TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

TOO INTENSE, TOO DEPRESSING, MY THIRD EYE

Too intense, too depressing, my third eye

the monocle of a Cyclops, a three hundred year old

methane hurricane rose exfoliating on Jupiter,

a gravitationally warped contact lens

that fits like a jellyfish on the mirrors

of the Hubble Telescope in a decaying orbit.

I’m willing to put up with a few thorns

to kiss a rose wearing black lipstick to mass

or sit under a blooming locust tree in the morning

that’s got bigger stingers than the bees that swarm it

ever thought possible, and from a crucifix

so forbidding, watch the honey humming sweeter

than the mellifluous light of a thousand sunsets

that alloyed themselves to copper back in the Bronze Age.

The moon can be the blossom of an apricot.

The moon can be a switchblade. Nobody

likes a real dragon for the same reasons

the tribes were afraid of their shamans.

There’s nothing altruistic about their wisdom.

The apple tree doesn’t look upon its windfall

in late September as a hamper on someone’s doorstep.

Some days I’m as sensitive as a sledge hammer

on the horns of a garden snail. Others

I could fine tune a spider web to the stars

or charm my way out of a snakepit

with the metronomic swaying of the suspension bridge

running up my spine between mutually supportive extremes.

As above so below. Sometimes I fall

from such erotic heights it makes even

the trembling lip of a precipice feel nervous

as I plunge by like a comet with its feet

on the handlebars of a Harley on fire

trying to blow the flames out by opening it up

on the highway like the mobile pyre of a sky burial.

I see blood on the snow and a savaged pheasant.

I don’t see a scarlet ribbon falling from your hair

as if the wind were unwrapping a present.

There’s starmud clotted on the inside

of my prophetic skull but that doesn’t tempt me

to turn it into a flowerpot on a birdcage of a balcony

overlooking the hanging gardens of Babylon

and I’ve never enjoyed popping anyone’s

supersensible iridescent multiversal soap bubble

buoyantly traversing the muck of the swamp

like the spiritual afterlife of a waterlily

that’s cut all ties to what the living are rooted in.

You can stuff your pillowcase with leaking hand grenades

as far as I care if it helps you get a good night’s sleep

and keeps you intrigued with the quality of your dreams.

A hard stone under your head at the side of the road

is often softer than a wet pillow that’s been crying all night.

Too intense, you bray? You sure as hell aren’t.

Took me twenty years to learn to say that with conviction.

I know pyramids with a greater sense of urgency than you have.

Befriend your own death. You’ll wax intense.

You’ll ghost dance with lunatics under the full moon

rising like a white buffalo mother over the seance of your fires.

You can afford to lavish an emergency or two

on the onceness of your life without putting snow chains

on the ambulance in a firestorm of ice-age fireflies.

As for depressing? So’s half of every wavelength.

The valley’s as deep as the mountain is high.

The way things usually go if you don’t see me

with a nose bleed, I’ve probably got the bends

and there are little bubbles of euphoric nitrogen

breaking in my blood stream like my narcotic relations

with laughing gas that would remind me of you in a way

if it weren’t for that long wake of broken mirrors

trailing away behind you like Halley’s comet

when it fizzled in 1986, or Isadora Duncan’s scarf

caught up in the wheel of birth and death

like a loose thread of fate or a snake unspooled

from the axis mundi of a voodoo doll in the arms

of an unlucky world turning over a new card.

Depressing? I’d rather be a sincere disease

than one of the spin doctors of a breezy happiness.

The dragons are unbearable enough

but the fireflies can be just as terrifying

if they don’t understand the nature of their own enlightenment.

My eyes aren’t deranged by the things they see,

though my heart might scream and my dreams

might be painted on the inside of my skull

in carbon, blood and red ochre, my hunting magic

tucked away at the back of a cave where I bury my dead

under the hearthstones, their bones,

symbolic kindling for a fire that never goes out,

and the shadows of all this might have

a thicker skin that you do, but long ago

I discovered the best place to hide was out in the open

and the longest guarantee of making sure

no one knows what you’re up to, is stand before them naked.

They see what they see as far as they’ve

been given a light to go by. Some have optic nerves

wired to their hearts, and they celebrate

the gentle fireworks of life like fireflies.

And some have the eyes of dragons

soldered to the motherboards of their brains

and they’ve been looking at things for such a long time

from a sidereal point of view, they’ve turned

into constellations, cold, beautiful, old, and vast.

PATRICK WHITE  

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A GREY MUSIC HOVERS OVER THE TOWN

A grey music hovers over the town.

No people on the streets. Background drone

of furnaces working overtime against the cold.

Space and time on the nightshift and fossils

of bootprints like prehistoric ferns

and the beautiful arcs of tire tracks

frozen into shales of brown Pre-Cambrian snow.

Unlike the stars, there’s no twinkle in the eyes

of the streetlights who just look down and stare.

There’s a desolate window across the street,

facing south directly across from my apartment

I’ve been peering into night after night

like the eye-socket of a blue-black anthracite skull,

waiting to see some ghost or star or the first small flame

of a pilot light come on in the dragon’s lair

as if it could breathe fire out of its eyes

and tonight the last full moon of the old year

slowly appears like seeing out of the darkness

or the return of an apparitional apple blossom to a dead branch.

The air’s got an edge that plays like a switchblade

with the most exposed parts of me,

and the silence brazes my face in glacial acetylene

as my skin goes into shock electrocuted by the cold.

My breath one exorcism after another

I had no idea I had been possessed by so many.

I wander in a fog of exiles and ghosts

like a mystic cloud of unknowing, the rag

of an impoverished atmosphere that aspires

to break into stars shuddering with insight.

Orion and the dog star of Osiris, and Jupiter,

a little further down the road from the moon

than last night. Further into the frozen river groves

a strange, brittle quiet waits for something to happen to it.

I am too far from home to make it back in time.

I have made and unmade my own way through life

like this river whether my end is in my beginning or not

or if there’s a sea of shadows on the moon

I’m trying to make my way to by flowing upward

like the bridges of the trees that burned in the fall behind me

after I’d crossed over to the other side of everywhere.

Myriad stars and the unoccupied emptiness

that’s forms the quixotic inconceivability

of my shapeshifting mind takes them in like fireflies

through the open window of a lantern that embodies the light

the way a candle wraps a spinal cord in flesh like beeswax

then adds a touch of fire to enliven the flame of life within.

My heart gathers them together like tribes

around their council fires and recites from memory

such resplendent myths of origin they shine

like constellations on a bitterly cold night

to keep themselves warm on the inside

by banking the flames with last year’s lack luster starmaps.

Cosmologies come and go like the leaves,

turn brown and go flakey thinking of themselves

as retroactive prophecies in the canopic jars

of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran

led out of the darkness by a messianic goatherd

thinking of kindling his morning fires with them

as he would later burn an autumn of Gnostic Gospels

like portable cave paintings surrounded by hearthstones.

Was the smoke any holier than that of a distant farmhouse?

Was there a fragrance of burning loveletters in the air?

Did fiery doves descend like cherubim and ice-age comets

cast out like flawed jewels from their black halo

beyond Neptune or the aura of the dark Oort cloud

catching the sun out in the open like a sudden hail storm

in Sodom and Gomorrah? Pillars of Dead Sea salt,

those who looked back, weak-kneed birches

buckled by snow. Footprints in the volcanic ash

of the first man to set foot on the virgin moon

like the hymen of this trail that breaks behind me

like poetry putting its foot through a window of ice

on this shadow-stained mirror of immaculate misconception

breeding a second nature to replace the first through repetition.

My mind wanders off into transformations

that always take me by surprise and I let it

follow the deer paths down to the river

to drink from the galactic reflections of migrating stars

like elixirs of hunting magic that drive the wolves crazy.

Every step I take, the creature I am morphs

into the one I’m becoming by mere association.

I’m a bestiary of arcane symbols and totems

I’ve stacked up like stones and skulls

into a dolmen of self I’ll leave as a sign

of residential abandonment to the next traveller

to pass this way and wonder who I was

and much more engagingly who I wasn’t.

I wasn’t a man who wouldn’t take a risk

at some peril to his eyes to get a better view of the stars.

I didn’t stand at a window for the whole of my life

to wish it away until I was numb with longing

on one grimy star descending into a night sea

of tarpaper rooftops writing their memoirs in snow.

I survived by not taking shelter from the storm.

I propped my elbows like the legs of a telescope

on the windowsills and event horizons of the world

and got out of my house of the zodiac

like a wandering planet through a lens.

I never took direction from my aftermath.

I was as fierce and lucid and clear as a star

and all paths led away from me enlightened

from the beginning like a future memory of the past.

Love was a kind of nebular confusion that didn’t last

though out of it grew the wild-eyed irises of the Pleiades

and the blue fires that bloom along these banks in the summer

when I remember some transitory detail

about the spirit of a lost lover that still haunts me

like a willow that used to rinse her hair

of stars and dragonflies in a river that passed her by.

If truth was the salt of the earth, beauty

was a dangerous sugar I was always bee enough

not to resist like a golden coke junkie dealing in flowers.

Though I didn’t indulge in happy endings,

I found it improbably possible to remain grateful

for more than I could comprehend of the gifts

I was given to lay like poppies and wheat

I’d gathered from the starfields by the heartful

on the evanescent stairs of the unattainable

as I hid like a secret I couldn’t tell to anyone else

to see who came out when no one was looking to receive them.

Wisdom when it managed to achieve me

always emanated a bouquet of seasoned ignorance

with a twist of crazy that often made me want

to smash it on a dancing floor at a Greek wedding

and dance in glee at my delinquency until my feet bled

with the blood of the grapes they tread the wine from.

Some people’s heels are winged in doves’ feathers.

Mine were spurred on by the wings and talons of hawks

plunging across the full moon like nocturnal arrowheads.

And when the time came to empty the lifeboat of my likeness

like the frozen wombs of the gaping milk weed pods

gaping as if they’d just given birth to a million ghosts

that are going to take root in the hills that live after them,

I could honestly say in words that politely ignored me

like a pyramid doesn’t make an impression on a sand dune,

even in a sea of radical pearl makers and resurgent stars,

mirages of water in the waterclock of a mindstream

in flood both sides of an imagination silting the light with starmud,

I knew the mermaids. And I knew the rocks.

I was a complete sailor. I dropped anchor

like a shipwreck in the moonset of my blood.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

THE STARS KEEP HAPPENING FASTER THAN I CAN REMEMBER THEM

The stars keep happening faster than I can remember them.

So is everything else, exponentially. Memory makes me

a continuum I’m always creating and calling myself.

Memory cross-references its matrix like the web of a spider

and soon I mistake the habit of the web for me, continuously.

I’m attached like a badge or a bird to the strings of my own guitar.

The seeing isn’t in my eyes. Neither is the music in the instrument.

I keep giving the stars new names every night

just to keep up with the possibilities of what they’re becoming.

Nor have they ever shone down upon the same man

looking up at them two nights in a row. I rearrange them

into different constellations and give them symbolic meanings

they never knew they had before. I step through the door

and every house in the zodiac changes. The sun

is less lucid at dawn than when it started the nightshift.

There isn’t a point on the ecliptic that isn’t the equinox

of a prayer bead that gets its way by not asking for anything.

Watching the world, I witness my own creation

as it’s happening. The star becomes aware of the eye

that’s observing it and it begins to see things

as if it had its own imagination. We celebrate

each other’s possibilities and awareness is born

of the binary of you and me, so we can dance,

not two, like a happy secret that can’t be known

by anyone else. No one has ever lifted the veils of Isis,

not even unity, which is to say, if you see her face covered

it means you haven’t opened your eyes far enough

to realize the Queen of Heaven is the shining

you’ve been looking for her with. Astronomy for fireflies.

This world is so interdependently originated

I’m the lifework of a star. I’m the masterpiece

of a bacterium. Starmud, I garden among the galaxies

that blow like the dishevelled heads of flowers in the wind.

My work done. I’m the only weed that’s been uprooted.

The pulse of my bloodstream is the waterclock of the stars.

The moon is in the corals having sex. I’m listening

to discrete variations on a theme of discontinuity

my ears are turning into music like the rain on the plectra

of the thorns and the leaves that ping like the G-spots

of the roses in heat that want to go on blooming forever.

PATRICK WHITE

IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

Is it such a light trigger between your life and death

all you need do is squeeze the last crescent of the waning moon

with the merest of thoughts for it to go off? Done.

No more complication, at least, that you know of.

Or is this about crushing the rotten strawberry

at the heart of the vile world because

your mystic specifics keep being uprooted

from the ground of being like a unique weed

in a generalized garden where comas are preferred

like cultivated columbine to your kind of wild enlightenment?

I’m not going to talk to you like a piece

of fragile crystal, or a bull having a nervous breakdown

in a china shop, wondering if he should saw his horns off

to keep from doing any further damage to a chipped swan.

You want to let your hair down like the willow

of a chandelier in an ice storm, I don’t intend

to stand under it trying to hold you up like a mobile

of the solar system losing its grip on time and space.

Not because I don’t care. Not because

I’m an elder shaman of the sixties who had

a happier time of it than you. I didn’t,

though I wish you’d been there to have

your most hallucinogenic delusions understand that.

I won’t chrome the bumpers you get hit by in life

or buff the blood off to prove you can make

a meteoric success of yourself if you know

how to spin the first impact it made upon you.

Some things leave you lying in the gutter

like a crumpled doll or the late Triassic.

Life’s a risk. Death’s a risk. Avoiding either

is, too. I take one look at you in your plaid tan

and I see a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a Sunni body

and a Shia soul trying to indoctrinate a day care center

into infantile acts of precocious terrorism.

You’re that old woman Muhammad who loved

women, perfume and prayer, warned

everybody about looking ahead to these end times,

who took a strong rope, like a spinal cord,

and unwound it into a million weak threads

until she found the silken trophy line of a spider

at its loom, she could hang herself with

like an anchor with no sense of buoyancy

or the plumb bob of a corpse fathoming her own depths.

Who taught you to play so seriously you

closed the theatres and scourged the brothels

with razorwire in a danse macabre of flagellants?

When you turn that deathmask over like the carapace

of the world turtle, whose face is it you’re trying to save

by recasting it as a cement portrait of a mime?

You’d look better painting it in moonlight on water.

The palette of your multi-coloured hair, a lure

on a fishing hook that throws back more

of what it catches than it keeps. Just for the fun of it,

exalting in the power of your magical absurdity

to enhance your charms like the spiritual eclipse

of a moonrise smearing Gothic mascara on your eyelids.

Meaningless, isn’t it? Are you devastated

by the stars’ sense of timing that they go on shining

like idiots with grins on their faces while you’re

burning black holes in your heart with a cigarette heater?

Clarity’s an art, not a failure of imagination.

There isn’t a star in the sky that doesn’t know the dark.

You just haven’t grown the eyes for it yet

or learned to turn the light around fast enough

to catch a glimpse of yourself making a death wish

on a falling star that might shock the disinterested fireflies

into realizing some constellations outside the zodiac

need more than fifteen degrees of separation

to stay on the bright side of things like a Tarot pack

with a positive attitude that lies every chance it gets

about the truth of things as they are at the expense

of living a two-eyed life without a prayer wheel in training

for balance. Poor planet. No moons. No fossils

in that Burgess Shale of asteroids you surround yourself with

ready to throw the first stone at yourself like a face

in the mirror of an orbiting telescope you can’t

clearly identify with unless it’s in transit by contrast.

Living isn’t a consolation for getting along without it.

And death isn’t a door prize a starting pistol

hands out at the gate for being the one millionth horse

to overthrow its rider and get out of the blocks way too late

to bet on finishing anything ahead of the pack.

Snake-eyes, baby, then seven come eleven. Things

happen in tandem like binary stars everytime

you throw the dice even in a random universe

that doesn’t enjoy listening to its own advice

it’s important to remember when you’re sinking like this

into one of those tarpits you bleed like black pearls

on a rosary of miscarriages without a new moonrise

heaven’s got an air force, but not much of a navy.

The abyss is full of elemental hydrogen dirigibles

that put their fires out like submersibles in the waters of life.

One torch up. One torch down. Like the dadaphors

of ancient Rome trying to synchronize the hinges of the New Year

like lapwings to the flight plans of imperial eagles.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

What I have become and did not intend.

Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?

Glum when I should be shining, bright

when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints

my constellations were. Still, I worked like a firefly

with the shadows of the insights I had to go by.

Some nights there’s not a dot of Braille

on a blind starmap eyeless in the east.

I try to stare these ice-age windows into thawing

in the heat of my vision but only an eddy of air

has been weeping along with the lament of my candle

like a stray thread unravelling the atmosphere,

a ghost at the loom of a flying carpet

that never got off the ground. Obviously, down,

I’m rooted like a flower in an urn of starmud.

I don’t fight the shadows. I don’t exalt the light.

I don’t try to embroider my death shroud

with finely stitched vetch. I don’t white wash

my nightmares with the upbeat needlepoint

of sweeter dreams than my prophetic skull can summon.

I offer my absence entire to the enlargement of a space

where the stars are growing further apart

and time is slowly running out of lovers and friends.

I don’t compare my ashes to the fires I could have been.

I don’t ask the lamps of my genies to preside

at the death of dragons. I don’t bear false witness

staring into the firepits of their eyes like niches

in a skull that can see better in the dark than I can

at the end of their wicks like spinal cords tethered to a flame,

something eternal that proved transitory as rain.

I have a seasonal mind. I take the weather as it comes.

Just past the winter solstice now, the days are getting longer.

Last night Jupiter and the full moon so clear

it cut my eyes like the facets of a jewel

in the abyss of a mystery that called out to my soul

with a longing that’s almost more than I can bear to hear

its voice is so impersonal, I’m alienated from the intimacy

of a solitude where I used to entertain a self

with how dazzling everything is when there’s nothing of value

to hang on to. Not an I. Not a They. Not a You.

I can swim like the comet of a Siamese fighting fish

in a cloven hoofprint of rain forever but heave myself

up over the gunwales of an empty lifeboat in any attempt

to save myself from drifting alone in the interminable depths

of another graveyard shift on an infinite sea of awareness,

and I drown like the moon in the undertow

of my own shadows looking for where I’ve gone.

I derive a strange joy from the pain I suffer through in life

like a risk I shouldn’t have taken, but did, and rejoice

in the counter-intuitive act of macrocosmic emotions

that my laughter is a mountain that can sing almost

as deeply as the bird drenched voices in the valleys of my sorrow.

The dead branch where the rivers used to meet

might break under the weight of my sacred song

but I’m not out witching for wishing wells

from the blisters of the stars on my lips to atone

for having tasted the light for myself to know

if it were sweet or acrid. Merely illuminating

or more convincingly fruitive. Bright vacancy

or dark abundance, or a dynamic equilibrium of both

for those of you still foolish enough to conceive

of yourselves as pilgrims on a middle way

mapped out by lightning no one’s ever set foot upon,

the journey’s that abrupt. A Milky Way of fireflies

signalling like ships far out at sea like the spiritual life

of shore-huggers burning their dead on driftwood pyres

that washed up onto the beach. The fire god

comes looking for fire and there’s isn’t a star

that’s out of reach. Make your oblations of ashes and smoke

and snakes will climb the burning fire ladders to heaven

like lunar spinal cords long before the elect of your matchbook

fake their way out of hell. Their candles snuffed by their bells.

Brutal clarities. Homeless thresholds. Unhinged gates

hanging on like the broken wing of a prayer

nobody bothers to close or open anymore

like the last exit out of the labyrinth of yourself

before you enter the starfields like an eye in the dark

to give the light something to focus on

like an over-exuberant loveletter from the wildflowers

wondering why they haven’t heard from you in lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU'VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

YOU’VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

You’ve been gone such a long time.

Do the dead share their absence

with the hearts of those who miss them

or is the scope of the moon diminished

by its lack of a credible atmosphere?

After the flood, I believed in the covenant

the rainbows made with the disquieting day,

but late at night among the moondogs

I heard them weeping like watercolours

left out in the rain that washes their promises away

like false dawns in the third eye of the sea.

Where did you go? And why? Were you

a failure that went unnoticed? Did I let you down

in some unforgivable way and this is how

I pay by having to grow galactic to embrace you,

to close the abyss between us with oceanic forays

into time and space to say I’m sorry when

I feel you near, if I harmed you in any way

I wasn’t aware of, though never out of a lack of love?

Night after night, my heart drifts like a lifeboat

lowered from the moonset in the west

to look for you without a starmap to anywhere

only to be washed up on shore in the morning

as empty as I left. My waterclocks trying

to turn back time like a widow walk

around a lighthouse with no habitable planets.

It’s not the light of candles that I follow

it’s the wend of the smoke when they go out

that reveals the paths of the dead unravelling

like a road of ghosts dispersed among the stars.

My heart’s become a bone-box of your eyes,

your lips, your hair, your fingertips,

the nocturnal fragrance of the orchid of your sex.

I carry the ashes of your shining in a medicine-bag

around my neck in the indefensibly

dangerous human hope that one night

you’ll be attracted back to the relics you left behind

in a kind of sympathetic magic with the blind

so they might see you again, one last time

just to know that you’re ok with your disappearance

like a sundial at noon overwhelmed by its shadows

boarding the flowers up like coffins in a total eclipse.

It’s white outside right now. No topography to the snow.

Silt of the moon. A photographic positive

of the oblivion I don’t imagine you inhabit anymore

now that you’ve crossed the burning bridge

of your last threshold to make an indwelling

of the black hole you’ve left in so many galactic hearts

they’re wheeling like Sufis seeking annihilation

among the dust devils that arise at their heels

like the oldest messengers of the stars

to the mud we’re made of, some, clay bricks in a wall.

Some, dry creekbeds trying to decipher

their own crackling like pictographs

on the shattered ostrakons of a cosmic eggshell

someone got out of like the canary of a buried miner

to see how big the sky was when no one else was looking.

Is it bigger than pain? Is it the freedom of the forsaken?

Does it advance the cause of life to dance

even when you’re weeping over a purple passage

in a suicide note that was meant for your eyes only?

Can you see your reflection on the back of a mirror,

or is it enough that we abuse our tears for that,

lightyear after lightyear, trying to turn them inside out

as if the stars were always on the other side

of where we were for the night, looking out at the snow

making it all seem so irrevocably easy to let go

when you’re staring through an expressionless window

weary of trying to second guess the long view

of what you’ve had to live your way through anymore,

your grief a frozen nightbird in an aviary of razor-wire

entangling your heart in the strings of a harp

looping like the helical orbits of your retrograde descents

into Orphic modes of empty-handed, esoteric thought,

regardless of whether things eventually

come clear of their own spontaneous accord or not.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEAR I HAVEN'T GOT THE VOICE TO SPEAK TO YOU

I FEAR I HAVEN’T GOT THE VOICE TO SPEAK TO YOU

I fear I haven’t got the voice to speak to you

as gently as I would. Just a whisper shy of silence.

A star in the dusk of an oncoming nightfall.

I want to suggest an arcana of secrets to you about

the wisdom of life and love you weep for now

like a bruised apple on the ground that yesterday

smothered in bridal apple bloom. Your solitude

and the sorrow of that lunar wound that encumbers

your heart like a bell you keep pouring your life out of

as if it were bad wine, makes you a sacred grove

not any crow on the wing can roost in with impunity.

I’m a shipwrecked sailor and I’ve got the scars

of the moon to prove it. My arm’s been replaced

by the talons of a grappling hook, and the white whale

of the moon mourns for a lost daughter like a harpoon

that triggers a thorn of sorrows in the rose of my heart.

I know the taboo that surrounds a young woman

walking like the moon on the sea in an atmosphere

that’s never going to clear like fog from an ocean of shadows

lashing her heart like breakers of grief and confusion.

Presuming upon nothing is the fairest form of exchange.

Don’t raise me up from the bottom, and I won’t ask you

to get into the lifeboat. I don’t burn my tongue on the stars

as readily as I once did, and I’m not saying

that I’m not as susceptible to an injured lamia

with a snakeskin around her waist, drakaina Sybaris,

as I’ve always been, or I haven’t learned how to milk

one fang of a crescent for the sake of the antidote in the other,

that’s how many times I’ve been bitten. Slow

but thorough, I suppose. It’s been transformative.

And I know it’s weird encountering me way out here

in this abyss where even the most severely abandoned

can’t remember whether they’re exiles or not, but

I was summoned by that seance of razorblades

you’re trying to thresh the starfields with hoping

if you cut deep enough you might uncover a hidden harvest.

If you don’t act like a sparrow with a broken wing

gleaning seeds like the lockets of leftover gardens

I won’t speak to you like a scarecrow trussed up

for the occasion like a hobo that isn’t going anywhere

in a dead man’s suit. Abyss to abyss, I address you

with the greatest tenderness for what you’re suffering through.

Time isn’t going to heal anything. You just learn

to flow around it like a skull in the heartstream

like the beginning of a bridge you’ll cobble

like a hydra-headed lover in the course of time

trying to nurse your absence on the dark side of the moon.

Time isn’t hiding daggers like assassins in the shadows

of the sundials so there’s no need to fence with your paranoia

out of fear the same thing’s going to happen all over again,

because it doesn’t, if you don’t let your pain lose its nerve.

You can make a pearl out of the dirt that’s been heaped

on your moonrise like the luster of a black swan

out on the lake alone like the reflection of a new moon

or you can cover the orbiting telescope of your third eye

in the eyepatch of an eclipse like a falcon in an executioner’s hood

that can taste the blood of the dove like a rose torn on its own thorns.

I suggest you learn to befriend your solitude

so you’ll never be alone again without someone to talk to

like an intimate familiar that won’t lie to you

about the loss of your shepherd moons like beads

on a broken rosary of Canada geese bearing your dead away

like lambs that lay down with a mountain lion without a truce.

Those moments of bliss you experienced have not gone amiss.

They’re still shining like first magnitude starmaps to the past

as they were then, and as they always will be, indelibly

as the blue fireflies in the Pleiades that are as radiant tonight

through the keyhole of your emotional cloud cover

as they were when you left the door wide open to the sky.

Though your lover become anonymous as a defaced idol

whose magic wasn’t a peer of yours, the spell you cast

over each other like the dream-catching fishing nets

of the vernal equinox, are not cast out

by the meteoric ostrakons of the autumnal Leonids

trying to break the light barrier of their radiants

by throwing the first stone into a diaspora of shattered mirrors.

Some dreams disappear like the smoke of distant fires

or ghosts lifting off a lake like a prequel to the morning

and others cling to you for the rest of your life

as if you’re skin had been touched by the moonlight

in such a way your nakedness was robed

in the subtle weave of a silver raiment undulating

like lunacy and enlightenment on the waves

of an oceanic awareness of how far from shore you are.

You don’t need to hire a troupe of foghorns and lighthouses

to act as professional mourners and warners

not to ever give your heart away like salvage to the sea again.

And I won’t say you’re not the first mermaid

to get washed off the rocks she was singing on

by a passing tidal wave that deepened the lyrics of her song

and smashed her lyre like a wishbone that had lost its charm

on the lunar coral reefs she keel-hauled her heart on

like the maiden head on the dolphin prow of a damaged schooner.

Pain is a lot more mystically unique than that.

It’s a snowflake on a furnace that doesn’t repeat itself.

It doesn’t happen to you in quite the same way

it does to everyone else, or to each of them separately

like a river breaking into a million water droplets as it plunges

over the precipice of some unknown abyss within itself.

Separation, too, is a means of sustaining the delusory unison

of the discrete continuum we apply like screening myths

to the discontinuous narrative themes of our lives

as if we needed a stronger rope than our umbilical cords

to moor ourselves like barnacles to an avalanche of moon rocks.

I apply my words like a poultice of lunar herbs to your heart

to draw the possibility of infection out like a flute

the toxic arrowheads fletched with pentatonic scales

in the snakepits of a tone-deaf snake-charmer

that approached you like a young Medusa, long before

your eyes began to stare at the moon like a cold stone.

I come before the oracle, not in her crone phase,

but as a beautiful young woman I ask to prophecy

without the usual ambivalence, what walls she can hide behind

by launching her sorrows like empty coffins in the rain

she inaugurates by breaking Molotov cocktails of champagne

across the bleeding edge of her bow in drydock on the moon.

You, who are the shape of the universe. You,

who are the black madonna of the Merovingian Aquitaine.

You who fletch the arrow of wheat in the hand of the Virgin

with feathers of grain within the wingspan of the golden scythe

of the waxing crescent of the moon. Your longing

the muse of an empty silo. You, the creatrix of poems

that fulfil your deepest desire to be known like a secret

unto yourself like a messenger alone with her medium.

A man might offer you his hand as the measure of all things,

but how many lightyears have your fires burned

in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven with her gaze fixed

like a star on the palm of a sailor to keep him from drowning?

The one who wears the lifemask hurts the worst, it’s true.

The generalities of victory are chaff compared

to the mystic specifics of the lavish jewels that are uncovered

by the wind blowing away the ashes of the bed clothes

that once covered you in flames like a hot-blooded gust of poppies.

Queen Cassiopeia’s throne abdicated her arrogance and things

went circumpolar ever after like a jinx wheel of lapwings.

May I remind you, in a great silence worthy of a devoted heart,

you are a child of Isis, not one of her sacred whores,

however much reverence they accord her under as many names,

the stars flow in your blood as lucidly as they do in hers.

And there’s no mirror of tears in your ancestry that could ever

put them out like fire on the water shadow dancing with the stars

in the eye of a mystery that disarms everyone

with the unspeakable beauty of their enlightened scars

looking upon the sorrows in the face of someone like you

and opening their eyes to the real flesh and blood

behind the carrara marble you’re turning into

like the Pieta of their own souls forsaken like corpses

in their laps like wounded voodoo dolls they can’t

lift the curse from until you return to the living

like the black sail of a funereal moonboat in mourning

sidereally surrendering to the tidal ebb and flow

like the red algae of your own concupiscent renewal

washing you up like a galactic starfish

on the gleaming beaches of a biophosphorescent Milky Way

shining by its own light to illuminate every step you take

like the footprints of a young, prodigal goddess

returning from a long starwalk of celestial heartache.

PATRICK WHITE