look at the night

and lowers its lonely eye,

like coffin lids

that were once the petals of a mystic rose.

Who knows who was buried

on those sexual slopes

that overlooked the motif of the river

wandering easily

through the vistas of the valley,

or how the story truly ended

that went on writing itself

as it does today

long after we were villages,

tiny necropoli, perfectly preserved,

and wholly usurped

like utensils by the afterlife

of the erupting mountain

that put an end

to the interminable funeral orations

that unrolled us like thunder in hell.

We slashed heaven

with the bloody razor of the moon

like the vicious legates of a papal threat

to spiritually salt the holy ground

we were rooted in

like lava, blood, and lightning.

I am still a confusion

of wounded dreams,

and when I look at the moon,

the bruises, the dead seas,

I am devastated again and again

by a ghostly sorrow

that returns to my heart

like a dove to a dark bell

that once knew the morning with another.

The truth is slurred by time,

and the confessions we made to the sky,

gusts of shame and contrition,

tiny burnt-out match-heads

that once flared into big fires,

slagging their depletion

like ore in the rain,

were abysmally true to the moment,

as we felt the ground beneath our feet

sinking like a continent.

We may have drowned like Atlantis

but how many decades since

have we lain here

like a thousand other toppled shipwrecks

offering the hilts of our masts

sheathed in coral

and the bunting of weeds

to the sea that slowly accepts our surrender?

All the beauty of that seeing,

the laughter in bed,

the aloof eternity in the form of the woman

at the end of the garden,

seen through the kitchen window forever

as if I had never made love to her,

pulling weeds from among the asters,

forever true, forever

preternaturally true,

the mystery that transfixes

and devours me yet.

I have not laid my dream down

like the head of a child

on the pillow of a stony heart.

I have not looked upon the stars

that shone over us those long walks into each other

as if we were two banks of the same river

and we were still a wonder

and a temptation to each other,

two wings of the same gate

hopelessly opening.

I am still summoned against my will

to those dread nights we went out in each other

like down-turned torches,

and the bouquets of the daylilies,

those truces of fire and water

we burned beside,

turned into congested refugee camps

that plunged into civil war with their own reflections.

All along this road

where I carry my life

like the shoes in my hand

there is broken glass,

shattered goblets of the moon

we once drank from together,

shards of the suicidal chandeliers

we once danced under

like the tails of the unnamed comets

that followed us like paparazzi

as if we were the prophecy.

Vampires once cloaked like assassins

in the darkness of the light,

they still come for blood,

pleading in the shadows like beggars for alms,

and I am often aghast at my own compassion,

feeling the quick tendrils

of their tongues flickering in my heart

that my blood still feeds these candles in eclipse.

Perhaps there is more spontaneity

in the darkness

than there is in the light,

but I have not let my mouth

turn into an open wound,

or wielded the cold flame of my tongue

like a dagger of fire that could only be put out

in the blood of another.

Leeches and lilies

are born in the same pond

and I have not denounced one

at the expense of the other,

but have stood before both in silent awe,

trying to overhear any whisper

of what these things might mean

that they should still sweeten and startle

my deepening ignorance

like the shadows and stars

that leap out of their own darkness and light

to ambush and detain us with love and life

all along these lonely, vivid roads

that walk us like the wind

that moves me now to remember

the generosity of loss that is love,

and the flaring of the dust that we once were,

this frenzy of dust, this urgent dance of the dust

that will forever be

like the wind, like love,

like fire and life, like the nights

that bent down over me while I slept

and kissed me good-bye,

the journey whirling in the arms of its own destination.

PATRICK WHITE 

TO BE ALIVE HERE

TO BE ALIVE HERE

To be alive here

is to suffer the godspear of light

that enflames your breath with life

through the heart, the night

of its napped shale

embedded in every part

like a mystic jewel in a wound that never heals

or a hidden nightbird in the far fields

when only the stars are listening.

To be alive here is to know

your only here and now

is to be alive.

Born into the lifeboat,

who needs to be rescued?

Is the fish afraid of drowning,

does a bird implore the sky;

is there not enough room in your eyes for stars?

Images, thoughts, symbols, feelings, words,

we live behind billboards illuminated

by artificial daffodils of light,

and walk our own midways alone

from tent to tent of sensation,

from mutant perversity to mystic elation,

blind in the blazing: come in, come in,

to the darkness under a flap of your skin.

How much has not changed for how long

inside the cocoon that diapers your reluctance

not to hump out of yourself with wings,

not to jewel the maggot with stars,

not to let the swamp hold up its waterlily,

not in overcoming or advancement,

not a white diploma of moonlit skin,

but a symbol and a celebration of what became of you

elaborating the world generation after generation

until, not enough just to see it,

your eyes immersed in the sea like rain

that has known the roots of the flowers

and opened the golden mouths of the grain

and washed the stars out of the hair of the fool,

and rinsed the age like a bloodstain off the stage,

you can finally be it.

You are empty.

Blood unspools like a thread

drawn out like a river unravelling the oceans of you

that used to lap these fleshbound shores

and flaunt this palace of bone on loan

from an absentee owner.

There is no face under your name

that isn’t looking away from itself

like light from the sun.

Utterly subjectivized, the imagination

reverses its spin

and things come undone,

and the skies that have dropped like petals from their eyes

to see without seeing the unseeable

are neither many nor one

nor the ineffable sum of the unbeable

because all things have already been achieved

and the world returned like water to the mindstream

it was taken from

like a snake that startles the stillness

before it flows away into the silence

or the light of a star that shines within

that doesn’t trouble the day.

But to live here in irrefutable bliss

you mustn’t confess to anyone

you were born knowing this.

To live here truly is to live

as if you had never existed,

though there are lifetimes behind you

like footprints on the road of ghosts

to say where you’ve been,

and every breathless glimpse is the eye

of someone you’ve never seen.

Here is the everywhere of is

and there is no shadow of another,

no map of blood to follow you like a pilgrim,

no sister, no father, no mother, no brother

you could possibly mean

to the photo-album of an aging gene

that doesn’t remember you

except as someone who was passing through

who didn’t know what things could lead to

when the stranger in the dangerous valley

took the highroad out of the mountains like an echo.

To be alive here

is to suffer one day, and dance the next,

to pass by rooms within yourself you never open

like tiny lockets of rain you weep alone in the shadows,

among so many furious stars,

trying to seed the pain with flowers

or patch new skin, a cool herb of light

over the burnt face of the moon like waterlilies

so the black mirrors will reverse themselves in the night

and turn your eyes away

from the things you can’t shatter with looking.

To be alive here

is to know you are dying,

the whole breath of the moment in every death

baling like overwhelmed boats to stop your crying.

Where do we go? Does anyone know?

Are we cinders and crows in the eyes of this shoreless sea

that watches us like a dream

no one can wake up from alive,

is this disproportionate night the jewel in the hive

that eclipses this rapture of honey

with more space than the flowers and stars can face?

Is a dead thing the king of its own skull-throne

or a toy of the ants lugging dismembered butterflies through its eyes

like sails crushed in the ice of a northwest passage

to be reassembled like moonboats on the other side?

We are islands and waves

and we close our eyes like the sea

in the imageless depths of our own inconceivability.

We are humans, worlds within worlds, and each

with a light of their own to know them by.

We are stars circling the lighthouse of our own knowing

like words off the coast of consciousness

that all mean, like birds, the same boundless sea

that slowly wound its aeons up like alarm clocks

to set us off like an insurgency of thought.

We are humans, bells and hells of blood and water that walk

upright like lightning rods wired to a brain

that the sea panned like a nugget of light

freaked with night, from the ore of a lunar vein

and everywhere we fall upon our own roots

and wash our own skulls clean of ourselves

like rain that was once alive

to raise them again like the moon to our lips, and thrive.

Long-winded brevity; brief longevity,

to be alive here is to be constantly giving

without knowing what your true gifts are,

like rain and rocks or the light of a star,

because even to share

is to set us apart divisively,

to break the plough like a wishbone.

There’s silver in the voice of the rock when it speaks of change

and though the rain doesn’t really know what it seeks to be

it gives itself everywhere inexhaustibly like a hinge

to the turning of everything,

and how could the night have guessed

the enlightened fury of a star

under the scars of its own elements

would lead to us in all our radiant intelligence

like something it got off its chest?

To be alive here is to know

that a single drop of water is enough

for the moon to swim in her own seas again,

and there are tides in the windowpane she transits

flashing with life, tiny glass fish

that make a turmoil of devotion

by seeding the ocean with eyes.

To be alive here is to know the wise

know less than you on both sides of the mirror

that lies in pieces at their feet like waves

that have learned to hold their tongues.

To be alive here

is to read a book on transcendence

while you’re sitting in the sun,

to ask why the moon is crying

when you’ve already drowned in her tears.

Is it holy? Is it joy? Is it real?

And look at the way it takes the whole of itself

from beginning without end to end without beginning

to make a single eye, all the measureless aeons of the myriads

that stand behind and before the seeing

timing the shutter-release

like someone taking their own picture,

running to get in the shot

before the flash goes off like light in the abyss

to illuminate the billions upon billions of faces

shed like apple-bloom in the orchard

from the radiant tree of its rootless being.

What is this without antecedent

I so urgently need to know

that I have poured the stars into me

and the starlessness of long, autumnal nights

and slept like the eyes of the rain in the roses of hell,

and grown black pearls out of a grain of dirt

like new moons in the mouth of a funeral bell

and hurt and hurt and hurt until

I could not tell who or what

was suffering me in and out of existence

like a dream in a fire that burnt without consuming,

my eyes in space twisted like melting windowpanes,

and darkness running down the blade of my solitude

like a nightdew of black blood on the tongue of the moon

as I shook in my chains like an avalanche

imprisoned in the heart of a mountain

where I wept like a metal in the cold abyss

of a horror without eyes or a name

that is everywhere this

that keeps killing me into bliss

by striking me like fire from a rock,

like the rainbow from its lock,

like a sword from the stone of the moon.

The universe pours itself out like a fountain

into its own inexhaustible mouth

like a drunk with a jewel in a bottle in a brown paper bag

up against the writing on the wall

in a dangerously infinite backalley

where Peter pretends to love Sally.

In each and every part it gives and takes

the whole of itself like a gift, like an ocean,

like an ocean breaking into eyes,

or the squirrel in the bluebells,

or me sitting here with the trees, waiting for leaves.

And everything is so eloquently

this effusion of transformation

as if fire were a music all its own

and in every flame and face,

thread, star, thorn, leaf, flower and voice,

in every feather and wave of awareness,

in every thought, feeling, and delusion,

and in what is beyond what we think,

the whole of the tapestry, the whole of the sky, the sea, the vision,

the mystic specificity of the indefinable,

the creative urgency of the uncreate

dropping worlds like pebbles in a pond

where every ripple opens its horizons like an eye

and even the rings of the tree are a slow pulse,

and the waterbirds shed their jewels in moonlight

and beyond beyond into the immaculate darkness of the thriving night

is the way their wings beat, the heart flows,

a star reaches out to touch the skin of a grape,

or a wave greets an island in a new language,

or a god drowns in himself so again and again and again

he can review his whole life flashing before his eyes

through every one of us,

through the rose and the bloodstain,

through the doorway and the window and the dream,

through everything that seems and unseems itself

like roads of light that move like snakes in the water,

like the holy paths of the unnamed ones

who return like memories of coal converted to diamonds

dancing with fools in the translucent bliss of their clarity.

One existence. Many. None. Three waves of light.

The sea. The sun. I am manifested

by everything I’ve ever been

like the running of a river

without beginning or end,

not old water behind, and new ahead,

but the whole universe, my watershed,

I am drawn from the well in this bucket of a body

enflamed by this fierce urgency of stars,

inextinguishable fire on the water,

growing eyes like ambassadors

from everything I am

to the empty throne

of the infinite bloodline

that delivers me like a message to me,

worlds within worlds like the sea in a bottle

bobbing at my feet.

And everything is always teaching;

every tree runs a school, every star

is a private tutor, every flower

a sage in a brothel, this harlot of blood

the wine of an unknown church,

and every bone in my body

the rung of a descending saint.

And what do they inexhaustibly teach

if not the youness of you to you,

if not the dark abundance

of your formlessness through forms

as if the world, and all that are in it

were your native language

and you were the ancient future of everything,

and every seed, a betrothal; and every flower, a bride?

Why suffer like a refugee at the gate

of your own estate

by refusing to let yourself in

through the open doors of the trees

with eyes that are wider than space

where can you hide from your own being,

or wash the seeing from your face?

Does ubiquity look for a place to stand,

a place to call its own, a seat at the table,

when everywhere it’s the homeless host

of these world-bearing guests who bow like trees

on the branching thresholds of a boundless feast?

In the furthest fields of yourself

you are the star, and the flower, and the seeing,

and it’s the namelessness of everything

that grows a mouth without saying like a word

that gathered overnight on the tongue of a leaf

that can taste you like the nascent stars of an old belief,

you have shone so long alone in the dark

to be alive here in every inseparable part.

PATRICK WHITE 

SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

SOMETIMES THE INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

Sometimes the intimacy of the silence

can grow so profoundly intense

it seems impersonal. Or the heat of life

burn like the dry ice of the holy ghost

as you shudder with spiritual chills in the cold.

And when you see things whole in and of themselves

it’s always as if you were looking through a broken window.

Truly fulfilled, you realize everything you’re missing.

The more you explore the mystery of what you’re doing

just walking around on the earth, aware

of your awareness, the more of a stranger

you seem to yourself, decultified of your identity.

The birches are glowing in skin tight moonlight

and there are sixties hash burns in their white leotards

and the leaves are falling and the river’s flowing

and the Canada geese are sowing themselves

in the wake of the plough of the moon

like black and white sunflowers seeds further south again

and my heart is saturated with autumn’s sad sugars

like a mournful apple at the pathos of their passage

as if time had abandoned everything and all

the solitary soul can do is harvest the loss like a human

with a romantic sense of irony as we dance

on the graves of the dead to celebrate

the bright vacancy, dark abundance of our starmud

occluding and enlightening our solitude

until you’re enthralled to conclude, the darker the night,

the brighter the light. And appearances are only deceptive

to those who haven’t broken on through to

the other side of the mirroring awareness yet like a hymen

over a virgin black hole that’s all iris with no pupil

so all it can ever see are moondogs of exclusion

that begin to look like haloes after awhile.

I’ll write an epithalamion on my wedding night with death,

but while I’m alive I like to toy with euphoric elegies

that weep like old rivers in the discrete depths

of their watersheds. I spend hours by myself

watching the spiders of time stringing contellations

like bird nets between the sacred upper branches

of the aspens to catch fish on the fly the way I

wait for insights to start riffing on the blues guitar

in the corner jamming with the silence of itself

like a poignant wildflower blooming unfashionably late.

If you stare intensely enough into the emptiness,

if your focus is searing enough to burn holes in space,

seemingly self-contained things will emerge like particles

you can elaborate in time and space like the fractals

of worlds within worlds engendered by your own seeing.

But turn the light down, turn your eyes away, dissipate

your concentration, everything reverts to the wavelengths

of the flying carpets unwoven on the waning loom of the moon.

Things done. Things undone. Does the water remember

the growth rings of its ripples, does the snake cling

to the loss of its skin, or fire reminisce in its ashes?

Or scars in autumn long for the springtime of their wounds?

Nights like this sensation haunts me like the ghost

of an amputated heart I dedicated to poetry to add my pulse

to a dying art like the blood of a noble enemy who knew

without saying, the only way to keep the calling alive

was to practice an excruciating discipline of heretical infidelity.

And that’s why I’m out here alone in the woods,

still trying to think my way out of the bone box of my decline

by taking my mind off things by letting go

of the paradigms and symbols that kept me afloat

like the lifeboats and wandering starmaps

of the habitable planets of the past bobbing

like the prophetic skulls of black walnuts back down

the mindstream to Mitylene in Lesbos

where Orpheus still dreams of singing himself

back up from the detritus of his cosmic dismemberments

like Vega in the lyrical grip of a dreamcatcher

casting spells like a widow’s veils on the water

to snare the stars like a fisherman who drowned on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

IF WE MEET AGAIN

IF WE MEET AGAIN

If we meet again, don’t quote your scars at me as if you were the moon. It’s hard to sympathize with the smile of a knife when it’s bleeding. There are some stains on the bedsheets even the light can’t wash away, and a mouth is not a wound you can close with a kiss. And I know some part of me is struggling with this like a cut worm who won’t bless the plough, but many women before you, because I died wholly for them, have taught me that even the most normative caprice of severance is the east of my deliverance, and all I have to do is wait in the cave of the Seven Sleepers for the eras to pass that will restore me like a face to a mask. But you’ll be bones by then, and the nightwind will not rescind the taste of your name just to please the flowers. You need a younger man who knows why he cries as I once did; older, I ache like a stone, but only metals move through me like swords and crowns unsheathed by wizards and kings, the boyish imaginings of my injured prowess when I’m bored with the lies that are inscribed under the eyelids of the wedding rings. And yes, this mute, mouthless, abysmal silence stings and the words that mated in a fury of night have lost their wings like flying ants that busy themselves with smaller dismemberments in the dirt. Or less symbolically rendered, I hurt. Quartered and torn asunder. Down, down, down under where I can look up at the roots and wonder if anything flowers on the bright side, or if my gravestone pops up like toast for another bride of the morning that wakes up glitzy beside my ghost. But this is an old coast I’ve been down before like a fly at a windowpane looking for a passage through the absolute glass of the ice pack in my way. And it’s not a matter of doubting there is a Cathay to be ultimately reached, but if I’ve grown sadder and wiser in all kinds of romantic weather, repeatedly beached, the compass of my little sage is more a map of where not to go than anything, but I don’t preach. Like a wolf above the timberline you can hear but can’t locate, the peaks scrambling the echoes like an early warning defensive missile system, I have learned to stay to the high paths above the radioactive dumps of the emotional melt-downs that glow like the half-life of cities in the dark. Howl there and no one understands the sorrow and the madness that’s drawn out of your blood and soul by the poultice of the moon; everyone’s tuning their bark to a voice coach, and behind every pitbull there’s a pooch. Better, my solitude, better this precipice with a view, than all the sirens and muses I’ve screwed the night before my sacrifice. I will not grovel on the bestial floor in the gore of my wretchedness, nor saint myself in a waste of blood and love just to prove I’ve been true to my hallucination. You can’t churn honey from yeast, or inflate the bread with pollen, and why bother trying to lift the pillars of old civilizations that have fallen into the rubbish and rubble of their kingdom-comes? I was never much of a goat you could tie bleating to a stake to con a tiger, or kill a god. Only a little magician is the fool of his rod, and there are darknesses well beyond sorcery that unmaster even the greatest adept of their demonic clarity. If you want to see into things don’t rely on your eyes. So I grieve; love palls and the flowers fall and I’m sad for the passing of everyone and everything, for the thin vapour of the dreams we keep breathing out like used air, for the unnamed star with dead planets like burrs in her hair, for the agonized cigarette-butt stubbed into the worn wood of the indifferent stair. If once I aspired to a failure beyond my utmost; at least, now, in times like these, when I search my heart like Atlantis for the occasional throne, I’m equal to my own inadequacy, and if I’m alone, I’m alone. Nor do I blame you anymore than I would the eyes behind the e-mail curtains that parted like the Red Sea to take a look at my exodus below into a gloomier theocracy. The same old menu of manna and vipers as the last time I crossed over, and the screening myth of a murder now the press release of a lie, and no sorrow in the eye that washes pharaoh out to sea, and tomorrow always the promised land just out of reach like the face of a woman only fingertips away from the obedience I breach and the breaches I obey. Did I not labour for you like a well in a desert, and bleach the water with sunstruck ghosts before I held it up to your lips like the moon to dispel the fever of a chronic eclipse? I was you and you were me. You said so. Closer than blood and breath. Maybe I just wanted to believe a greater intimacy than I had ever known was possible between people. Maybe the night was bored and sighed and the sigh stirred us into words and a nighthawk shrieked at the top of the moon’s stairwell, higher than it had ever been lifted up before by the bedsprings of its spiritual thermals where you lay down with me, our only skin, the sky. I saw your face once. I saw your tattooed arms and legs. I saw your eye. And the moist star that adorned it. The man and poet that I am are the two footings of the same bridge astraddle the mindstream that has no banks, and most of the time it’s hard to tell whether it’s the water or the bridge that flows, but my heart knows when it’s been touched, and you touched it. I felt you like the sky feels a new constellation crossing over for the first time, fascinated by the dark currents that swirled below, a confluence of voices, and the reflection of stars that mimed your radiance, as, effortlessly, a spontaneous inversion of the night, I returned your shining to you. But now, if you’re gone. Full stop. And this silence that widens in my wake like the compass of a departing waterbird on its way to the next pond, is all that’s left of everything that’s gone, this tremor of time in a dark space that once shone, the light with its tongue cut out learning to sign, I will not blow out the star in your eye that webbed the dreamcatcher in the corner of mine. I will remember you some nights when there’s only the field and me and the night and the stars, and I stand in the vastness lordless and alone, and feel the dark efface my life in its boundless immensity, and all my feelings a halo of black comets that once flared in the sun, I will remember you; I will remember you with intensity, and I will wonder.

PATRICK WHITE