THE PALE MONTHS

THE PALE MONTHS

The pale months discharge their attributes of green

in the gripe of small, bitter apples

and the white blossoms

have got their laundry done like nursing caps

and the bonds of friendship with the young

have grown sticky and black, almost obscene,

as they lash the willow like bad actors and beauty queens

with long, drawn-out rehearsals of sappy plays

and the busy wavelengths

of petty mind worms inching toward the virgin cocoons

that might lark their threnodies with real wings

and flammable paper if the little mummies

ever make it to their afterlives. As it is, when they weep

their tears fall like the cold lenses

of leftover concentration camps

they may or may not have read about,

and the split seeds of their careful, furtive eyes,

the tender shoots of agile semi-quavers

run to the black and white keyboards of vinegar

thinking the moon’s just an old whole note,

and the silence that lies in state

like wine in the dark cellars of the sublime

is just another waste of time. They can’t imagine

how many stars and planets and lives it takes

to sugar the black holes of their photographic depressions,

how much light must give itself up to the night

to get one drop of translucent honey

flowing through the narrow veins

of their slim contingencies

and into the green flutes of their bones

like marrow and music. Okay, they’re not

the red wizards of autumn yet

forging swords out of the ores and eras

of the igneous sunsets that have purified their fury in the fire.

They’re too busy looking for their place

and white surplice

in a travelling choir with portable pews

and souvenir crosses of wood. They’re young

and imagine because they say the word good a lot,

they’re good. Let them stand for their hymns and anthems

as they will, it’s natural, it’s right

and there’s even a beauty

in their platitudes and repertoires, their reforms

of ancient hydrogen

that looks like the birth of stars,

the seven spoon-fed sisters of the Pleiades perhaps,

or the reluctant debutantes torn on the horns of Taurus,

white dwarfs and Cepheid variables,

young pulsars turning their diamonds in the light

to see if they’ve been cut right, if all the facets

are correctly interfaced

to download easy solar systems from the night.

They’re goldfish in a shark bowl,

flamingo fan tails and neon tetras

in a cannibal aquarium

of tiger-barbs and brutal dime-angels,

they’re an army of baby turtles

holding on to their helmets

as they run for the beaches of Normandy,

strafed by the Stuka seagulls,

black panzers in heavier armour on the cliffs,

black wolves swinging their muzzles into the wind.

It’s a hell of a way to begin

the rites of spring,

but the best steel goes through the fire

and there’s a chastening beyond virginity

that’s got nothing to do with victory

or the peevish tempers of first violins.

And I look at the old women, the derelicts, the crones,

and the roadkill along the highways of life

unstrung by the turkey vultures like dead guitars

and the sad veterans of spring in the swan park

staring themselves to death like foodbanks for birds,

all the lamentable carbons of human existence

down to the last embers of their spent hearts,

the spare change of cogs and bobbins

taken apart like watches, and I see

another kind of beauty, the deeper innocence

of worn bannisters spiralling up like smoke

in the stairwells of old hotels panned by junkies,

sybarites of wood aged and polished

by the sweat and oils of ten thousand different hands

that steadied their ascents and fallings

through years of snakes and ladders

on the chromosomes and rungs

of these who’ve bleached their peptides

in the caustic salts of the sea. Born

a beachcomber among wasted, cast-off things,

the second-hand bins of the stranded performers

and dismantled wild-west shows of the wave,

a seahorse, a Pacific cowboy from the lunatic fringe,

I look efficiently into the secret urgencies within

the Pre-cambrian tidal pools of their fossils and shells,

tears the ocean left behind in the undertow of a thousand farewells,

and a I see a darker kind of flowering

and the mysterious purple fruits

of a second innocence sweeter than the first

long after the apples are out of their diapers

and their blossoms are fouled by rust,

swinging from a dead branch of boney vertebrae

like bells, and moons, and chandeliers

clustered in an eclipse of black cherries,

and windfalls of seasoned planets

waiting to be pushed through the doors

of the hungry dead

in a jubilee year of pious offerings.

See yourself reflected in the face of an old man

if you truly want to understand what grace is,

or the well-used wood of a faithful chair

with a view of forever

beyond plans, if you’ve got the juice

to make something of yourself in the light and the rain

that can embrace the whole of the night,

can hold it like a syllable under the tongue,

a coin of insight, and not go insane. That’s what

courage is, not the charades of the young

besieging the sweetmeats

of moonlight in a nut,

raising their arrogant hammers

like stone gavels on the anvils of the heart,

mistaking their juvenile bias

for the robes of an older law

that presides without judgment

over everything that lives, not the breezy sail

of a quick voyage into the depths,

a love-boat cruise among enchanted islands,

but staring into the eyes of the Medusa

in the snake-pit of an oceanic abyss,

and greeting every grinning serpent

with an antidote and a kiss.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I WOULD SAY

WHAT I WOULD SAY

What I would say to you if you were near,

if this definitive namelessless that walks me down to the river

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

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

enrobed in my star-dazzled solitude, setting fire

to poems I never wanted to own,

every burning lily of paper floating away

like another crown I’ve set free

from this domain of air and shadows

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

weren’t the eyeless oblivion that engendered us both.

I would say to you in the pyres and the petals

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

of these exorcised ghosts, in the dream wakes

of these poems that confess their love to the flames

with every exhalation, with every feather of smoke

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

in the form of a man, I would say,

it was always the hive of your silence

that was the fairest likeness of you, the bluest honey

rarer than night, I’ve ever tasted.

And I’d try not to talk too much,

letting the fish jump for the two of us,

and the winged serpents of the luminosity slip away

like things not said into the water

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

that was never much of a yoke

as if you were the fruit of an astounded tree,

and hold you a long time in the vastness

before I turned to kiss you for everything

and fall down back into the silver grass

to make love to you on the moon.

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

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

I would mingle blood and starlight

with the wine of your body and being

like a chalice lying empty by the river

that has brought us both to drink from each other

like the deer that will come out later from the grove

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

would flutter through me like the red-winged blackbirds

among the scepters of the cattails,

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

for this night of being human long enough

to understand its brevity is its beauty

and its brevity goes on forever like you and I,

burnt poems, wounded swans, lovers, indelibly.

Life is suggested to us, never proclaimed,

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

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

more enduring than the rest,

floats downstream under a frozen elbow

raised to take the next stroke,

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

levitates up into the air and disappears like a buddha

into the absolute perfect emptiness of an enlightenment

that grasps at nothing. Form

is emptiness; emptiness, form, and the poem

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

and though you’re not with me now,

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

lands on the water, and then another,

and I think of them as you and I

arriving somewhere together out of the sky and the night

and the bright vacancy

between the sidereal knots

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

weary of flying, two poems back from the dead.

And I wonder what love is, knowing

love is I wonder what love is,

as the fireflies flash their assent,

and the cars pass in the distance on highbeam,

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

as much for the island that spreads the stream

into the waterlegs of a woman

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

like a wharf deeply saddened by a thousand farewells,

to launch my fleet of poems

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

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

turning the stones over, lost like a fragrance

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

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

awed by the fact of being here at all

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

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

and the answers seem more timeless for being left unsaid.

And I’m never as old by these waters

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

you told me to watch as you would

is always so much more on this undulant black mirror

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

There’s a birch and three willows

and the third of the three is you

dipping your hair in the water

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

And it’s no surprise to know you know how

to drink the whole river in a single gulp

and swallow a whole star with your eyes

in a single glimmer

the way a solitary drop of water

at the tip of the tongue of the stargrass

entirely fits the entire skin of the sky

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

from the nightsong in the flight of the bird in my voice

and from a single hair of your head,

or the eyelash on your cheek

that is all that separates us now,

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

I can be here with you as I have always been

on the other side of death

where everything in creation

above and below this river of night,

from the furthest galaxy

to the dragonfly on my right

is expanding like a lily of fire into us,

as if we were the emptiness that receives the light.

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

releasing these little fire-boats on the stream,

raising themselves up like the breathless flowers of a dream

rooted in the infinite depths of the knowing.

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

been coming and going like us.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

YOU TAKE THE SOLITUDE OUT OF POETRY

You take the solitude out of poetry.

You rob nobility of its grief.

You pursue an earthly excellence

like a posse, you hang poetry

like a horse thief with wings on its heels.

The nightbird no longer sings

about the way it feels to lose its voice

in an aviary of half-hearted appeals

begging bird seed like begging bowls

from the dawn. Something’s gone

from the light, when you deny

a moonrise its black pearl. It’s true

that orchids bloom in the shadows

of outhouses, and waterlilies in swamps,

but if you only want the star and not

the mud its rooted in like a brain,

the shining’s tinfoil, and it never rains,

all your Chanticleers are bronchial weathervanes.

The highest, most difficult path

isn’t for petty people. The trail

isn’t well worn or warm to the touch

of your bare feet firewalking the ashes

that bite like thorns of the reflexive wavelengths

of the red shifting snakes in the aftermath

of greater spirits. Even horned reptiles

can’t fledge an arrow with scales

without first turning them into feathers.

The snake’s got to achieve its wings

if it wants to fly with oxymoronic dragon sages.

If you suffer your dismemberments

like a picket fence losing its palings,

it doesn’t say much for the lion gate.

Maybe your sacred grove

with its toxic unicorn is nothing more

than a twig of kindling and a bundle

of firewood for a homeless oil drum

cooking stolen barnyard birds

stuck in their own throats like wishbones.

It’s well known Apaches don’t pluck chickens

to make war bonnets, and it’s hard

to convince paper lifeboats on the moon

they can still float, after the captain’s

jumped ship like a plague rat in 1348

and the defection’s beginning to catch on

like a popular meme of what it really means

for a flea circus to act great and black and tragic.

Celebrity bubbles keep rising like weather balloons

until they burst with a big bang

of narcissistic mythic inflation,

parachutes tangled like Medusan jellyfish

in their own powerlines, come back down to earth,

candling like condoms, wind socks

and withered daylilies off the charts

of their heart throbs on life support

that never got over the analeptic shock

of you letting them down like a dandelion

that roared as if it had a mane and teeth

to back it up when all else failed in diaspora.

Poets into gleemen, gleemen into entertainers,

entertainers into court jesters, court jesters,

into fools, fools into idiots, idiots

into morons, morons into experts, and experts

beating on a pinata of paper wasps

like Chinese lanterns and burning box kites

that don’t yield honey or wield their tiny stingers

to tilt quixotically at windmills and real dragons.

And then come the donkeys to the well

to see the well looking back at the donkeys

like the shameless celebrities who are famous

among crows and nightingales alike

for not being able to sing even so much

as a riff of an honest lullaby to themselves,

late at night, and they’re alone, and nobody

applauds the braying of a jackass at the moon

in front of a make-up mirror in the green room.

You can go to a Grateful Dead concert

and huff laughing gas like a muse.

You can moshpit your way to the front

of the crowd elbowing other people

out of the way to a seat on the celestial omnibus

that isn’t leaving for anywhere in particular

for a couple of thousand light-years yet.

You can piss on everyone’s parade

like the golden showers of Zeus

tinkling like a horse-haired glockenspiel

on their watercolours of starmaps in the rain.

You can act as if you’re mad when you’re sane.

A nasty being with a beautiful soul.

But you take the black hole out of poetry

you’re Orphically afraid of descending into

and try to fake it like a tunnel of love,

you rob the river of the sea, the road

of its homelessness, the bloodstream of its heart,

the galaxy of the sense of direction it’s had

from the very start like a prayer-wheel

turning into the wind like a jinxed Sufi

at the crossroads of where it all begins and ends.

You take the ore away from the gold.

You take the coal away from the diamond.

You liberate the star from its dendritic chains

of black matter in the darkness, the mystery

from the occult, the history from the bloodshed,

the eyes behind the mask you wear

like a fancy poultice at a costume ball,

the arsonist from the mouth of the fire swallowers

you surround with emergency exits and alarms

and stumpy fire hydrants waiting in attendance

like an ambulance upon a fire engine,

the poison in one fang for the sake

of the antidote in the other, you’re only

milking the crescents of the moon like a snake trainer

with a bird bone flute to bite other people

without taking a risk of dying of the spit

you drink out of everyone else’s mouths

like house wells you’ve been fracking for snake oil.

You want to die a trivial death, a volcano

buried in the caldera of a firefly, flaunt

your sex appeal in front of a jealous muse sometime

and try to convince her you’re as real

as the falsies in your padded bra

you’re palming off as poems. Or cod pieces

in the dancing leotards of prosthetic anacondas.

And she’ll show you soon enough

she’s not an inflatable doll on a long shipwreck

and you’re not the swan she’s going to stick

the copulative sibilant of her neck out for, when

the the double-bladed axe comes down

like the crone phase of the moon

on a chopping block of a real fox

inside the razorwire of a chicken coup

born running from the shadows of hawks.

PATRICK WHITE

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

HOW MANY WAYS CAN YOU DIE IN A DAY?

How many ways can you die in a day?

How many ways do you want to?

As if things had been settled once and for all.

No one to say farewell to anymore.

Grey, this anonymous day that does not

serve me well, though you can never tell.

Sometimes the worst is for the best. Fat chance.

No more excuses. No more alibis. No more

reasons for why dying seems so much

more sincere than living this waterclock

of a life constantly shooting white water rapids

without an oar or a raft when everything’s on the line.

More a drainage ditch than a device for telling the time.

Too late. Too late. Too late. No flowers in the fields.

No stars in the sky as a sign of things to come.

I look around. Circumspectly numb. Is this

wisdom, or just the calm before the storm?

All the snowmen are gone. Am I the last dolmen?

Tired the rocks. Of never having anything to build on.

Weary the air. Of this labyrinth of ins and outs.

And sad, sad, sad, this sea of oblivious awareness,

almost sweet, that accepts us as a matter of course.

The pursuit of an earthly excellence, even achieved,

isn’t much of a success in the world’s eyes.

You can hope, though I’ve come to understand

that hope like despair is often more of a curse

than a blessing. Like those little blue clearings

in a grey sky that somehow seem to make things worse.

Me? I turn to something like this poem

when I’m alone in the abyss in the absence

of any other way to exist except as a gesture

of absurdity, and maybe with no suggestion

of changing anything, an existential protest

against circumstances that progressively don’t resist

but insist nevertheless on a form of repressive tolerance.

On the principle that if I know the name

of my enemy, when my enemy is merciless,

a word, a single name, an atom, a photon of insight

is enough to empower me to transcend it.

But even that’s growing a little thin these days.

No insulation on the heart of the dragon.

No up or down to it anymore, just one long flat line

like a horizon with no rolling hills

bluing in the distance cyanotically like frost bite.

Stern the windows like moral lessons left unlearned,

grimed by the weather and the world. Real estate offices

decked out in flags as if they were the last

true nations on earth. Can’t even bury your dead

by the side of the stream where they caught minnows

in the early spring run-off every year as an excuse

to get outside, without somebody holding their hand out

pleonaxically for more and more and more.

I want to slam the coffin lid on their fingers

and make them gnaw on a crystal skull immune

to maggots. Let the maggots go hungry for awhile

and shrivel up and die like emaciated commas.

Further out at sea, ineluctably, the flood pours over me

caught up in the undertow of the providential tides

I took at the full but are now sweeping me away

like a mirage in a desert, salvage under the flying carpet

of this derelict shore. I’m somnambulistically

piloting myself through the reefs of a waking coma

and it’s better the less I feel what’s happening to me

than it is that I do. Soma sema. The body a tomb.

What could Orpheus bruised like deadly nightshade

by the glare of the unnuanced day, in for the night,

with less than he left with, possibly hope to attain,

his eyes adjusting to the darkness within, his voice

to the dread silence that wears it like a death mask,

but the right to exhume his own remains in a land

of dark jewels like the tears of the dead, without

looking back at where he’d displaced his own

prophetic head like a skull in the firepit of a moonrise?

Ably said. If the cold doesn’t go through your bones once,

how can there be apricot blossoms in the spring?

But what happens if the ice age keeps repeating?

Do these latter day dire wolves gather waiting

for the vintage blood, that tastes of fear and panic,

for a baby mammoth to thaw its way out

of a glacial crevasse that’s breaking water like a mother

that gave it the best she had without meaning to?

All these post-mature, amniotic fluids are turning to glue.

The waterclocks are slowing down. The lockmasters

have swallowed the skeleton keys of our ups and downs

like anchors in drydock. The hull of my moonboat

is being refitted with coral on the bottom, and sharks

in the nightshift cafeteria are playing ping pong

with my rudder and a fishing net in a valley of shadows

between the sundial and the sun, not one burning bridge

between here and forever, to stand on and watch

the river run between one extreme and the other

like a balanced approach to life that took the initiative

into its own hands like the ghost feeling of an amputee.

Orpheus remembered by dismembering his poetry.

What would the white-robed priests say about

exstasis then, if he ate of the little tree, the fly agaric,

amanita muscaria, ephedra, rust on the wheat, the apple,

haoma, or any one of a number herbal options,

and became as one of the gods of vulture capitalism

circling the sky burials of neolithic Turkey

where the victim is always a poor substitute

for the sacrificer? A scapegoat fattened on food stamps.

Or the ambrosia of macaroni and cheese.

O Great Artificer, explain that to me. How it

comes about that it isn’t the meat, the ram, the lamb

that reaches your nostrils, but the piety of the event?

Do we die and go to a foodbank for the poor

as unwanted at the end as we were at the beginning,

scraps off the altars of other people’s religions?

Do our bodies rise up to heaven like incense to you?

PATRICK WHITE

THERE WAS NOTHING EVER TO FORGIVE YOU FOR

THERE WAS NOTHING EVER TO FORGIVE YOU FOR

There was nothing ever to forgive you for

I’d say to you now if you were still alive.

Pain doesn’t maintain an agent,

though as many who have lived

have been named as perpetrators.

It just occurs

like happiness just happens

like a stroke of luck, a touch of grace

in an astronomical lottery of famished chances.

Voices arise in my head to address you

in the immensities of time and sorrow

like spokesmen for my heart

and another part of me

listens from the audience to this play

that’s been going on for light years without you.

I suspect I’m still trying to perfect the way I loved you

out of force of habit, knowing how

redundant and absurd that is

long after the play closed

and the plaster cherubs

on the Ionian cornices of the theatre

were buried in the rubble

along with the comic and tragic masks

that shed their petals when the lights went off

and everyone was left face to face with themselves.

You have drifted in and out of my poems for years

like a curtain at an open window

in an abandoned house,

like blue smoke from an autumn fire,

the fragrance of the bath you draw from the stars

and sweeten with the salts of lunar wildflowers

whenever you want to renew your virginity

like the kings’ mistress

stepping out of the sea

like some Renaissance Venus

covering her sex up with a serpentine lock of hair.

You’re the sparrow on the finger of Catullus’ lover

except now you can only make it as far

as my windowsill

though I leave everything open to you

to come and go as you please and must.

No illusory skies. No broken necks.

No more finger-stroking the soft walnut of a bird’s head

like a lost locket full of grief,

like a small lamp that can’t grant anymore wishes

however you caress it.

Ah, the genie’s out mingling with the Milky Way

like all unencompassed spirits of the night,

like dead souls in the bodies of Canada geese

heading southwest

though their echoes are veering northeast

as if their homeless ghosts

had a place and mind of their own,

an airy nothingness

without a local habitation or a name.

In my view of the world as picture-music

in an expanding universe with its foot to the floor

on a pedal of dark energy

the vision’s always too big

for any frame or stage or star map

you bring to it to try and express

where things are improbably at now.

We were young together for awhile

and we sought to embrace the world

and everything in it

even if it meant kissing the dead on the forehead

to wake them up gently from their long dream

of flying in formation with Canada geese,

though it never did.

I tried it on you more than once.

I kissed every bead on a rosary of prophetic skulls.

And still to this day no one answers, no one hears.

I tried to scry the future

in the crystal balls of my tears

but all I ever saw was the same old moon,

the same old stars that crossed us off

their birthday guest list

like a calendar of total eclipses

that had already taken place.

And I knew the future was far behind us.

And your early death could only make you more beautiful

as the years wore out their threadbare flying carpets

and those rare bright nocturnal spirits of life

you were meant to meet and fall in love with

like the heart loves its bloodstream

like a waterclock loves the passage of time

when it’s full to overbrimming

with water on the moon

grow rarer and further apart

like stars on the skin of our cosmic enlargements.

Just like this open window

that never lets eternity become a barrier to the dead.

I’ve never closed the curtains on the play.

I’ve never drawn a veil over

the fountains and the waterfalls

the wetlands and rapids of my mindstream

and said to the lady of the lake

in her garment of mist

this is live water

and that water’s dead

as if there were a wave of difference

between the one that carries forth

and the one that carries away.

The cloud and the snow on the mountaintop

both speak the same language,

share the same mother-tongue

as does the fog in the valley

the ice, the rain, the dew,

as if what’s false about the living

were true of the dead as well,

everything sublime, everything trivial.

Hydra-headed water shapeshifting

through our hands

like the desert sands of an hourglass

that dump the pyramid

and finally get out of the box.

Lunar landscapes

with transmogrifying mindstreams

that apply themselves like water

to mending gardens on the moon

while death waits like a stranger at the gate

to commend you on the green thumb

that’s apparent in your choice of wildflowers.

I can still feel you bend time

like the body of a guitar

when you’re around me

trying to tune the spider webs

in the corner of the room I write in

to your cosmic whole note of silence.

And just as you were a muse of mine in life

and I drew your intoxicating waters

deeply from the well

and we walked under the stars awhile

without caring where we were going

so even in death

I can feel you come to the dead branch sometimes

like inspiration to a night bird’s heart

when it doesn’t really matter

if anyone answers or not

because you flower like longing

in the roots of my solitude

and the moon blossoms

and my poems unfold like leaves.

PATRICK WHITE

I DON'T CARE IF YOU REMEMBER ME OR NOT

I DON’T CARE IF YOU REMEMBER ME OR NOT

I don’t care if you remember me or not.

I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be here.

But I’m going to disappear soon enough

and you can have the mirror all to yourself.

I can’t imagine dying alone is any deeper

than this solitude I’ve been living on my own.

Take that chisel of a tongue and chip

my cartouche off that gravestone I’m not under yet

as if you just discovered a new talent

for pecking away at death as if you were married to it.

I’m out of here. This is my grand exit. Like Keats

I make it with an awkward bow, the way the deer do

when they come down to the river to drink.

I don’t make it in anger. I’m not judging a mirage

because it doesn’t slake my thirst for real water.

I’m not bitter, vicious, or proud. I see myself

in you, especially when you’re crying without

a knife in your hand you wield like a paper cut

of the last crescent of the moon. It makes me sad

that we live more separately than we ever will in death.

I can remember when you first took my breath away,

and now, if you want to give it back, that’s ok,

that’s ok, too, as my brother would say, listening

like an amputee to the one-handed applause of the Buddha.

There are gaps, there are voids and abysses,

there are neuronic synapses, godheads, bardo states

and black holes we all have to bridge sooner or later.

Love’s one of them. Death’s another. And life’s

a country road with so many potholes it’s shell-shocked.

You can efface my name from your memorial wall

but I’m sure I’ll turn you into poetry somewhere

along the way. I’m thawing into tears

like an Arctic ice cap faster than I should

but I’ll hold you in my cold, cold heart forever

like a dolmen without snow nobody knows the name of.

More wonderful things get said in the doorways

of farewell through the veils of our motiveless tears

than you’re ever going to hear on the thresholds of hello

when everyone mythically inflates their uncontested lies

in the name of love. It’s not much of a triumph

to ride in a golden chariot of the sun through a slum.

It’s a little vehicle, and come the first serious eclipse,

you’re on black ice on a highway late at night on your own,

however many corpses you’ve sand-bagged in the rear

to give it some weight. Kitty litter and ashes

for traction are better than rose-petals and thorns

strewn along your path. You get a better grip on things

as you’re turning your wheels into the direction of your spin

or somersaulting over your handle bars like a cow

that jumped over the moon. As for me. The moonrise

raises a spoonful of ashes to my lips and I try

to take my medicine like a solitary nightbird

sipping from the fountain of a dark muse

like a lunar fish in the watershed of a total eclipse.

I’ll never wish you ill. And I’ll try really hard

never to dispel your delusions of me as someone

you might have been able to love. Sorry about the discrepancy.

Mirages on a sundial. Lighthouses on the moon.

Sharks and shipwrecks. Shouldn’t our dreams and delusions,

our secret nightmares, be accorded the same

ontological dignity as any other God particle

in the transmorphic context of reality? They move

the world as much as mass or gravity and they’re

as counterintuitively absolute and constant

as the speed of light. Everyone’s trying to write

their own unified field theory to explain everything

all at once to themselves, as if they were whispering

seas of rising awareness into their own ear.

I’ve lived too long under this cloak of the mystery

I bear as best I can like a mantle of starmud

in the name of a thousand poets who bore it

in their turn to suffer the solitude of their revelry

like the calyx of a black hole in the center of a galaxy

consuming two hundred billion stars in a single gulp

to stay drunk enough for light years to learn

to breathe in the light before they’re willing to let it go.

To kiss the bud of the wildflower into the open

and step back into the light like a shadow at noon

and watch it grow without you. Noblesse oblige.

And I don’t mean it cynically. The wolf howls.

The dog barks. The road leads like a trail of blood

to a dark grove of trees where everything heals by itself

and death is a retroactive edition of a posthumous future

that lies up ahead like road kill. Like it or not.

Sooner or later every persistent absurdity is interred

in an aura of grace, as if we gave the dead

the benefit of the doubt we begrudge the living.

That said. Still hard to kiss the stinging nettles

like hooded cobras on the head spitting in your eyes

like the Taliban just as you’re learning to read

the writing on the wall. So the blind prophets

learn to love the dark. So the candle that’s burning

to shed some light on the night and the stars

goes out in a gust of breath like a secret chandlier

on the dark side of death. And what are we left with

that might remotely stick it out with us

in search of a treasure chest that isn’t

just another bone box of sacred relics? I used to think

scars from the stars that enlightened us

like Medusas of white phosphorus that bit

like high frequency wavelengths in a snake pit

the moon was agitating like ripples and scales

on the skin of a mirror we thought we’d shed

relationships ago. But now my youth has outgrown me

I go well out of my way to err on the side of compassion

more than I ever longed to know the truth

of what we’re all doing here together

trying to stay true to the circuitous path we’re on

by getting lost in each other’s eyes and arms.

PATRICK WHITE