YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

YOU MAY. YOU MAY NOT COME. MAYBE TONIGHT. OR NOT

You may. You may not come. Maybe tonight. Or not.

When it’s not cooking cosmic eggs, boiling heretics

in the hot oil of bubbling cauldrons, the hourglass

is sandpainting sidereal mandalas with stars

to empower the wind to blow them away,

bones of grey chalk watergilding my flesh in ash.

What did I say? What did I say that was so unorthodox

all the bells of your body were left speechless

at the sight of so many grails trashed like empties

from a car window like a litter of roadkill

along the side of the highway? Did I transit

the zenith of the burning bridge of your last loveletter,

or should I have jumped, or fell, or cannonballed in

to make a bigger splash in the blood vats of your heart?

Maybe a meteor to render your old lovers extinct?

I watch the cold windows until they begin to percolate

in an unexpected thaw of disciplined sorrows.

It’s getting late. Your absence, a glacial waterclock

followed by a lot of patronymic colons about who

begat what upon whom. I don’t want to meet your father.

I’d kill him on the spot. I don’t want to prove

to your mother I’m going to be good to you

in ways that she was not as she soaks

the blood from the carpet like gouts

of insincere candlewax. The price you pay

for three meals a day and a creative finishing school

where you can afford the kind of problems

the poor don’t make enough to imitate.

They worry about where the next meal

is coming from. You were born knowing

how far out the soup spoon was supposed

to be aligned from the begging bowl

like a shepherd moon in orbit around Neptune.

And me? I eat out of my skull on the run

whenever I’m writing poetry to the moon

in one long howl of anguished wanting.

Were the diamonds too hard? Wasn’t I

bituminous enough when I entered the dark

to show you how I could shine out of

my own inner resources like two hundred million

urns of light gathered from the firepits of the stars

by the crows that keep pecking out my eyes

like jackhammers looking for the motherlode?

And when I watched you slicing the throats

of your long-necked swans like ballet dancers

and black daffodils on an angle to preserve them longer

as cut flowers on the coffee table, didn’t I

make a Zen comment on the way you’d arranged them?

I’ve been scarred by love like a clay tablet in cuneiform

in the library of Ashurbanipal. The crow

has scratched at my flesh to show me where to bury

my dismembered body parts to guarantee

a higher yield over the ensuing light years.

The cat claw of the moon has caught my eye

more than once. Fireflies in a bird net,

I’ve cauterized my optic nerves on the constellations

of my own signage to keep my brain from seeing

what my heart was afraid to reveal to itself.

I was a blind prophet being led away by a child.

I could witness on the dark side of my seeing

the bird eating arachnids with two red stars for eyes

weaving their wavelengths into low frequency webs

like the bass strings of a slack guitar

to catch the fire of the morning dew in a false dawn

like Cherokee water spiders with hairy down

and scarlet stripes casting magical spells

like the geoglyph on the Nazca pampas

with Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka

in the hourglass waist of Orion trying to squeeze

its abdomen into a whalebone corset

before the Arabs changed its sex

into the belt of a less subtle Hunter

with a trophy line of scalps for wampum.

One of them mine. My eyes transfixed

by the paradigm of an eclipse being peeled back

like a black eyelid of time, or raven tresses

from the skull of the moon. I’ve known

the innocence of the crow when its feathers

were albino white before its failure turned sinister

as a starless night. A penury of insight

pearl diving for diamonds in a tarpit of love

that swore the new moon would last forever

like apple bloom and silver on the inside of the ore.

But sometimes the Artesian springs we plant

in the starmud of our hearts come up like black holes

and flowers of oil and what’s left of the shining

is the tinfoil of a trickster shaman substituting

his hunting magic to gratify the eyes of fools

that revel in their amorous delusions and spurn

the astringencies of enlightenment that burn

like circumpolar suns at midnight illuminating

nothing but the skins we shed to let the snake

out the box like Draco, without getting bit

by the picture-music of our own motives

trying to charm the serpent fire with backbone flutes

jamming with the downed powerlines

of our badly tuned spinal cords riffing

with the cosmic spiders writing the lyrics

of our myth of origins like electrical dreamcatchers

with toxic pincers like the tuning forks of splintered stars.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MOON ISN'T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

THE MOON ISN’T RENEWING HER VIRGINITY

The moon isn’t renewing her virginity

in the snakepits of the hypocrites

faking the wavelengths of their radiance

like the black dwarf of an imploding commune

that flared out like graverobbers in the dark

desecrating a cemetery of rainbows.

I’ve watched the silver shovel of your tongue

go through all phases of the moon, from full

to new, as if you were laying your Tarot cards

out on the table for an autopsy on the Hanged Man.

This one’s suspended by one leg with a real rope

around his neck. You’re decked out in dreamcatchers

and spider silk like the butterfly bling of a pimp.

What are you selling? Peace, love, and happiness

at the expense of all else? You chirp you love everyone

but you’ve never loved people enough to learn

how to hate them honestly. There heretics burn

but you’re attuned to harmony like a snaketongue

of black lightning is to a tuning fork or a lyre

to the laryngeal cords of a cheesecutter.

You’re a wedding cake full of worms. You’re

a wishbone with one hip lower than the other

like the short end of the stick, a black capped chickadee

on the lowest rung of the crutch. You emanate.

You radiate. You resonate. You alert

your sleeping brother like a fire alarm

to the god waking up within him, but you exclude,

you forget, you reject the real shamans

dancing in the shadows of their solitude with a limp.

If you cram any more beauty into your eyes

soon you’ll be able to open a jewellery store.

God knows how you can love the silver

and hate the ore that poured itself out

like wine for you as if it were bleeding to death

like wild grapes going sour in your mouth.

There’s more salvation in drinking

from your own skull, than sipping

like a hummingbird from someone else’s grail.

You’re just baling a moonboat with a black sail

and a bucket the bottom hasn’t fallen out of yet.

Dew blooming on the tips of the tongues

of the stargrass, yes, but you can’t conceive

of the watershed of the abyss it was drawn from.

Your moondogs don’t snarl enough to guard

the farmyard from the predators that surround you.

You’re water gilding Dachau with a silver lining

whenever you look at a black cloud pluming

into the night sky like a fumarole

of mystically unique people going up in smoke

and white wash the dark side of things

desecrating their suffering by remarking

how wonderful it is their ashes kiss your eyelids

like gentle snowflakes of human flesh and bone.

Your third eye’s got a cinder in it like a stake

driven into the iris of a Cyclops. You denigrate

the black ops that rescued the rest of the flock

from the cave, like a shepherd moon

that’s never known an eclipse it didn’t resent.

The blood and dirt under the fingernails of the moon

aren’t the terraced gardens of an Incan ruin.

If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack

of sunbeams make sure you don’t stick it in the eye

of that voodoo doll you carry around with you

like the strawdog of a scarecrow at a harvest ritual

that’s eventually going to go up in heretical flames

like Joan of Arc, the witch, not the saint,

once her white magic grew irrationally ineffectual.

Most people look for the light to see in the dark.

Rinse the night from your mirroring consciousness

and you throw the stars out with the womb water

of Aquarius. In the urn of what’s left, not

the translucency of self-cleaning jewels

as if your eyes were constantly buffing

their own windows with vinegar

and yesterday’s newspaper full of atrocities

that wipe the filth like sunspots off your shining

like a patina of print on the faces of the chimney sweepers

scraping the creosote and shovelling the ashes

of the fireflies out of the furnace. Not enlightenment.

But the putrefied residue in the alembic of a bad alchemist,

trying to mine gold from lead like a thief of honey

from an ant heap of spectacles, and gleaming ingots of teeth.

PATRICK WHITE

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