IS SILENCE THE NEGATIVE SPACE OF WORDS

IS SILENCE THE NEGATIVE SPACE OF WORDS

Is silence the negative space of words,

darkness, the stars? A fact is just a fact,

static and inanimate, until it moves and breathes,

a dynamic of the mind, sinks into the heart

and mingles in a confluence of the nuances

of chaos that characterize each one of us

in solitude, is it alive, one eye plucked out

of a voodoo doll, a sunflower at a black mass,

a fable of truth in time that time, too, will pass.

Venus and Jupiter near Spica in Virgo

and Arcturus in Bootes, still stand offish

as it was through the canopy of branches

of the black walnut trees this summer.

The worst place to discover your loneliness

is when you’re dancing like the new moon

in the old moon’s arms, and it’s the old moon

that’s having all the fun. Everyone wants to

fly with the waterbirds. The third eye of the river

turns itself into a simulacrum of the sky, but still,

it only runs. As the star that would efoliate

like the starclusters of the New England asters,

merely burns like a chip off the focus

of a magnifying glass in the hands

of inquisitorial children cooking butterflies.

Here is a bend in the Tay River about ten miles

outside the town of Perth. When is another

cold night on earth I had to get out of the house

to bathe my nuclear cabin fever in the heavy water

of the moon washing over me as if a lunatic

were immune to the craziness of going sane.

Why is the content of life that counter balances

death’s bad sense of timing. How is a matter

of doubting the cure and trusting the pain

to turn you into someone you could never imagine.

The fish don’t jump. It’s Lent for the blackflies.

The leaves have torn up their book. The retina

of the river is partially detached. There’s

more resentment in the woods than there was

even a month ago. As if the only way

you could live here were by trespassing.

As I do, furtive as a fox, wary as a wolf

listening to the distant barking of farmyard dogs.

The air’s taken a vow of chastity that burns my face

in the warped clarity of the hottest part of the flame.

The atmosphere’s renewed its virginity

like a windowpane in an infertile November rain.

The grass brittle and the starmud hardened

into shards of pottery in a midden of ostrakons.

I’m exhilarated by the way I’m threatened

by my own vulnerability at the possibility

of being eaten alive by the elements, rather

than expiring slowly en masse like the hungry ghosts

of the homogeneous consumers back in town.

No place for an old man, maybe, but the young

don’t fare much better here either. Birth

is on the clock. No one’s born on the nightshift.

Only the salt lick left out for the deer

isn’t frosted like a cake in a famine

of mean-hearted snowflakes that don’t adhere

like toupees and wigs to the judicious skulls of the rocks

but blow off in any slight gust of the wind

like tears of dry ice that don’t know what there is

to cry about, and keep holding themselves back

like the locks out at Murphy’s Point or the boats,

their sails furled like daylilies and withered poems

at Rideau Ferry. Even the dragons that used to

feather the staghorn sumac in their flames

are barely a skeletal candelabra of wicks

that have gone out. Just the dendritic deltas

and bloodlines of dynastic lightning whose roots

go all the way back to the sky, but don’t

flash their sabres as much in the legendary storms

that once made them famous among

the usurped crowns of the sacred oak trees.

Laureled in poison ivy, their blood slows down

like the xylem and phloem of imperial Rome

wintering north of the Danube or Ovid in exile

on the Sarmatian shores of the Black Sea,

waiting for the Ister to freeze like a meat locker

while a tryst of sorrows pleads to be forgiven

for the joys they once took in living life erotically

as if frost-bitten toes were as close as he

were going to get to Augustan purple in his afterlife.

I wonder what my eyes have contributed to the stars,

what might have been added to their shining over the years

I’ve looked up at them, if anything at all,

in this inter-reflecting hall of incommensurable mirrors

warped by the mirages of my frozen tears

in this desert of snow grinding them into lenses.

Clear. Cold. Far things brought near out of the darkness

like moths and stars into the more intimate fires

of my heart. Per ardua ad astra, I reach for the stars,

the lamps and the urns, the eagles and swans,

and they scatter my ashes like a snow squall

along the Milky Way disappearing into a black hole

in a mindstream of its own like images of this occult art

of reviving my life by returning it to deeper, darker waters.

PATRICK WHITE

BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCHE OF TONGUELESS BELLS

BURIED UNDER AN AVALANCHE OF TONGUELESS BELLS

Buried under an avalanche of tongueless bells,

I want to scream. I’m an oyster shell in the midden

of an archaeological dig. Who shucked my pearls?

Trying to weep my way into singing away the pain.

What happened to the Algonquin village that once stood here?

My skull’s an empty locket at the end of the foodchain.

I’ve given more than the less I had to give in the first place.

What do the takers know about sacrifice?

I’m not a strawdog with a deathmask for a face.

My emotions aren’t tinfoil. My tears aren’t wax.

I embroider my dreams in blood on a pillowcase

of razorblades. That way they’ll last like a dye

that holds fast against fading in the bleaching sunlight.

But my varnish is cracking along the agitated fault lines

of my nerves. My shining freaked with gaps

like the dry creekbed of a splintered mirror.

I’m trying to condition the split ends

of the uprooted lightning I transplanted into an urn

of fertilized starmud with enough death in it

to make anything grow. But all I’ve done is burn

my green thumb attempting to turn this desert

in an hourglass into the fertile crescent of the moon.

No exit out of this labyrinth of dead ends,

I’ve eaten the breadcrumbs all the way back

to where my homelessness began. Cartographic spiders

weaving the fibre optics of my situation like starmaps

for unwary flies in the corner. Still, nothing shines.

Whose sign is this? I follow a trophy line of black dwarfs

like a rosary of flies all the way to end of a dangling modifier

but still I can’t find Aldebaran or Arcturus. Am I blind?

Or is this just another black farce of the constellation

I’ve been beading out of burnt match heads,

hoping sooner or later they’ll break into light again

and show me a way out of here like the first magnitude dew

of a new morning on a habitable planet

in an unattainable starcluster far, far from here

the dawn is about to befriend with another attempt at life.

Fat chance of squeezing the Milky Way out of the tits

of seven lean kind. I’m trying to sword dance

with the hard times I’ve fallen upon flat-faced

to the sound of one hand clapping in an audience of echoes

to the slapstick antics of a buffoon tripping over himself

onto the ritual blade that guts his dignity

like a hungry poet hung on a hook in an abattoir,

bleeding out like a blood red star over a bathtub

as the elements of life and light eat themselves

out of house and home like a periodic table from the inside out.

I’ve been shining too much. I’m ferociously lucid.

I’m probably mad. I’m scalded by the cauldrons

of my own visions. My heart wandering like a shepherd moon

in a loose orbit around a demoted planet at the extremes

of the darkness that surrounds the solar system

with the black walnuts of rejected cornerstones

or pine cones that fell far from the dolorous roots

of the sappy evergreens weeping slow glaciers of bitter tears.

Where the bright vacancy of orchards in bloom?

Where the sweet windfalls of dark abundance?

Some child take me by the hand and lead me

like a blind prophet out of this forsaken promised land.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

The grey rain riffs on the windows

as if it’s been listening to too much rap.

Fragrance of gasoline blooming in the gutters.

People all look like daffodils in baseball caps.

Wish I wanted something enough to buy it again,

and it’s been a while since I’ve been with a woman

who wanted anything for me. I’m inside here

dethorning the intensity of the black rose

imploding under its own mass as its core

condenses in a withered star like a heart

whose light’s run out. The fire in my blood

took it all one nightshift further than red

and now I can see in the dark like a black hole.

Nightvisions in broad daylight. I can see the stars

shining through the smudged pearl of the sun

trying to glow its way through the clouds.

I can see the skulls of insurrectionist dreams

deep underground in the cults of my cells

trying to assess the direction of the bomb blast

to insure the maximum damage. Not all roads

are trying to make friends with people

who walk them like cowpaths littered with road kill.

It’s better to be lost as the lesser of two evils

when clarity scorches the heart radioactively.

Dissociation, Deconstruction, Disintegration,

I’ve evolved like a language into a grammar

of oxymorons just to keep my thoughts and feelings

together in a syntactical world of unpunctuated scalpels.

Alloys of a stronger metal are not estranged

like copper and tin from the cutting edge of the sword

by the colour of their skin or religion in the Bronze Age.

Love comes at me in the darkness of these depths

like a crossroads of light from all directions at once

by which I know the radiance that’s found me

is not just another flashlight that’s still looking.

And there are Sufis whirling like weathervanes

in blue woollen robes, and enlightened Zen masters

gently picking the fleas out of their chest hairs

and thanking the thieves for leaving the moon in the window,

and demonic demons with the insight of black diamonds

all telling me you lose control if you hesitate in the moment,

or stand up, sit down, walk, or run, but whatever you do

don’t wobble. And I plunge into the galaxy with both feet

hoping to make a big splash in the red tide of the stars

and I either drown in the light, or I end up

blowing hyperbolic bubbles into a bulky multiverse.

I haven’t turned my senses into lenses,

starmaps, and spectrographs, but I’m not blind

to what’s living under my eyelids in a chaos

of crazy-wisdom playing picture-music

in a band of clowns, just to get a good laugh

out the oracles that are prone to never

take their own advice so seriously

they couldn’t change their minds.

You can’t refit a round suggestion

into a square meaning, and it’ cruel to try.

I have long wavelengths of thought

that burn like iodine and salt in sea kelp

but I don’t whip the eyes of the tide

just to get things flowing like tears my way.

I don’t throw acid in the faces

of tomorrow’s beauty queens learning to read

the writing on the wall as just the wall’s way

of threatening you into letting it protect you.

I don’t boil kids in their mother’s milk

and I don’t practise the kind of spiritual judo

that uses a person’s best ideals against them.

Especially as I get older, I would rather be

obliterated by wonder and gratitude

that I got to be all this without any effort of my own

than have my awe underwhelmed

by petty renditions of the black farce

that welds some people’s eyes shut like

an eclipse stronger than the original bond.

But there again, if you’re happy being a scar, mend.

What could it mean to the stars

if you can’t see them during the day?

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again

to those of you who have taken a more radiant path,

blazing is a kind of blindness too

that keeps you from seeing the diamond in the coal.

Yesterday oxygen was alien ore as toxic

as the love apples of superstitious tomatoes

two hundred years ago it was death to eat.

And it’s poignant to remember that any ground

you plant your flag in like a flower without a root,

like a placard without a rally, is

a charged particle field that reverses spin

synchronistically like a revolution

in an hourglass relationship with what it overthrew.

Consciousness is necessarily bifurcated by its blossoms

into two points of view, but deeper down

in the bloodstream of its darkest roots

it doesn’t make a distinction between an I and a You.

Subject and object aren’t separated

by a skin of water empty as the mirage

of a bubble within and lustrous as the stone

that broke the window without. This world

isn’t happening to you from the outside

and you’re not making it up within like a lie

you can tell your children about being alive.

No one’s wholly wise who still possesses a mind.

No one’s totally ignorant if they give

a red cane to a blind traffic light to see it coming.

I don’t trim the wicks of my comets

as if they were candles at a black mass.

I can breathe fire like Draco at the North Pole,

but when I’m not axially aligned with the earth

I can look into the eyes of my fiercest dragons

and see at the bottom of a telescopic well

millions of fireflies lost in a labyrinth of mirrors

looking for an insight into the nature of life

that would true all the others like crystal eyes

caught in the eleven dimensional net

of enlightened lies where time and the timeless intersect

and synteretic sparks ricochet like spiritual eagles

off the slopes of mountainous eras of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct?

PATRICK WHITE

CLACKING HOME FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN MY RUGBY CLEATS

CLACKING HOME FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN MY RUGBY CLEATS

Clacking home from high school

in my rugby cleats, metallic castanets

clicking like crickets on the cement sidewalk,

battered, soiled, blessed. The anger

expurgated by violent body contact.

Knees, green, bleeding. Grass stains,

mud. My black and gold-striped jersey,

a wasp. I’d see them, on their backs,

perfectly intact, the filaments of

their black legs extended like oars,

delicate fossils of tv aerials,

looking for better reception in death

out in the open. Death, are you

still vulnerable?---scuttled lifeboats

where anyone could crush them,

the mysterious beetles, heritage jewellery

that seem to die for no reason.

An old woman drops a brooch.

Iridescent greens and pigeon pinks,

rainbows on oilslicks. Were they

scarabs of immortality in another life,

rolling the world up into a ball of dung,

pushing the sun along, little engines

with black holes big enough to sink it

like a cue ball, a marble of light?

Millions of years of random variations

in evolution estranged us. Was I

as much an alien to them at this

dangerous bus stop of a planet?

Unknown destinations, the seriatim

of a vague beginning elusive as a ghost

in the prenatal shadows behind us

the only bond between us? Or was

something against us both as

sentient life forms straight off the boat?

A common enemy that built a bridge

to gap the spark plug with light years

of stars firing us both up like a car

on a cold morning, lacquering its valves

with hot lubricants? I didn’t look

under the hood to see if beetles

have blood, but they had life and that

was taken from them as mine will be.

Their coffins were open as lockets

someone had torn the pictures out of,

unrevealed secrets, maple keys of love.

I was tough at the time. Fit. Proud

of my broken bones and scars,

a successful initiate into young manhood,

uncowed by my energies. I could

carry the ball without dropping it,

negotiating a labyrinth of contusions

and collisions in broken field running patterns

that brought the crowd to their feet.

I made the try. I got the ball off

down the line. I drop-kicked the field goal.

I was a cosmic egghead with knuckles

and books of astronomical poems

that weren’t all that easy to crack.

In the world’s eyes, I’d earned the right

to the madness in my hermeneutic solitude.

Nobody watching, I’d dig a hole

with my finger in the unwalked

boulevard grass. I’d pick them up

like a crane on the wharf of a drydock

and lower them into their graves

out of respect for dead metaphors.

I’d cross two blades of grass and say

a small prayer over them and

send them on their way, as I to mine

not knowing whether we shared

the same gods or not, if any, but feeling

the silliness of the gesture wasn’t

lost upon what might be circumspectly sacred

about standing in rugby boots

and glorious bruises, burying beetles

like lifeboats in a grave whether it made

the slightest difference to bugs, gods or people

what was destroyed. What was saved.

PATRICK WHITE  

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

BY THE LIGHT I HAVE BEEN GIVEN TO GO BY

By the light I have been given to go by,

I can see how homeless the journey truly is.

How provisional the shrines along the way like milestones

we stop to paint like the inside of our skulls

or the caves we first dwelled in with our dead

buried under fire and the numinosity of our picture music

impregnating the womb walls of a space made sacred by fear.

The darkness bears my secrets, and in the torchlight,

in carbon and red ochre, a diary of shamans

gored by defecating rhinos speared to death.

I have imagined my way into an understanding

that is a rite of passage into a space that is

a vast abyss of intelligence, a nothingness

that speaks through an intuitive grammar of things

as if a galaxy, a star, stone, tree, raindrop were each a thought,

a sign, a word, the syntax of a growing paradigm

of creative awareness that we’re completely alone

and lost at sea like fish on the moon crawling out of its tides

as if nothing bound us, not even detachment,

nor a god that exists as a confession of the way we do,

nor any medium we work in as reflection of our presence

labouring away at an unattainable world that won’t exist

until we do, and it’s 7 to 5 against anyone making it that far.

But what a joy to emerge out of our own nothingness

like a secret we’re letting ourselves in on,

making it up as we go along like a deportable myth of origin

we can adapt to our infinite beginnings

because for starters, it has none of its own.

We were born to express ourselves like apple trees.

We were born to see and be happy marvelling at the event.

To enjoy longing for things we were never missing

and be guided by wise men we never listen to

back to a silence that has nothing to say for itself

that we didn’t already know in the first place.

Everywhere is the threshold of the return journey.

Life is either an exile, or it stays at home like a follower.

Bless the enlightened apostates of the dangerous religion

that desecrates the mind by worshipping it.

Why make a chain out of your umbilical cord

and get your head wrapped around it like a noose

because you forgot meaning was an art

and not a way to take yourself way too seriously to heart?

Why go to war with your own mind

just to administer to the needs of the suffering

when you can paint a god in blood and ashes

and decultify yourself with the creative freedom

of your imagination deconstructing the fable of your belief

that it’s the being, not the becoming, that endures.

And you can do this without even knowing how to draw.

A starmap doesn’t shine. A blue print doesn’t open a door.

If you ask a crutch to do your walking for you,

it’s going to throw you away like a miracle

at the top of the stairs of Notre Dame de Coeur.

Better to be the sacred whore of a thousand profligate gods

than the unrepentant nun of one who shuts the world out,

like art for art’s sake, to revel in her own extinction

in a mystical connubium with an unregenerate imagination.

You can burn your gates and cages in a wild field if you like

for not being able to keep the flowers in, or keep the wind

from rioting with the leaves way past curfew,

but there was never any risk of being granted what you ask

because life is the unpredictable moon rise

that deepens the calendars with a renewed humility

towards the extraordinary mutability of time.

What have you ever been that baffled your imagination?

It isn’t reason that inspires us to become a stranger tomorrow

to the self we knew today. Genuine faith isn’t

an artificial life support system to keep something alive

that should have been allowed to die quietly away yesterday.

Millions upon millions of facts like a graveyard of skeleton keys

to a door we can’t find open within ourselves

as if we’d just stepped through it to be here where we live

deciphering the shapes of the clouds as if we lived in code.

Hide your secret deep enough if you want it to be known.

Walk alone as far as you can until you can’t

if you want the world to walk the rest of the way with you.

The white demon that knows heaven and hell experientially

mentors the senses in the spiritual subtleties of the black angel

that comes like the new moon of a third eye

to help the exegetes of light see further into the dark

by blowing their candles out like flowers.

All seekers are roads looking for a map to follow.

Preludes after the fact, that set out to look for their own endings.

Be a star. And keep your afterlife behind you

like the shadow of the last form you cast upon the earth.

Be an eye that doesn’t leave any room between the moon

and it’s reflection so that the substance of life is seeing

not that you’re a distinct and separate entity

that cosmically identifies with your exclusion

but that you’re wholly within easy reach of everything

that depends upon you for its existence. Just as every leaf

you let fall in the autumn like an adage of wisdom

about how you can know the world by its fruits

first came to the tree like a smile to your face

when you realized your imagination was

the inconceivable dynamic of a creative state of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIGHT DOESN'T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

THE LIGHT DOESN’T TALK TO THE FLOWERS ANYMORE

The light doesn’t talk to the flowers anymore

the way it used to. I can feel a lot of shadows touching my face

as if it were written in braille. Acid in the rain.

Tears of dry ice in the housewell. Weathervanes

knocking at the door to get out of the storms

they used to revel in, and the storms themselves,

no kamikazes riding a divine wind against the Mongols,

at best, a mango-flavoured tempest in a Japanese teapot.

And even Zen can’t put an edge on the full moon

to cut through everything like a harvest being threshed.

No songs from the birds that used to wake me up in the morning,

only these spiders weaving their smokey laryngeal webs

like a voice that got stuck in the throat of a chimney

when it forgot, when you sing from the heart,

you don’t need a medium or a seance. Not even an art

that’s interested in what you’re saying unless

you’re obeying a grammar of headstones that don’t know

what you’re talking about until it’s not worth

bringing up anymore in anybody’s language

whether the metaphors are living or not. Words in a bonebox.

Locks and bars on our eyes. Dumb-bells stuck through our tongues

like someone was doing voodoo on the leaves

or the baton of a drum major in a parade

that’s never going to come, afraid to leave home on its own.

Since I was a boy in the late Cretaceous,

I’ve always wondered about the timing

of the asteroids and comets and why

they had such an impact upon the dinosaurs.

But I hear they were already on their way to extinction

because of the earth’s own volcanic activity,

and, at worst, the asteroid just accelerated

the flywheel of birth and death a bit.

Bad spin on an antiquated myth of origin.

Better luck next time, but right now the mammals

have evolved so far beyond that they’re destroying themselves

in a long, slow nuclear winter of attrition

that’s putting a pillow over everybody’s face

like the cloud cover of a screening myth with an air force

that buffers the light with our own ashes

and much prefers smouldering to ignition.

What did Berryman say in a letter to Wang Wei,

centuries after the fact, just before he jumped from a bridge

into an ice-covered river with the Pulitzer Prize in his hands?---

O to talk to you in a freedom from ten thousand things.

Be dust myself pretty soon. Not now. Or words to that effect.

But just the same, it’s hard to get into the skull

of the man anymore without the flame of a candle or a dragon

to see where you’re going in case you nudge an atom the wrong way

and bring on another astronomical catastrophe inadvertently.

Minefield covered in snow like a pioneer cemetery

buried on the hilltop of an avalanche with a view of the valley below.

Dangerous, too, to move among the stars freely

like a rogue planet without a starmap, causing perturbations

in the orbits of the shepherd moons on an exploratory flyby

to see if there’s any kind of intelligent life you can identify with.

The nights are getting darker. The stars are moving further apart.

Sooner or later everything tends toward empty space

until there isn’t even any room left in it for itself.

And nothing ever dawns upon you there but endless entropy

and time comes to a sudden halt where spaces runs out

and the bones of the fossilized stars are left like empty chairs

in a dark auditorium with bad acoustics.

I’ll write it on the wind now, while I have the chance.

I’ll write it like a fire in smoke at a ghost dance.

I’ll write it in blood and tears and rivers and stars.

I’ll write it in scars and wounds as deep as roses.

I’ll write it on the skins of the snakes that I’ve shed

like serpent fire running up the lunar thread of my spinal cord

like a lightning rod tattooing the clouds of unknowing

with the insights of fireflies into the mysterious darkness of life,

who know that one glimpse is enough of a Big Bang

to satisfy even the blind who go looking for their eyes

with their eyes like a windfall in a thunderstorm of picture-music

though they’re still hanging on to the same old lifeline

like an umbilical cord between the backdoor and the barn

in blizzard of stars and butterflies. I’ll write it in light.

I’ll write it on the eyelids of eclipses and occultations alike.

I’ll write it on the foreheads of the mute rocks

in runic striations of glaciers retreating north in tears,

I’ll write it on my bones before I’m buried under the hearthstones

with a big rock on my chest like an asteroid

rolled over a cave to make sure I’ll never rise again

like Jesus and Muhammad said I would if I was good,

or Ali Baba and the forty thieves muttering their shibboleths

on the thresholds of an artificial paradise, in case I wasn’t.

Now is the light. Now is the loving and the living.

Now is the hour for the hidden nightbirds to raise their voices

in the sacred groves of the moon to celebrate

the brevity of their own longing for the unattainable

blossoming on the dead branch of their aspiration.

There’s only so much time, and then, in a moment or two, forever.

The heart sings awhile like a red-winged black bird on a green bough.

And then the eyeless silence of the stars

who have looked down upon nothing for 14.3 billion lightyears

and watched the fireflies dancing to the music

of their own tiny hearts, lockets of light, of insight,

that open like seeds and eyes sown into the abyss

to let all winged things, and even star-nosed moles can fly,

out of the cages of their earthbound solitude like dragons

taken down like occult books from their hardwood shelves,

with the wingspan of constellations singing in the night to themselves.

PATRICK WHITE