SO MANY MORNINGS

SO MANY MORNINGS

So many mornings I want to be done

with waking up as if it were always winter

and rifling through my pockets to see if

I’ve got enough cash to buy me and the cat

another day or two of life she can spend

chasing paper balls of the poems I roll up

to expend on her amusement, and for me

a microbubble of space and time I can

write and paint in without feeling hungover

from the chronic sobriety of my last encounter

with a swarm of killer bees retooled

from the dirty thirties smuggling prohibition

through the Thousand Islands. Return me to exile.

I’m the King of the Outcasts, a pure blood pariah,

a leper of the moon, a sacred clown who dances for rain

to help him recall how to cry. I’m a blue flower

in No Man’s Land someone ploughed with a cannon.

It’s a kind of protest sign I hold up

like a placard of chicory that means no surrender.

I sheathe the moon in my scabbard like a blood-stained blade.

I am the lunar trifecta of aquiline talons that grasp at nothing.

I labour at life with an effortless effort of intensity

that makes Rasputin look like a slacker among mad monks.

I have been dispossessed by more spirits I’ve never met

except as an anonymous urgency to write something

as if I were here to listen, not speak, and my voice

were merely the microphone everyone popped their p’s in

as if they were French kissing electricity, than any man I know of.

I wholly understand experientially what the Zen master meant

when he said he didn’t like poems written by poets,

cooking prepared by cooks, or paintings done by painters.

Leftover carbon in a half-hearted fire. Boulders of coal

instead of diamonds for the adamantine eyes

of an enlightened snowman wondering

what it might have been like to have been born a scarecrow,

a strawdog, on a hot summer evening in the flesh instead of

made out of stars on an immaculate winter night harder

than moonlight on the lake ice. I’ve found my way

out of this labyrinth of dead ends more than once.

The crows and the wolf gods know all the backtrails out of hell,

but it was a sadder day than I ever imagined

clarity and freedom could be. The solitude is interminable.

And even the moon doesn’t truly understand what you’re howling at.

You’ve probably never heard of Archibald Lampman

but he was the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

a hundred and fifty years ago plus in Ottawa

at the Council of the Three Fires where the rivers join

and I smear the same kind of war paint on my face

though the feathers in my topknot I plucked from Pegasus

to see if I’d forgotten how to write with ink and quills.

Poetry is the last sanctuary of savage dignity in the Black Hills.

I’m a hold out from way back when the Chinese

taught the Haida to carve cedar totem poles like the power nodes

of the chakras in their spines. I’ve got knots and nooses in mine.

But the principle remains the same. Having tried

shattering a few celestial spheres into the crystal chandeliers

of a wine glass falling everywhere like the fine mist of an ice-storm

with my voice to see if I could make something habitable

out of this shepherd moon that might surprise everybody yet

with life forms that defy uninspired expectations, I

turned my attention to Tibetan prayer bowls

that hummed in spirals that made a mantra

out of every line of picture-music I wrote after that

placing the emphasis on the assonance of my sacred syllables

I kissed and placed in the pyx and lockets of my consonants

as if I never wanted to forget a face that had meant

something to me sometime like an eclipse of the full moon.

Now I’d never undertake a journey

that didn’t leave me homeless at the end.

That’s what I do in life. That’s how I honour

all the prophetic skulls that have brought me to this moment.

Some things I reveal like a candle in a morgue.

And when I fall like a stone bird out of the heavens

you can be sure Medusa’s been stargazing again.

Pain to me is a naturally renewable resource,

and if I were ever to write my autobiography,

it would read like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

Here you can tinker with your revisions like hex-keys and lies.

It’s difficult to know what you’re going to say next

given there’s no connection between thought and emotion

and verbal expression, and you realize they’re not sharing

the same dream grammars when one calls you to prayer

and the other to take notes at a seance of all your former selves.

All I know is whenever it was my turn to jump out of the plane

engulfed by the abyss, to test out my winged heels, it always

seemed like bad faith to reach for a parachute as if

there were something left to save. Be brave, young Icarus,

be brave. Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

Though I’m afraid I’m beginning to repeat myself

like the white noise of an old man remembering the past.

I’ve been plunging with the dolphins on the moon

in this shadowy sea of sentience since I was first conceived.

And it’s not so much that madness became a way of life

as it was a matter of sharing what I saw without asking

or expecting to be believed, if I lived it by myself for everyone.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

Shock one bird into taking to its wings

and all the others will fly up out of the sacred woods

into an emergent symphony of spontaneously choreographed words

like rivers reeds dancing in unison to the music of a distant sea.

Fish do the same. And the fans of the corals before the moon

turns them into stone. Listen. Aldebaran

bellows from the heart of the bull sacrificed to creation

like the gift of a gift to itself. It’s raining blood

in some parts of the world. If I don’t look for asylum

in reality it’s because I completely trust my imagination

not to schedule any dress rehearsals for my dreams

as if you could improve the play by upgrading the stage.

And my religion can’t bring itself to believe in a god

that created the world just to let herself be victimized by it.

I don’t take the universe as a sign of intelligence

because I can’t look at a stone without feeling I’ve added

a little wisdom to my thoughts, an earthy, sage laughter

to the unworldly seriousness of my moonrocks.

Life in the universe, elaborating its redundancy

through sex and fractals into an order of complexity

that weaves every wavelength of its picture-music

into a lyrical tapestry that would otherwise

be hanging in hyperspace like a blank membrane. Life

is intelligence in action like a mystic that got up off his knees

to fix the church roof by opening it up to the stars

that keep falling like the mercy of a transcendent rain

to wash the starmud off the roots of life with light

until they shine like lightning breaking into blossom

from the bottom up. Whether things are good or bad

synchronicity reverses the spin of my atoms

like the turn and counterturn of matter and anti-matter

dancing creatively as if love could be measured

in direct proportion to its potential for annihilation.

That’s how things have always gotten done around here.

Someone manages to peel their snowblind reflection

off the mirror like the sunburn of a coronal halo

a throne too close to home, and the night begins

to cool things off with the moonlit salve of a herbal darkness.

Everything lives, animate and inanimate alike,

the lotus eaters, the condottieri of the vulture capitalists,

and in the great reservoirs and watersheds of memory

that generated muses to inspire the living with the fires

of the dead, to keep them from going out, everyone, everything

down to the last mystically specific detail of scarlet paint

flaking off a fingernail as if someone painted a window

to cover up a moonrise with a sunset, lives, endures, thrives

in the well springs of an expansive mind that celebrates

its regeneration out of the magical black holes and top hats

it’s been pulling itself out of like rabbits by the ears for lightyears

while supernovas go berserk with applause just to tempt itself

into finding out how the trick was done by its own sleight of hand

without anyone catching on. Whatever it washes its hands of,

science is still an antiseptic magic that keeps reminding itself

of where it came from the harder it tries to deny its roots,

but there are other vital organs of the body that can

lay claim to being children of the mind as well, not just

this one changeling of a brain child laid on the steps of a temple

or found among the bullrushes. Eye-child, the bird

that lives like a larynx in your throat, heart child,

and the shy child that can feel the light breathing on her skin.

We are the neurons and axons of a galactic intelligence this week

and we’re communicating with shepherd moons and starclusters

that are as alien as we are sending out space probes like genes

unlocking the secrets of the universe like wardens and nightwatchmen

breaking koans like keys to the cosmic eggs where they’re imprisoned

like seven sleepers in the cave of our genome. If you

can put up with that many similes in a row like variations

in the evolutionary bush that might or might not catch fire

like sage brush happy to lay back on the wind and drift, just drift

in the wanderlust of not really knowing what we’re doing here

but taking it on faith, it’s blind luck to be aware of it.

And the available dimensions of tomorrow will have recourse

to these metaphors poured out of the heart like a waterclock

and new dinosaurs will walk the earth among the emotional mammals

in boas of ostrich feathers and suggestive snake-skin sequins

that shimmer like the waves on a lake at night, liquid anthracite,

dark tears with black diamonds for eyes burning heretics

in the unconfessed fires of their adamantine translucency.

Maybe it’s time to let the caves we enter like carbon-based life forms

paint us for a change in colours that have yet to be seen

in anyone’s paintbox like the bulbs of wildflowers about to bloom

in the starfields with a rainbow coloured thumb for gardens.

Let’s turn our astral portraits inside out as if the stars

were embodied within each of us like a starmap

in the crystal skull of a drop of water on a spinal blade of grass.

Mind only. Everything is mind. Not two. Not one. Not nothing.

In every part, in every grain, the whole of the harvest moon.

And the formlessness isn’t inchoate. And the form

is as homeless as the mind looking for its lantern

with its lantern, as if it wasn’t accompanied by its own light

like an honour guard of stars and fireflies the whole way

to the gate and the threshold of an endless beginning.

That’s what’s inconceivably beautiful and playful

about being alive in a mind as aniconicly vast as this.

We only hide the secrets from ourselves

that we must urgently want to be known

like mirages breaking water in the wombs of our wells.

We’re rummaging for grails in our own spiritual lost and founds.

We’re sending telescopes into space like foreign embassies

acting as plenipotentiaries for our eyes only

as if our seeing had to be diplomatic about

the infinite number of ways there are of deciphering the stars.

Make it a loveletter from a bride catalogue of Asian mermaids

if you want to hear the lyrics of what they’re singing to you

about the music of the mind walking on the waters of life

like the Pleiades webbing the constellation of Taurus

among the leafless boughs of the horned locust trees

standing in the moonlight gaping like gored matadors.

Or make up stories to keep the fires within you amused

with a ghost of smoke on a rocky road rising

out of the ashes of its deathmask on a distant hillside

with a nebular glow on its face and a secret syllable

you have to hear with your eyes before you’ll believe its yours

hidden like a jewel in the folds of its veils like a prefix

that isn’t just another false dawn on the mother tongue

of the word for bliss because no one yet has even known

how to say it in the silence of waiting for it to speak for itself.

PATRICK WHITE  

SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

Supersymmetrical fluctuations in my God particle field

are oxymoronically balancing my asymmetrical

quantum mechanical relationship between matter

and antimatter into sacred syllables of sibilant sparticles

so I can go on living substantively losing my balance

by creatively annihilating myself against a background

of perfect harmony. Is it love? Is it poetry? Is it

the amorphous music of becoming someone mystically specific

with mass throwing its weight on the side of my humanity

by loading the dice with one eye more than the perfection

of my non-existence knows what to do with,

or is everybody playing the part of an extra in their own life?

Languid apples of knowledge dancing naked

to the wavelengths of snakes playing moonlight sonatas

on the plectra of their pentatonic scales as if my photons and photinos

were all blissed out by Liszt. It’s as hard listening to a painting

that doesn’t know how to sing, as it is to see

how an omniscient secret could hide from itself

until it wished to be known. But as every dragon intuits

it’s not an elixir if you’ve got a formula for it,

and when the universe wants to speak if it isn’t

talking to itself in its sleep, or trying to come up

with a poem or an equation to fit all occasions

like a unified field theory with a burning bush

for a voice box addressing an indentured prophet

in a desert gully, pleading his brother’s superior eloquence,

it’s mourning the ashes of books that were burnt at the stake

for interrupting the silence. It’s harder to break the rules

after you’re dead than it is to discipline your disobedience

to the greater challenges of rising from Pandora’s box

to the greater miscreance of not surrendering

your insights into life like real stars refusing

to give up shining for the sake of a false dawn

the roosters and the wildflowers aren’t paying any attention to.

The flower bows to the butterfly. The shadow

enshrines the sundial and the star reveres the eye

as a child of its own. Nothing could be clearer than that.

The opposite of mindlessness isn’t the death of intelligence.

And the complement to love has never been hate.

Hate wastes too much energy underwhelming

its own inspirations like a pornographer

with a home movie camera, starring himself.

A swerve of the God particle and love

one in seven times has no opposite to collide with

just to keep a preponderance of creativity in the world.

And the rest is just nemetic lust out for a good time.

Everytime you whine for a muse to help you celebrate

this little potsherd of eternity that keeps turning thumbs down

like an ostrakon at your exile, you shame the Big Bang

into believing that she wasn’t muse enough to keep you occupied

over the last 13.5 billion lightyears of your lifespan.

But I would tender, respectfully, of course, it’s not the world

but you that have lost your charisma. Your shabby sense of wonder

is wasted on a face like that, and your tongue talks

like an old shoe that’s never wandered very far from home.

Enlarge yourself like a plenipotentiary paradigm

your children will be able to look up to like a constellation

that refused to stay within bounds but coloured outside

its fifteen degrees of separation in a sexigesimal zodiac.

Reverse the spin on your mirrors once and awhile

and take a good look at yourself on the inside as if

you weren’t trying to build an empire founded upon

the quicksand of somebody’s else’s miracles. Who doesn’t

love dancing with the Persian silks of the aurora borealis

their flesh shapeshifting like lamias and snakes under their veils,

cyanotically blue moodrings turning the pallor of death

into the irises of a chameleon that’s learned how to paint

a supernaturally toned oil of whatever comes before it?

Do you see how enlightening it is to turn

the high-livers on the catwalks out in the street in homespun?

Get back to the the roots of things like the radical

you’ve always told yourself you were from the late sixties on?

If you’re not worthy of the madness, how can you reasonably

expect to live up to being sane? Nothing worse

than a careerist with the ambitions

of a prophetic skull in an asylum

trying to listen in on cosmic office gossip

like the afterbirth in the background hiss of the universe.

Come withering, come fire, come hungry flames of desire

that will apocalyptically transmogrify your limbs into a great forest

consumed by lightning into a flash of insight

that knows enough about annihilation not to light

a match in a black hole that’s teaching you how to see in the dark,

or, more recuperatively creative, resilvering,

as the progenitive dew of the moon was once reputed to do,

or moonlight on the Byzantine leaves of the metallic Russian olives,

parabolic mirrors with an aquiline view of the stars.

Get ready for this. It’s approaching as if it were already

behind you like the light you see from Al Tair tonight

is merely the shadow of what it’s becoming without you

knowing anything about it like a surprise birthday party

that doesn’t leave your tears singing in the rain among

the myth floods of Babylon crying out like uterine waters

breaking all around you for arks to lullaby your cradles

of civilization on a Turkish mountaintop that’s about

to put its forehead to the ground in an avalanche

of asteroids and shepherd moons surrendering

to their foundation stones like an unmastered ship

going down in its oceanic awareness of the Pleiades,

or a humbled man, who realizes belatedly,

at the drop of a heart, the mermaids were always

singing to him as if he could swim without taking lessons.

PATRICK WHITE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,

Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,

cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is

but my heart seems to be in the right place,

smokes, coffee, heat, a loaf of whole wheat bread,

not quite Omar Khayyam, a jug of wine, and Thou,

but the bough is on the fire and I’ve got the Pleiades

to make me feel like a sexy astronomer

if the life mask I’m wearing isn’t convincing enough.

The moon’s off aloofly waning below the horizon.

There’s a commotion of ghosts below my apartment window

and the furnace is cracking its knuckles as if

it were getting ready for a fight. And I want to write

from the least expected quarter when you least expect it

in a space where my heart isn’t just another synonym for solitude.

Explore my mind in its omniabsence by handing out

free telescopes to the fireflies and asking them if they can see

two stars over at eleven o clock from the dim one,

the same thing I’m looking at. I want to

investigate the morphology of knowledge forms

among the mad, wholly absorbed, nothing left out, by my work.

That’s what I call it for the want of a better word

but most of the time it’s a kind of dangerous fun

that keeps me warily engaged on full alert

listening to a voice singing in a lighthouse

on the coast of the moon that laughs

nervously like a lifeboat at the weather.

Or Shelley in the Gulf of Leghorn. If I didn’t say anything

how could the silence know how beautiful it is

to experience the world as an aimless, drifting intelligence

at ease with itself as it toys lightly with elegant distinctions

that burn like paper boats origamied out of Zen poems

that come and go as they please like the moon in the window?

True excellence doesn’t rule like an aristocracy.

There are too many wonders in the world to be distracted by.

And there’s an hour. It doesn’t come often. But it never

fails to return. One disquietingly beautiful daughter of time,

lying down in the cool summer grass looking up at the stars

as if her whole body were vivid with light

as she savoured the ages that went into every single flash

of the beauty of her brevity. Firefly eyes in a lightning storm.

You can lie down nameless with her like a secret syllable

and speak in a voice older than words about things

you both know there are no answers to, and why

the shared sadness grows more beautiful the less it clings

to the lucid delusions we precariously cherish the most.

You can rendezvous with her at zenith on the hyperbolic arc

of a burning bridge or a comet that’s only going to come once

and your detachment’s a deeper intimacy

than anything you’re ever going to experience

with anyone in life ever again however hard you try

to rinse the ashes of the falling stars out of your hair for good.

On a cold night like this, even an eclipse gets creative

and she’s the crow silhouetted by a moon blossom

rising in the west of a dead branch still lamenting

the loss of its songbird as she leans down

low on the green bough of the east and suggests

maybe it’s time to get over your grief by learning

to sing for yourself. It might feel like confusion at first.

But at heart it’s an infusion of growth and compassion.

All relationships with a muse are illicit. Like blue moons

it’s not good to conduct business under. So you don’t.

And mundanity’s at a premium only a mystic could ill-afford.

It’s like taking the future for a test-drive before

the vehicle’s on the market. And at daybreak,

whether you look upon it as an entrance or an exit,

by example, living it, it’s much like mentoring a star

that always woke up too late to greet its own light

how to say farewell in the dawn and really mean it.

PATRICK WHITE

IF IT'S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN'T GOT A HISTORY

IF IT’S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN’T GOT A HISTORY

If it’s a true religion, it hasn’t got a history, it’s wholly

of the moment. No time for a teacher.

No martyrs, saints, apostates or heretics.

No Summa Theologica trying to proof-read the spirit.

Like a star, it’s always ahead of the light

it lavished on yesterday. It advances into the dark

like the root of a flower without nightvision.

The moment you say anything about it

you’ve flawed its silence with a lie. Like

the light of the star in its eye on a long road

after midnight, you can’t fly toward it,

you can’t run away. Whatever it shines upon

is true north, and the wind is its only direction of prayer.

Make a shrine of it, and it’s empty. Deny it

and it returns your voice like a bird in a valley

to a bough that lets you overhear yourself.

The world is construed from the absence of a self

like a mirage on the moon that doesn’t affect the tides.

If you want to paint the worlds the way the mind does

lay your brush aside, and watch what unfolds.

Show me a leaf that isn’t a masterstroke of your seeing.

Show me a starmap that isn’t a mindscape of your being.

Show me a book that isn’t trying to decipher the silence

as if you were written in code to disguise

the enigma of your unlocatable presence everywhere

without a sign of yourself that depends upon your magic markers.

The moment you say it is, this is it, and mistake it

for the foundation stone of a nacreous paradigm

for the new moon beading rosaries of black pearls

like the bright beginnings of a born again eclipse

you’re anointing quicksand with a desert of holy oil

and all the pyramids you took to heart, start to thaw

like the eternal recurrence of an hourglass that lost track

of history when it abandoned its perspective

for a telescope among the stars, no three alarm fires

to rush off to like a volunteer waterclock in scuba gear.

If you want to grasp becoming stop trying

to take a hold of it like like a hydra-headed snake

shapeshifting in the noose of a solitary question.

Stand away, let it go, let it flow like the wavelength

of a black river through the undergrowth of your sacred woods.

And don’t throw koans at it in the last moments

as it disappears, if you meditate in a glass zendo.

Every accusation is a confession and the karma’s

meted out in full immediately as your feathers

revert to scales, and opposites are conjoined

like dragons in cosmic eggs with wings

on both sides of their extremes such that

as it is above so it is below, a matter of starmud.

The earth in harmony with the light that shines upon it.

And you who are lost upon the nightseas of your own awareness,

whatever terrors of the deep sleep under your lifeboats

dreaming of bobbing their way to rescue

like prophetic skulls washed up on an insular beach

like green Japanese fishing floats picked like early grapes

from the vines of the nets your dolphins are tangled in,

what is there to fear from your own weather

that isn’t a reflection of the kind of love life

you’re deriving from an affair with oceanic notions

of keeping aviaries of kingfishers to quell the commotion

of the storms that pass through your life roiling

your thought waves with turbulent reflections

on the surface of your awareness rooted in the music

where fumaroles toot on the bottom of the sea

like the stops of a flute playing the dangerous lyrics of life

in different keys, making them up on the fly?

In an interpendent universe whatever your eye falls upon,

stars above, dragons below, versatile enough to reverse

the telescopic spin of your perspective of what’s high

and what’s low, anything you see is the mother of the matrix

even when you turn the light on yourself to discover

there’s no one there, just this creative absence, this

dark abundance that’s goddess enough to fill her bright vacancy

with worlds within worlds that unveil her immediate intimacy

as if she were telling the truth to herself like a secret that didn’t exist.

PATRICK WHITE  

WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

Watching mirrors on a catwalk

but none of them interest me.

Disembodied as a play without a stage

it takes time to know where to stand.

I take my heavy winter boots off

like two starless nights. The smoke

is wiser than the candle, but who cares?

Looking for the pure space, the little white square

the shrink told me she discovered

at the centre of my heart like an albino sunspot

but no one was there. Excruciating solitude.

Times, I swear, even death feels lonely.

Comes from looking at too many stars.

Looking for an intimacy so deep within the abyss

it turns me inside out like the eyelids of an orange

without wedging the full moon apart into segments.

The peers of my high school annual predicted

I was mostly likely to become a mad teacher,

a mad scientist, a mad poet, mad. Four careers

and I’m retroactively mastering the last.

It’s haunted me like the Sibyl of Cumae for lightyears.

I thought if I pushed the envelope

people would receive it as a kind of loveletter.

Peace in your soul you can always

live it like a dream when the craziness

gets out of hand but I was a firestorm

of sidereal insights in a lighthouse

built like an obelisk on lunar quicksand.

Sometimes you’re better off at sea

than landing with high hopes for your lifeboats

on some coasts. Wasn’t sure if mine were among them,

but why take a chance? I warned people away from me.

There were happier islands you could be washed up on.

Strange the life I’ve been living like a quixotic crusade

against all ideas and forms of art that lack compassion,

breaking up continents like loaves of bread

for the ugly ducklings and the mysterious black swans

that move through the water like the reflections

of total eclipses, just to diversify the species of my solitude.

Poetry has made a thematic habit of my discontinuity.

At the top of every totem pole I’ve ever carved

out of the forests of Vancouver Island I was raised in,

there’s a hidden nightbird with its wings folded

like a black dove perched on the axis mundi of my serpent fire.

The songs I sing can’t be rehearsed by a choir.

Spontaneity keeps me from looking like a liar

in the eyes of the stars when they overhear me talking to myself.

Crazy wisdom. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

You’ve got to keep saying yes, yes, yes, to the light,

to the dark, to life, to love, to solitude, grief, despair

and all their attendant transformations if you want to stay sincere.

Visions of life. The twenty seven year old hooker

so strung out on cocaine in the bank robber’s house

where there wasn’t so much as a spoon or a fork or a plate,

she was a black, aniconic madonna of pain,

the paint rag of a thousand fantasies from fairy dust

to snakepits, none of them her own.

The coke white blankness of a bright vacancy

enslaving her dark abundance like shadows at noon.

The crone of her infancy, a withered spring.

I’ve been holding back my tears like an ice-age ever since.

Life can be as cold as an exacto knife as often

as it lets you feel its wisdom ripening like an apple

in the sunset just as the air is beginning to cool off

from labouring so intensely all day at minding flowers and the stars,

by God, the stars are distilled from a thousand lovers’ eyes.

The syrinx selects its own song when nobody’s using it.

And I’d rather fail, throwing my voice like a sparrow

against a windowpane keeping me from the sky

until it breaks and I’m grounded at the roots

of the prima donnas of the cosmos in their ballet slippers

dancing on the wind. Say it all in one big-hearted metaphor

like the roar of a dragon with a compassionate heart,

so that every poem I ever wrote was a fleet of lifeboats

flying the skull and crossbones like a shepherd of wolves

that knew how to howl at the moon like smoke from a distant fire

and I was poet enough to know that madness

is just another form of prayer. Be that. Without compromise.

Rather than disrespect my life and art by taking notes.

If you’re making a gift of a gift don’t call it a sacrifice.

Still within you, I swear, my gun-shy brother,

my reticent sister, despite all your wary attempts

to the contrary, there resides a jewel,

and you can call me a fool if you want,

a star sapphire, let’s say, because that’s my birth stone

and I had one once that was given to me by a lover,

a radiance like white phosphorus starclusters

that burns through everything from children’s skin

to the comets of kelp rinsing their hair in the tide

as they root their eyes in starmud like black ribbons

undone on a gift of life, or streamers on a girl’s first bike.

This jewel cuts through the void like a scalpel of starlight.

It’s an intimacy with your own awareness that leaves

everybody standing at the gate a stranger to themselves.

This is that homespun genius that makes its own clothes

like the moon to cover its nakedness in raiments of light

and takes in everybody under the cloak of its eclipse

like the leather yurt of a dragon giving shelter to birds

that are afraid of the lightning under its fireproof wings.

This is the labour of a lifetime spent on the flash of a firefly.

This is the lantern you’ve carried before you for lightyears

like a nightwatchman into the dark to see if there was

anyone else there who was as scared as you were to find out.

This is the work that taught you to be just as fulfilled

by what you failed at as you were empty

when they handed you a fictitious award.

And you knew immediately what a long way back it was

to the anonymous sixties when you were insignificant enough

to get some real work done and you weren’t famous

for the way you worship everything under the sun.

The uniqueness of your eyes might evaporate

like snowflakes of dry ice with the fragrance

of cornflowers tossed into a grave like the sad, longing

in the afterthoughts of a Neanderthal mother,

but your seeing, not what your looking at,

is as ageless and unperishing in its formlessness as ever.

And though you might have changed the covers

from pulp to hardback sometime in the early Cambrian,

none of your emotions and many yet to come

that have been left unthumbed like the novels of friends,

have grown any older under the carapaces

of your prophetic skulls trying to balance

the lunacy of a spare harvest moon on your head

while you’re crossing an exhausted suspension bridge.

Like I said, I don’t need to make a choir out of my voice

to listen to the sacred syllables whispering

in the autumn aspen trees to know there’s something sacred

in the silence that follows the wind isn’t revealing

like a poem that wasn’t written to be overlooked or not.

I’ve lapped the marrow from the broken koans

in the terrible lairs of the gods, and I’ve sung

the dead up out of the coffins of the sunflowers

knowing they’d look back eventually at their own shadows

but it might prove crucial to the state of their afterlives

that someone who loved them at least gave it a good try.

Magnificent the life within you, isn’t it? The way

its freedom never gets caught in any sudden squall

of golden chains you might want to weigh it down with

like the spiritual bling of maidens of the mist with rainbows

to dazzle the eyes of the blind into believing what they hope for?

Kids and wives, divorces like horrible vacations,

lovers that painted their nails in blood like razorblades,

brute dung heaps who snarled like distempered carnivores

under a heavy snowfall, forgetting no real shepherd of wolves

would be caught dead in sheep’s clothing. Disappointment

turned out to be more of a perennial than a one night stand.

You began to understand why God bewails human ingratitude.

And it was the folly of common sense when you were paranoid

to close your eyes like the granite crypt of your afterlife

against the superstitious shadows of the approaching grave-robbers.

You brought it all with you. Did you really think

you could leave it behind like a dogstar

you tried to ditch in the country to give it

some chance of spiritual survival like a fire in the wild

that could live off the land without it following you

like a return journey for the rest of your forsaken way?

It’s not that wonderful, heart-thawing, mystical acts

of human compassion have stopped happening

like oxygen and fire breaking into tears, it’s just

the turn of the miracles to lose their faith in us

like the hurt feelings of beautifully rejected lovers.

Something about the way love bonds both sides

of an open wound as wide as an expanding universe

like a maternal welder kissing our injuries into stronger scars.

Zen cracks in a teacup mended with gold.

Stop trying to sift through the middens of your past

like an archaeological dig in the starfields

you were trying to build an on ramp to the Road of Ghosts in,

and when you’re woken up in the small hours of the morning

by the dead who’ve got nothing but time on their hands

until dawn, and they ask you what you were dreaming

don’t answer like a seance addressing yourself to their absence.

Sometimes you just have to leave some things unburied

in the Valley of the Kings and Queens and move on

to second-guessing the tumblers like habitable planets

in possible solar systems like ours on the locks

of the stargates of Orion that will know you by the way you knock

not by the junkyard of sacred relics you’ve been hoarding.

If you dump your own redundancy, you’ll travel a lot lighter.

If you don’t forget the hidden jewel within you

has long had a place among the stars, whose eyes

I ask you, even after all these seeing nights and lightyears

of peering through a glass darkly, a candle in a lantern

released like a firefly to find its way home, could shine

any brighter than the waterstars and starmud of yours are now?

PATRICK WHITE