WHITE NIGHT. UNHOLY SOLITUDE

WHITE NIGHT. UNHOLY SOLITUDE

White night. Unholy solitude. Big flakes

pillow on the windowsill. A pincer of dream anger

with its claw on my jugular like a clothes peg

I want to throw down at somebody’s feet

like an iron gauntlet just to watch the parasites squirm,

the hypocrites, the frauds, the uncrucial demeanors

of the literary slugs leaving slimey contrails

like snotty scars on the mirrors that hold us up to nature

and think we’re all soiled in the midst

of so much magnificence, by the trivia

that sticks to them like the garbage they’ve

picked up along the way rummaging through the refuse

of other people’s attempts to garden.

Too cold out for the gypsy moths to swarm the trees

in the mystical clouds of unknowing they make

careers out of, teaching what they’ve never tasted.

The Luna moth and her fire, the butterfly and her flower,

that I can abide up to a point, but self-appointed experts

on the malignancy of their own ignorance, it’s

everything I can do from burning down their house radioactively.

Time mellow me. Wisdom teach me to level off

at the speed of light so all these bugs can be frozen

in amber paperweights, toads snakestruck on their lily-pads,

when time stops and I can put the future behind me.

The snow ploughs snarl over the pavement.

I’ve got to get my mind on other things.

The majesty of angry lions is squandered on flies.

I’m not agrarian enough to want to be planting skulls

like crocuses in the killing fields. These demons

don’t know how to act my age. Don’t think

of Jesus when he lost it on the moneylenders.

Don’t think of the Zen masters who said

poor hole-dwelling devils. I know what

you’re making your living at. Then beat them

out of the zendo with their horse hair hossus.

I’m trying to live up to the best of my delusions

concerning spiritual imagination as a way of life being poetry

the way water is fish and the air a flurry of birds.

Whenever you see scales turning into feathers

you know there’s a snake nearby getting ready to fly.

Evolution has as active an imagination as I have.

And nobody, as Dogen Zenji said, likes a real dragon

but what’s that to the dragon compared to the effect

it’s going to have like two days of intense heat

at the end of May, on the tiny jawed blackflies

back-biting a flamethrower that just got woken up

from enlightenment in a bad mood on Okinawa?

God give me the patience to bear myself

like a tuning fork in a snakepit trying to establish

a little harmony among a lot of dissonant wavelengths

hissing in the background of the choir

like snowflakes on a furnace burning holy books

on the pyre of Savonarola at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

If Luther got to throw an inkwell at the Devil,

isn’t it only fair the Devil gets to throw one back

like a black hole at a lot of bad writing once and awhile

or even as a reasonable compromise between

taste and compassion or the truth and pollution,

a partial eclipse? The scariest thing in my existence,

a blank white page, the obstructionist angel in the way

that says, No pasaran, thou shalt not pass.

You just know you’re going to walk away like Jacob

with an iambic limp, and you’re never going to win

or pin that kind of intensity down, but this is the point,

you’re never going to walk away from the encounter weaker.

You can only lose to your own advantage.

And the bruises, the scars, the wounds that never heal

where your heart was pierced by a spear of bliss

you’re never going to get over, your bloodstream

efoliating like a rose in heat for the rest of your life,

that’s the kind of language you can be proud of,

those are the sacred syllables you can address the gods in

as if they spoke the same mother-tongue as you.

If you turn the light around, get yours eyes off

of whatever they’re glued to in front of you

like flypaper buzzing with bad genes helically twisting

on a snakeoil chromosome rising to the music of their flute,

uncharmed, to get their wings off the page.

I’ve got a message. The medium is the messenger.

Not the message. That’s just one petal of the whole flower.

A drop out, if you will, of everything that’s being said.

Seven waves of water don’t make a housewell or a Pierian spring.

Bright vacancy. Dark abundance. Listen to yourself

when the wind is cooling the white gold of the wheat down

like a loaf of bread cradled in a tea towel, when

you’re a widespread famine in a seven year long abyss.

Listen to yourself like an empty silo when the wind

is trying to play a tune like a drunk who remembers

something from his childhood, by tooting it out on the rim

of a hollow bottleneck. That’s a real mantra.

A true shibboleth. That will get Ali Baba and his forty thieves

into the cave quicker than you trying to pick the lock.

If the hucksters want to be tricksters or sacred clowns,

the ultimate angle, if you need one, is to be real,

be the thing itself as if it never existed before you.

That’s a kind of respect for yourself when you realize

nothing is confined by an identity that isn’t a good guess

or a pineal projection mythically inflated on space and time.

There’s more poetic potential in being absolutely nothing

but what you see before you as your own mind arrayed

than there is a muse in the actuality of what you’ve achieved.

All the haikus are pointing at their homelessness like autumn leaves.

The messenger is formless. With big ears.

He sings like three hands clapping in the dawn,

the wings of waterbirds getting off on their own applause

as if they didn’t need the approbation of anyone else

to do what comes most naturally to them, a native joy

like breathing and seeing and flying in a sky

their minds bent over them at birth

like the sky goddess, Nut, bridging heaven and earth.

Poetry isn’t made like an aqueduct. It’s exprerienced

like water being poured into its own absence

like a mindstream, not a waterclock, as a means

of giving time something to listen to at night

to remind it like a love song that its temporality is eternal.

Mystically specific. Blind, brilliant, divine

and infernal. Lightning signing the rain when all eyes

are upon it like a flash in the pan for a very few moments.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

The snow a silence whiter than last night

and the sky, a red violet. A mysterious rose.

As if the night were blushing at something said

that wasn’t meant to be disclosed.

I feel cramped without the stars, embedded

like a hibernating frog in my own starmud,

my bloodstream reconfigured as the thin thread

of a red alcoholic thermometer, though I don’t drink.

Nocturnal solitaries huddle their way through the night

like dark comets past the unwary mirrors

of the nightwatchmen working on their novels

as if nobody were watching. I people the abyss

with my life and let my mindstream decide

where it wants to wander through its own timelessness

as if the past, as well as any future I could imagine

could take the lead at anytime from compliance

with the present, and it wouldn’t make

the least bit of difference. Three waves

of the same oceanic awareness. Three talons

open like the triune esoteric crescents of the moon

and one hawk blooms like a poppy in the snow.

My imagination isn’t a cry I follow

deeper into the woods of a hidden mindscape

as if it were mapping my eyes like stars

it had never seen before and was wracking its brains

to come up with names that made it feel less homesick.

It is me. Like a nightbird is the child of the wind.

Like a song whose dark secret is a longing to live.

Like the heart of a stranger is the hearth of his homelessness.

I am the evanescent foundation stone of my own fire.

Like the moon, a lantern in the arms of my own journey.

I gather the fruit of a rootless tree and it tastes

like the voice of the sun and the moon waxing lyrical

as the water and light of the alpha and omega

of sacred syllables, with the third extreme

of the earth in between shining in the middle intensity

of the three wise men in Orion’s belt

just before the dawn pales the seeing-eye dog

of blind Osiris blazing like an underground root fire

set below the treeline of cedars ageing on the hills to the west.

I remember the lovers I carried both ways

across the thresholds of a burning house,

and what I’ve made of my sorrows are wildflowers

that bloom for a night in a garden that tends to itself.

If my children are lost to me as they are,

I don’t ask my imagination to explain why anymore.

I let it drink its fill of compassion from my heart

like a bottomless well deeper than the stars are high

and I leave my door ajar for the dead who still call me friend

to come in, whatever the hour, as often as I open it

to the apparitions of the living I greet like dream figures

who have just stepped into my intuitive vision

of not needing to wake them up until I do because

as I keep repeating like the riff of a mantra on a blue guitar,

mark one jewel like the third eye of Venus in the dawn

and they’re all marked with the same morning star.

I invite the darkness to enfold me within the pages

of its imageless book like the godhead of the great void

revealing a story that keeps growing in the telling of it

as the mindstream changes the tempo of its narrative theme

from a pulse, to the merest fragrance of a melody

expiring like the last breath on the deathbed of bird-bone flute.

I am all skulls. I am all shepherd moons. I am space

that exculpates gravity to bend and relent at a black mass.

I refuse to imprison my enlightenment in a church

and get by with finding my way by a candle

that casts as many shadows as it illuminates.

I put my hands up over my eyes like the wingspan

of an eclipse over a full moon, instead of folding them

like birds roosting in a dark wood, praying for light,

and the stars that fire the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

grow brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what’s can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN HERE ON EARTH

EVEN HERE ON EARTH

Even here on earth where indifference,

not rebellion, turns the place into hell,

slag of the angels, and dark ore out of

the gold pollen of the honey bees,

and self sets false humans up

like fallen idols to Mammon,

and the hearts of children are crushed

like strawberries, the wise are tormented

by trivia, and the fools are given pulpits

on behalf of a cult of coffins,

small mystical acts of compassion

keep happening like salt and water,

light and bread, slipping between the cracks

like one prisoner passing another

a cigarette through the bars

they climb everyday like ladders.

Who hasn’t cursed the long labour of worship

carving yourself out of light is, or given up

halfway through the dawn that lasts

until sunset when the nightshift comes on?

I don’t think I’m especially good

and is the inability not to empathize

with everyone, a vice or a virtue?

Mark one jewel and they’re all marked

like the dew shouldering the moon

in every drop, or the eye

the superclustering of galaxies

in the afterbirth of myriad multiverses.

Insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me. That’s pretty clear.

You see the worst and best done everyday.

Everytime somebody looks at someone else

the whole world changes out to the furthest star.

For your eyes only never made any sense.

An aspen leaf whispers something to the wind

and the seashells hear it oceans away

as if it were a secret they were keeping

like lockets to themselves. Something

their mother said in a good mood, remembered

since childhood. You were fathered

by every stranger you’ll ever meet

the night you were conceived.

You share your genes with everyone

like a mother tongue back to Lilith beyond Eve.

There isn’t a drop of amniotic fluid

that isn’t a waterfall. There isn’t a star

that wasn’t born in the womb of your eyes.

Sentience is the light turning around to look at itself

through your point of view. Sunflowers, too,

and gnats and fish and birds and wolves.

We all cast shadows. We all live penumbrally

in the half light of the moon, and by noon

the blazing’s washed us out like watercolours

and we’re a disappointment to the sundials.

Everyone’s tears are on a grail quest

for an inkwell that will help them live

indelibly happy with the outcome

of their prophecies whether you call them

fact, fiction, or spirituality, the issue’s the same.

One to blame, we’re all to blame

in a bigger frame of reference. Like roadkill

on a country road when even the dust

is as sweet as a locust tree in bloom,

just to be here is to be inescapably complicit.

Even driving the white-gold chariots of the sun

there’s a lot of slum in all of us that comes due

inestimably sooner than later. Do you know how long

you have to hold your breath before

you become a pure fish in polluted water

trying to belly flop up toward the sky?

Do you know how many fish are dying

of thirst beside a freshwater lake

and all they’ve got to do is roll over and drink?

I’ve been witching for water in hell a long time.

I’ve been trying to decipher the crackling

of my starmud like lifelines in the dry palms

of my creekbeds. I’ve been attempting to live

as if meaning had some artistic talent

as a medium of the absurd and the very inanity

of the effort is enough to prove I’m on

the right track. The seance is making

an honest effort. I’m a journey man apprentice

to a travelling circus of sacred clowns.

Some people want to make a big splash.

With me it was always a total eclipse or bust.

Indefensibly human you do what you must

and hopefully won’t need an alibi that will lie

behind your back, just as you’re coming clean

as a new moon with yourself, and everything’s black.

Nothing’s bigger than one, and sometimes

I think I’m the grand master of God’s Own Zero

then someone unusual comes along and pops

the docking Zeppelin, and I’m a conflagration

of mythic deflation astonished by the progress

of my humility just to have something to hang on to.

What’s come as a retroactive shock, recently, though

is how many muses refuse to be saints

and yet there’s still an echo of goodness in the air

tending the heart’s home fires in danger of going out

as if it were a reflex of the second nature of oxygen

to keep things lit in a dark time, brighten things up a bit.

Extraordinary ordinary decencies of life,

small acts and gestures of kindness rare

as orchids in the winter time, and just as shy

as deer caught in the headlights on a spring night.

Their own two hands the only clay tablets

brought down from the mountain

after talking to God like a gate, not an exit,

they ever obeyed like commandments

carved in granite like glaciers in the rocks

of the Canadian Shield. The alluvial soil

of a northern mindstream with small asteroids

of circumpolar ore circling a midnight sun

like gold in the heart of a human that never sets.

How one eyebeam of genuine starmud

without an agenda for shining touches the heart

and the whole valley’s alive with fireflies.

PATRICK WHITE

LET ME BE WORTHY

Let me be worthy of the river

and the strange ores that glow at night,

buried like teachers in the mountain.

Let my blood always taste of the moon

and my heart burn like a black rose,

like the poem in the fire

that sweetened the sky with a flower of smoke,

for the wisdom of the generously unattainable,

and transcend the hell that shadows the folly

of not being foolish.

May the stars,

when they gather in gardens

water the roots of my seeing from clear fountains

and the wind bleed like ink from my pen

when I’m wounded by the beauty and the terror

of my helplessness.

When I am large, spacious, profound,

let me sit like the universe

on the throne of a seed

that lies in the dirt,

and when I am small, brief,

a trinket of light in a flash of ephemera,

robe me in the lion skin of the night sky

and ennoble me

with delusion and enlightenment

on this road of ghosts.

Whatever befall,

let me perish or prosper as a human

who insists upon the divinity of all

and burns and rises

for the heresy and truth of it.

Let anyone born be accounted a hero,

a lifeboat that hauled the world aboard

when the seas raged in the womb

to give birth to suffering,

and may I always be entrusted

with the ancient shales of dark courage it takes

to look into the dragon’s eyes

and not be horrified

by the ferocity of the freedom

that thaws space

like an hourglass in the rain.

And should love occur

to shape the blade of the moon

on the anvil of my heart,

and a cauldron of passionate visions

scald the eyes with intimate glimpses

of myriad heavens and hells,

all truer than reason,

may my bitterness pass

like the eclipse of an hour,

a left-handed blessing,

no vinegar of injured illusion

accept the sad surrender of the wine

like the death poppy of a folded flag,

no tar of judgment and denial

feather the dream with stone pillows,

no abyss under the brief era of an eyelid,

make me too petty or afraid

to dance with my skin off

engulfed like the wind

in secret sails of mystic fire.

There’s always a clown, a jester

who rides beside the hero like an anti-self,

a thoroughbred and a dray

yoked to the little red wagon of the heart

like two thieves either side

of an unwitnessed crucifixion,

two dadaphors, two torches

disposed like opposible hinges

on a door that opens like water

at the whisper of a key.

Let me be the clown-prince

of my own idiotic profundities then,

let me survive my way into the wisdom

of the inspired fools

who know that anything they ask for

from the stolen bounty of the king

is just another absurdity in disguise,

that even laughter isn’t a lifeline.

I’ve always had my heart

caught in my throat

like a bird in a chimney,

a cork in a wine-bottle,

a habitable planet in a black hole.

I have loved and befriended

almost anyone

who would let me

and seen their evanesence,

their transience, their vagrancy, their passage

through this mansion of space

with the amazing windows and chandeliers,

the sad brevity of the things they cherished.

Blind to restorative grails,

I have not sought the meaning of life,

I have not hunted the dragon with nets,

knowing reality is meaningless

because it has no fingers,

it doesn’t point to anything beyond itself,

nor bear witness in a mirror,

but I have walked in the peacock robes

of the twilight sky, all eyes,

in the gardens of the life of meaning,

past the hushed bloodtalk of the roses,

and seen for myself

that there are flowers with petals of water

and roots of fire

that drink the stars like rain.

Meaning dethrones the flowers like bottle-caps

and there’s no refund on the empties.

Night puts its hands over your eyes

and asks you to guess

and there’s no end of the mystery,

no end of the blessing

of sitting under a tree

looking up at a star

wondering what human beings,

what you are doing on earth,

what a thought is, an emotion,

the blade of grass beside you,

everything alone together

in the silent boat of the rising moon

docking at its own reflection

as if the port were always in the voyage,

understanding

merely an expression of the intensity

of our not knowing.

The answers come and go,

governments, religions, arts, sciences

like parking meters, like waterbirds,

like oceans on the moon.

Life is the lock that opens the key,

the skymouth of the dream that woke itself up

talking in its sleep,

trying to remember the dreamer.

Like the fleets and caravans

of the seeds on the autumn wind

we are the purest expression

of a universe

that answers us with ourselves

when we ask for a sign.

Like cherries that ripen in the silence

of the deepening night,

turning our tears to wine,

our darkness into eyes,

may my shadows always be worthy

of the light that casts them.

Sixty-four years a human being,

sixty-four years of suffering and doubt,

of boredom and magmatic intensities,

of mystic elation and mythic insignificance,

of anger, danger, risk, defeat and victory,

of saying and seeing,

of trying to kiss the shadow of my pain away

by deepening my ignorance

and progressing backwards

through the re-runs of old eclipses

that once gorged on the moon like dragons.

Tonight the wind howls bitterly outside

and the stars seem eras away in the cold

as if the intimacy I have felt with their shining

since I was a boy

were just another leaf torn from the tree.

It’s rare to catch a glimpse of your agony,

to see that even the brightest fountains

of your effloresence

are rooted in a wounded watershed

that has never known the colour of your eyes.

I don’t need to be forgiven

for being born

and I won’t be poured

like a tidal wine

into a life that isn’t mine

however many cracks appear in the cup,

however I recede and leak out of myself,

my blood isn’t anyone else’s signature,

and this walking to nowhere I call a poem,

no one’s footprints following me but my own.

How should it be otherwise

that I fall like rain

to appease this rumour of life

like a fire in my roots

and flash through the creekbeds

of my own flowing

like time returning to its hidden source

with news of nothing?

An echo of light

looking for its lost voice like a star,

I don’t need to prove myself to the night

like a theory in the heart of a passing stranger

and space is the only death mask

that is the true likeness of my face.

No more than the light and the rain

that open the seeds like love-letters,

I don’t need to know

what I will become

or what was revealed behind me in the dark,

but let me be worthy

of this wounded boat of the moment

with its cargo of eyes

enduring the burden and inspiration

of the voyage

like illegal refugees

with forged passports to Atlantis,

and if I must be accounted

one of the martyrs of absurdity,

then let me be as generous as wings

to the worms in my name

that blindly ploughed the soil

of this, my rootless country on the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

COME TO ME IN RAGS OF BLUE FIRE

COME TO ME IN RAGS OF BLUE FIRE

Come to me in rags of blue fire, you, muse, you,

the gardenia face on the other side of the black gate

whose ancient spears are tipped with the taste

of wounded moons and iron roses. Do not be swayed

by the blossoms on the cherry bridge,

or why the shadows of the brick children

on the walls of atomic decisions

haven’t been signed by the artists. Give up

your fixation for amateur comet-watching in the rain

and come to me, touch me, hold me, consume me

in the flames of your igneous dispositions,

pierce me with stars, tear me on the thorns of your light,

as you have loved me in revery, distress, and tears,

as you have loved me in horror and humiliation

and then yourself lain down with me

in the mass graves of the student guitars

that were raped and murdered in the limelights

of the show-bizz army trucks,

antidotes weeping all night from the crescent of your kinder fang

to keep my heart alive like a toad in winter,

bring me now the night fire of your tigers

and the fragrance of wild sapphires blooming on the wind

when you return like an atmosphere to find me

as only you know how to find me

listening to my scars eat through the silence of dry creekbeds

revising the flash floods of their nervous breakdowns

with the short hands and amputated fingers of cactus alphabets.

Shall I call you dark names, and season my calling

with black swans and histrionic willows;

shall I summon you by silvering the Russian olive,

or bleeding the cherry to paint a man without lips,

or will you make me labour for nothing

in the sweatshops of the underpaid cocoons

when my tongue’s already as thick as a shoulder-pad?

Come, just come, come with wings, come with fireflies

and trust I’ve always preferred you to suicide,

come with bells and starfish calendars, come with candles and cedar

and tears in the mirror that don’t belong to anyone

and remember what I’ve died for when you asked,

come with fish and peacocks and orchids,

with squandered lakes bruised by the moon,

with black roses shedding their crows like witches,

come to me like an emerald that needs healing,

come with fingertips, breasts, eyes, a windfall of soggy peaches,

and believe in the poor goat whose piety’s a broken horn,

lift him up like rain above the sphinx in a desert ripe with diamonds,

and let him know, softly remind him, caress and confine him

like a cemetery covered in a keyboard of snow

until he confesses there’s an asylum in the heart of chaos

that sings to itself like an emergency constellation,

more enthralling than all the rest, a black waterstar

you are compelled to turn the lights off everywhere to be.

PATRICK WHITE