I NEVER ASKED YOU TO LIE

I NEVER ASKED YOU TO LIE

I never asked you to lie.

I never insisted upon the truth.

I was wholly absorbed in studying

the comparative mythology of your alibis

as they came to me like mystic revelations

dropped off in the wrong mailbox

like the Koran addressed to Muhammad

that was meant for Ali. At least

that’s what the angel said through its eye-teeth

when it came to the door and I asked

Why me? And it left me a flightfeather of light

to read like a glossy flyer when I got a chance

to sit in a room alone with a votive candle

and watch the dawn advance

like a lamp in the niche of an indigo window.

I might have momentarily hoped

I meant something to you closer to the heart,

but after awhile I thought Nietzsche

would suit you as well, or Spengler’s

Decline of the West and got on with my art

like a madman with things to express.

Better to be loved than right most of the time

and who could argue with a silence

that wasn’t a sin of omission, to prove it wrong?

So much I could say swimming in tears

to the polyglot candle on my desk,

speaking in oracular tongues to the stars

for the both of us waiting for Venus

to come up just before the sun exorcised

the graveyard shift of the ghosts

that worked so hard at becoming us.

I could hear the picture-music of your soul

dreaming in the next room like rain

on the windowsill of an ivy-covered asylum

and the eternal recurrence of the leitmotif

you kept trying to take in your mouth

like the light of the stars catching up to their tails

or an ouroboros spinning its wheels in the starmud

as you played long sad wavelengths

of your red shifting thematic life schemes adagio

on the bull horn harps of your golden larnyx,

expecting different results for the same credentials

over and over and over again, like the pulse

of a Chinese water torture tapping on the forehead

of your crystal skull like like an impatient finger of rain

on your windowpane to get you to sign the confession.

You were always Mata Hari in front of a firing squad of stars.

You gave me your body like a foreign agent

spying on my mind for critical secrets

you could pass on to the Kaiser like antidotes

to the mustard gas of toxic English unicorns.

I used to mutter false information in my sleep

but I never liked misleading you that way

but no leaks worth listening to, no charismatic sex.

Now it’s thousands of light years hence,

and I’m still a lyrical existentialist

trying to make sense of the essential mystery of it all.

O, how I would have loved to have danced with you

without the encumbrance of a disguise.

The petals of five life masks open

and one face blooms like a nocturnal waterlily

the stars return their eyes to like the lunar dew

of a fertile enlightenment experience

that bales the mangers and drinks from the grails.

Bereaved wise men have been known

to cross deserts to satisfy their astronomical curiosity

in spiritual hourglasses going supernova

like wine glasses smashed against the walls

of Greek weddings dancing for joy

on the splinters of their tragic chandeliers.

And the Buddha, too, sat still in the presence

of the morning star, supremely assured as I am

that he’d attained absolutely nothing

from the shining of the clear light of the void.

Yet how beautiful you were, and what

a promise of bliss was missed by this delusion

of what is and what isn’t the true identity

of emptiness in an exuberantly abundant world.

And though I keep winding up the wellsprings

of the waterclocks to keep them running on time

like train whistles keening across town,

and things have grown momentously pendulous

since you left, like a water drop hanging

from a blade of stargrass trying to be a lamp post,

I can still regret, delinquently sitting here by myself,

trying to have a conversation with a candle on death row,

waiting to be eradicated by the dawn

as a few remaining winter birds begin to tune

the trees up like shipwrecked guitars

there are no sequels to a mirage however

many lunatics fall to their knees in the cults of the moon

and pray it wasn’t retroactively over so soon.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THE DEEPER I'M LOST THE HAPPIER I SEEM

SOMETIMES THE DEEPER I’M LOST THE HAPPIER I SEEM

Sometimes the deeper I’m lost the happier I seem.

Missing. I go looking for myself

with Mason jars full of fireflies and a crystal skull

I send out like search parties into the woods

but I’m getting more selective as I get older

about who finds me. I’m a lighthouse

cowled in the hoody and cape of an eclipse.

A sinister cardinal with a heart of gold

that’s been burnished in the forges of hell.

I doubt if I’m anything at all except

the bone rack of the skeleton I climb up on

to paint new provisional creation myths

to accommodate the growing sensibilities of the stars.

I keep tearing myself down and building myself up

as occasion and opportunity require.

Known a few angels that got in my way for my own good

but said, no, you’re looking for my brother, Jacob,

and went on limping my own way with the old demons

that keep things running smooth as the last ice berg

of a comet in an ice age riding its own thawing

like global warming breaks the spirit of a wild glacier.

It’s not a warning. No one needs to convert the Roman Empire.

The stars come out in the dark. The flowers

come out in the light. I’ve got a damaged heart

but there’s more art in the bruise than in the caress.

You let the dead speak through you. You can hurt your voice.

And what the living who accuse you of putting words

in their mouths like cockatoos in the aviary of a zoo,

have to say for themselves, when called to account,

is self abuse however you try to dissuade them.

The way of the stump is the jedi of trees in a swamp.

I’m rooted like a molar in a lower jawbone.

I’m the sunken caldera in the archipelago

of an island hopping volcano and I’ve got my fault lines

like a small delta of tears reaching the sea

in the corners of my landlocked, Mongolian eyes.

Most of my genes have come to me as a surprise

from my ancestry spread out all over the earth

as if their prophetic skulls were trying to cover

all their bets. I have high cheekbones like the ledges

of a precipice I’m always on the brink of.

In the absence of a soul, I get by with a little love

from my friends like a cowboy Zen master

from the lunatic fringe of the West Coast sixties.

Good possibility I’d scare you in my silver-buckled,

black leather belted avatar, but it’s the snake skin

of a new moon I don’t intend to shed just to blend in

with the inoffensive twilights of a wedding cake into yoga.

Not as tough anymore as I used to be, but it still

gives the mail lady a cheap karmic thrill

if I play the part. Never hurts to act as if

you’re into the dark, nemetic arts of the occult.

She says my shades look like the irisless pupils of a shark.

I tell her they’re just eyepatches to cover a detached retina

in my left eye that hurts like a spider wincing

in the glare of the flashlight that caught it in the corner

like a moment to remember forever on You Tube.

In truth, I’m a hermit thrush. I’m inspired by the dark.

I can wow you with the way I keep

my heart in my mouth like a strawberry chocolate

without getting lockjaw from the rusty nails of the saint

who keeps following me around trying to pull

the fangs of the snake with the claws of a crab

when what he really needs are the dental pliers

of the first and last crescents of the moon,

but his polymorphous, atavistic perversity

isn’t nuanced enough for that. And there’s no gold

in the albino ore of my happy, happy crowns.

Comes a time when your body begins to feel

like a used mattress someone’s throwing out

like a corpse from a trunk in front of the Sally Anne.

I work out like a hair sculptor labouring in carrara marble

but I’m not a masterpiece of Michelangelo,

more Moses than David, but I’m still not standing

in the puddle of a melting candle of body fat

at a black mass. I drink my own blood. I eat

my own flesh when there’s nothing else in the house

but the last full moon of tunafish in a Mayan calendar.

This might be the Last Supper, and I’m sitting here

in an upper room by myself, but I’ll go without

if I must, give up my place at this desk below the salt

like a peasant abdicating his throne to avoid

the protocols of the princes he’s trying to be free of

even if they say their coup d’etats are all about love.

I’m not a tenant farmer. I’m not an habitant along the river.

If I pay tithes at all these days, it’s to an extortion racket

that threatens to cut my secular lights and heat off

or the internet when things get really rough.

I juggle things around like a balancing act on black ice.

As Willie P. once sang before he died, wouldn’t

be in this mess if I could take my own advice.

But who am I to tell anyone what to do

unless they’re hurting someone else, and isn’t

that precisely the whole point of art? To get yourself

out of the way to let other things come into play?

To disappear like a volunteer at an exorcism?

To be the gold that synarthritically mends the crack

in the skull cup of the Great Schism that broke

like a collection plate at a Japanese tea ceremony?

Even if sometimes taking shelter from the storm

can lead to Pearl Harbour or Megiddo in the valley

of Jezreel. Or Icarus trying to hang on to his tar and feathers

like a wing and a prayer in a two bedroom apartment in Perth,

with north facing light as circumpolar as the wheel

of death and birth someone once told me they were turning

like a cosmic starfish, but I took as an idle boast

and went on burning like Arcturus caught like a kite

in the powerlines of a sacrificial host. Less Holy Ghost

than a last lifeboat drifting like a lost starmap

to the jewels in the land of the lotus eaters on the West Coast.

PATRICK WHITE

ALWAYS AWARE OF HOW UNKNOWN IT ALL IS

ALWAYS AWARE OF HOW UNKNOWN IT ALL IS

Always aware of how unknown it all is

even when I’m familiar with the path.

You can love someone for years, share

the same air they breathe, stand in each other’s light

and get along as well as plants and mirrors.

You can paint their lifemask through your tears

or you can watch the crackling spread

like the roots of their hair and know the names

of all the stars that take shelter in their eyes.

Then one night, who knows what it is,

the downdraft from the chimney on a winter night

parts the hairdo of the fire a different way,

a snowflake gets blown off course, the auras

evaporate like the Northern Lights, Orion

rises in the west, and you realize, for the few

you have, how many veils will never be lifted,

how mysterious and inexhaustible a face is,

almost eerie, as if you’d just stepped on another planet,

and that was ok, but you didn’t know anything

and you were seized by a terror for a moment

as if the unknown were deeper than solitude.

There’s an impersonal vastness under

the most intimate encounters with the world

that embraces everything like space

as an apprehensive, new dimension of awareness.

You cohabit with the strange. The leaves

you kicked through yesterday like someone

happy among their thoughts, are no longer

what they seemed, nor the small winds

that knew you as vividly as they knew their own breath,

bear any resemblance to your feelings.

They stay the same, limited by your understanding,

defined by the boundary stones of your relationship

to them, but irrevocably changed in a way

that scares you a bit, though you love them

as you always have, how do you love

what’s unknown about them with your heart

and your art, and your discipline, when

you don’t even know if that part knows you exist?

As with everything when you’re walking with a mystery

and it’s got no personal history except

the one you give it. The allegorical smile.

The mythic correlatives for the light in someone’s eyes.

The copulative metaphors that say this is

like a Rinzai Zen master who isn’t fooling around,

or the more gentle similes that suggest

the world into being without the imperatives

with looser fitting likenesses that appreciate the nuances.

Be like this isn’t as much of a straitjacket as Be this.

It leaves more room for the living to approximate themselves

like a garden, and leave a little out for the birds.

It’s humbler in a way because it doesn’t try to say it all.

It doesn’t presume upon the true nature of the secret syllable

we’re all trying to say to each other in our own various ways

as if we wanted to communicate, not just our names,

not just the facts we gather like dead twigs of one another

to start a fire on a bed of ashes, like sumac in the spring,

but the whole wild apple tree, the bloom, the leaves, the birds,

the lightning roots of our neurons with their tenuous hold

on the handful of starmud we’re attached to like the earth,

but what’s so eloquently unsayable about us

it catches in our throats like a starling in a chimney

trying to scratch its way out of a black hole

like dawn in an aviary of summer stars

going down in the west like a windfall of secrets

between the light and the water and the endless discretion

of the inescapable silence of the night sky

according each of us, with trillions of brilliant reasons why.

PATRICK WHITE

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