THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

THE RIVER AN OLD WALTZ ON THE DANCE CARD OF THE STARS

The river an old waltz on the dance-card of the stars,

at the navel of time, at the crossroads of the unborn world,

I take the hand of the waterclock that pumps like my heart

and escort it to the centre of the floor and in a strophic wind

of wheeling turns and counterturns, lyrically reverse my spin

like the weathervane of a Sufi trying to annihilate

my sense of direction in the vertiginous bliss

of not knowing where I’m going on the journey ahead

and as ever, still as clueless, whether it really matters

if I arrive or not, on time or late, mad or enlightened,

weeping like an atmosphere that’s soaked up

too much from the occult arcana of the air

or laughing like a trickster crow shaman as innocent

as a black sense of humour blowing the candles out

like shallow insights into enlightenment to see better in the dark

what truly shines in my third eye, and what does not.

Should I mend the cracks around my eyes with gold

like a broken Japanese teacup, or are those the roots of the lotus

that anchor me like axons of black matter to the lower depths

of my starmud like a radiant alloy of Orion and dirt,

all my neurons wired in series like galactic sea stars?

I don’t take notes on the fires of life in short-hand

and I’m alert to the false dawns of inspiration

that urge me to draft my first impressions of night

in flourishing scripts of cursive smoke uncoiling

like the vapour trails of dragons in the quantum sunsets

of a mystic singularity behind the veils of a black hole.

If it isn’t written in the scarlet vowels of my blood,

koans of unbreakable consonants, seventeen sacred syllables

of the total eclipse of a haiku in nirvana, it’s

only an experiment in the loss of identity of an old science,

not an experience of the crazy wisdom of the new

realizing the shape of the universe is the shape of the mind

that observes it, and knows like an intimate of emptiness

it’s inconceivably alive and intelligent as space.

And I celebrate it now like an ageing man

looks at his hands and immediately understands

why the last flowers of autumn are always the most beautiful.

I have sown like a star what others will harvest

of my light after me like the eyes of a man who spent

a long time dreaming in the watersheds and wine cellars

of the art of learning how to break into song

like a graverobber into the heartwood of his youth,

how to carve guitars out of coffins without cutting

your own throat like tightly bound vocal cords

badly attuned to your jugular vein like the low E string

of a Tibetan mantra with nothing but an empty begging bowl

for a microphone. And the forked tongue of a lightning bolt

witching for serpent fire in the mouth of a dragon sage

that triggers the moon into releasing the mercy of rain

on the scorched earth path of a volcanic grailquest

that might give the lost something to look forward to

when they’re drowning like fish in the sea

that gave birth to them like the sun in Pisces

at the vernal equinox where the celestial equator

and the ecliptic intersect like rippling bracelets of rain

elaborating into mandalic interference patterns

where the protocols of chaos wear the appropriate life masks

like dark poems and light on both sides of the moon

to commemorate the occasion of a rising constellation

in a metaphoric rapture of collaborative illumination.

Homage to the dark mothers of the words for water and light

it took a lifetime of silence for the daughters of the muse

to learn to say as if a poet’s life depended upon it.

Homage to the thieves of fire that set the windows ablaze

from the inside out in ways they’ve never been lit up before

when they least expected it from the least expected quarter.

The sun at midnight. The moon at midday. And the shadows

remarkably supple given the age of the dance they’re performing

like a swan song of black feathers with the wingspan of a ghost.

Homage to the mystery that led me like an exile

out of my own doorway to disappear like a bird in the night,

brief, brief, brief, and gone into the abysmal dark

of an afterlife I followed like a starmap of lightyears

into the open until my eyes adapted to the black mirrors

of my deepening awareness of how the heart

shone brighter than the mind and the entrance not the exit

was the harder way home for a human who was willing to risk it

for a valley full of fireflies and savagely clear insights

that echo a mountain that shrieks in its sleep

like a nighthawk to the sharp-eyed stars. Asleep

or awake, alive or dead, the differences pale

like wandering scholars in the moonrise on the river.

Prophetic skulls lose track of the time like amino acids

in the alphabet blocks of ancient asteroids

trying to keep it together in the Oort belt

after they were messed up like ricochets by Neptune

on tour in the leper colonies of shepherd moons.

The seven inaccessible dimensions of the future

fray like a spinal cord into an infinite number of lifelines

at the deltas and sacred meeting places where

the mindstream returns to itself, water to water,

not ashes and dust. And the silver sword

the moon lays down in tribute to the lake

is bent like the back of an old man so no one after him

could ever wield it like the hands of a clock in battle again.

Homage to the stranger that stands at the gate

to another world without disavowing his homelessness.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DUST ON THE WINDOW NO LESS PART

THE DUST ON THE WINDOW NO LESS PART

The dust on the window no less part of the magnificence

of our awareness than the stars that will come

later tonight. Look past the obvious radiance

even if it means you go into eclipse for awhile

and two full moons weigh heavily on your eyes,

and the clouds press down oppressively like a pillow

over your face. When you wake up you’ll be amazed

by how extraordinary and strange the ordinary is

in everything. Wake up like a firefly if you’re

world weary of being a galaxy. Reverse your spin.

Get entangled in an affair with your quantum self

without worrying whether it’s a delusion or not.

I’m thinking about the kind of knowledge

that puts the petals back on the rose instead of

severing its eyelids to see what it was dreaming underneath.

Are there not as many thresholds ahead of us

as there are rungs behind? The whole

is not the context of the part anymore

than a wave of emotion, breaking on shore or not

is any less oceanic than the vastness of the heart.

The secrets aren’t hiding under the stones

of shepherd moons like life under the carapace

of a turtle on its way to war quixotically.

One beginning runs toward another as if

it were the end of things. The waterclock

never comes to a full stop like a fossil of water.

Time doesn’t go extinct just because you lose sight

of what hour it is. Take the patina off the eyes

of your peacocks, and you’ll see things

as they are clear enough. Bored with your life

change your amniotic fluids once and a while

and look at the world as if you were born of methane.

Teach your houseflies to roar like dragons,

like singularities in a black hole creatively deploying

its emptiness like a plenum-void to teach

the sea stars how to bloom like galaxies in fire.

Is beauty the same in an old mirror as it is

in a young? You can spend the rest of your life

trying to reknow what you knew but that’s

a ghost’s way of going about living,

a candelabra of smoke and mirrors

held up to the sky like a leafless tree

looking for the lost constellations of last spring.

More dark matter in the voice of the watershed

than there are rivers in the trickling

of a mountain stream from the wellsprings

of the muses I once drank from but from

the first whisper of light in my eyes,

until now in this monkish scriptorium

of ashes and wax where I labour elaborately

to match kells like treble clefs to the starmaps

of the names I’ve given to total eclipses

like an elder among the tribes of the Ojibway

who sustains the history of his people

like smoke on a distant hillside in the autumn,

it’s been the terrible solitude in the song

of the nightbird that’s been the longest standing

continuity of my life, the existential music

of trying too hard not to live in vain

by approaching the creative agony of my starmud

with as much light, oxygen and rain as I am capable of.

In this anonymous darkness I am the skeletal frame,

the scaffolding of the light, the rose arbour

of galaxies that arc like blood and burning doorways,

the trellis of starclusters on the vines of wild clematis,

the unknown boughs that blossom like rafters

in the houses of life that shine like zodiacs

over the entrance to the dark passageways

of mystic black holes in the eyeless hoods

that web the veils of widowed constellations

like dangerous executioners that kill you back into life

as many compassionate times as it takes for you to realize

you don’t need a starchart to plot the flightpath

of your inimitable singularity when a single wavelength

of your indelible shining is enough to fill up

the whole of the nightsky in the lantern of space

you’re holding out like an empty hourglass of time

in front of you as your heart pumps new watersheds

like a housewell into the empty cup of your prophetic skull.

Bright vacancy, dark abundance, the coat of arms

on your shield, stop tilting at dragons of your own making

and even the emptiness is full of a strange longing

to reveal itself like a hidden secret that wanted to be known

like a starling in a birch grove when you’re out

late at night on your own, shadowing your mindstream

like a river you been following down the mountain so long

like the Rideau canal, you’ve dug yourself

the longest grave in the world like a creekbed

to sustain the flashfloods of Orion rising over

the black walnut trees like the flow of life

through the radiant valleys of the astonished dead.

Like love, like the universe ageing into its renewal,

trying to catch one last fleeting glimpse of what

it once was in an eyeful of parabolic mirrors

orbiting like the hanging gardens of Babylon,

the morphology of knowledge is the shapeshifting

of your own mind as it flows from one sky into the next.

Yesterday’s earthbound scales that crawled on their bellies

swallowing the eggs of the mourning doves

they were about to become, are the clairvoyant totems

of tomorrow’s dragons pursuing their craving for the moon.

If you want to look into the future, look at what

you long for now. Your desire’s giving birth to you

like a waterclock in the cosmic womb of a galactic fire eater.

I can hear your eyes from here calling out in distress

as they drown in the mirror like a flashback of yesterday.

O lady, you’re not the black dwarf of your former shining,

the Queen of Heaven in a coven of cowled candles

conferring the last rites on a black mass.

In the stillness of what you’re becoming can’t you hear

the perennial beauty of the crows reciting the haikus

of inspired dinosaurs singing like poetic eclipses

in the dead of winter celebrating their lyrical extinctions

as if their eyes were burning like young diamonds

in the dark lanterns of their ancestral shrines of coal?

PATRICK WHITE

A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

A TRYST WITH THE MUSE AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

A tryst with the muse at an ungodly hour.

The past creatively adapts to the moment

as readily as the future does. The bronze age flames

of your auburn hair, withered petals

of a fire flowering in the rain

that may be down, but not out.

The wellspring of a muse is always

the third eye of a woman overwhelmed by tears

at the approach of spring. Last night,

pink-lilac Mercury on the short leash of the sun,

Venus as bright as I’ve ever seen it

and nearby Jupiter dim by comparison,

Sirius southeast of Orion, then Mars,

and shortly before dawn, Saturn.

I stood for an hour at the backdoor

of the all night laundromat, out

in the parking lot behind the Chinese Restaurant,

while the streetlamps held their heads down in reverence

as if they’d all taken vows or something,

and I, cigarette in mouth, looked up

like a chimney spark in awe of a radiance

so unattainably beautiful all I aspired to

seemed merely the ashes of firefly by comparison,

a runt of light in the vastness of the fire-womb

of a busy, busy sky, while

I waited for my laundry to dry.

And the last time I can remember feeling like that

was combing my hands through your hair

as if were laving my roots in your bloodstream,

without getting my fingers burnt

walking on fire all the way

to the gibbous moon of your earlobe.

And here you are at the door again

like the red maple key

of a rainy night loveletter

that’s let itself in soaking wet

to inspire me to write it in tears.

To shed my eyes like the starmaps

of last night’s luminaries, to tear down

the old spider webs of the defunct dreamcatchers

hanging like constellations

at the broken windowpanes

of the abandoned houses of the zodiac.

I was on my way to the homeless oblivion of my bed

as if I’d found a heating grate to sleep on

to keep me warm for another night.

As I once saw a man in old Montreal

after a poetry reading at Concordia,

curl up on his cardboard flying carpet

as if he’d run out of places to go,

friends, family, lovers he used to know

and pulling the shadows up over him

let himself by swept up on the concrete shore

like a dead starfish on his own private island.

Every time you step across my event horizon

you break another taboo of mine, your voice

slips into mine like a watersnake into a moonlit lake

and you become the connubial chanteuse

of an unspeakable solitude with something to say.

It’s always been this way with you.

A fire-bird flies into the room at night

like inspiration through an open window

just as I’m about to put out the lights

because the music’s over and the dancing girls

of the candleflames have completely disrobed

and stand naked in gowns of wax at their feet.

And just as I’m about to leave my seat in a dark theatre,

you come in the guise of an usher

to show me the way out of curtain call

like the moonrise of a crocus in the snow.

And I can hear you from way off

like a ghost being summoned

by an empty lifeboat in the fog.

Like a fragrance of life returning

to the apparition of my spirit

when you kiss me and it feels

like someone doing cpr on my deathmask

to prove I can’t hide from you anywhere

even here, where I’ve said

who I thought I was in my solitude

and buried my name in the night

like a silver star-shaped locket

deep in the palm of your fathomless hand

for you to remember me by before I drown

again in again in the eyes of Isis

like a sailor who sees a different life

flash before him every time

he goes down for the night

and can’t get Venus off his mind.

Because even in the empty parking space

of my deathbed in a dark room

lying there like a crystal skull

that’s gone prophetically blind

in the shroud of the black sail

I’ve taken down like the tent

of a wild iris in mourning down by the river,

even when my eyes fail

before the unattainable,

I can feel through my fingertips

you coming on to me like a stripper in braille.

PATRICK WHITE

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

My lonely island music,

already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,

skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away

weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky

and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,

how could the moon not leap from my tongue

in praise of the world that shines through you

bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly

alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture

poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say

beyond the saying

what can’t be said. How unbearably sad

in this defeated hour that so few know the truth

that walks ahead of them like their own footprints

returning to the door they left by, already lost,

their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,

get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind

take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,

and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.

Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses

for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain

on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence

in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,

you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.

Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see

the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted

like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?

If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold

and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet

on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,

you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,

your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand

of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.

A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand

deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,

taste this dream for yourself and look once

into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking

and acknowledge in a crown of water

you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.

Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space

wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky

already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,

you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life

expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,

blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.

Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail

and send yourself in a straitjacket to school

when you already know by heart

the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where

did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives

are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,

fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions

that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims

on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,

gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room

to see whose face it is

then blow yourself out like an orchard

before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.

Put the world to your lips like a finger

in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see

the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well

to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,

the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,

the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so

and now you are so

and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden

right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend

when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people

never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,

trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names

when they’re called to come out and play

with a universe that begins in every moment,

a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,

domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,

peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise

with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup

for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.

The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,

nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face

in this mirror of echoes,

the one you wore before the birth of silence?

I shall come looking for you like the wind

and I shall find you among trees and flowers

and among the grasses of the fields

and in the living light that breathes over the harvest

and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds

and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun

with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,

everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood

the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,

slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,

to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,

the whole history of the world

in the way I love you by letting go; in the way

when you are closest, your heart, the thunder

of subtle intimacies in a lost well,

I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,

happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,

my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.

Do you understand? Not different, not the same,

we are rain on a window, faces beyond

the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.

In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word

ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,

this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

DON’T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

Don’t try to force me to my knees to pay homage to the world

you’re living in, and I won’t ask you to verify my last mirage.

Let’s just pass through each other imperturbably intense

as two cosmic events encountering in this immensity

like galaxies in a ghost dance when the night

is an abysmal radiance, and I’m mystically intrigued

with the turn of your earlobes, oysters making pearls,

where silver ripples of rain are hooped like the orbits

of shepherd moons on a concentric abacus of prayer-beads,

and though I’m not trying to account for anything,

what metaphors they might have in common

with the golden ratio of sunflowers and seashells.

I want to bathe naked with you in the sacred pools

of a silence that isn’t polluted by the history of our sorrows.

Even if they prove as waterproof as a twelve volume tattoo

they’ll wash off in the stars if you scrub hard enough.

I want to look at you with innocent eyes again and again

directly into the eyes of a human insight into creation

and the occult labour of enlightened destruction

that follows in the wake of winged heels that are blown

like blossoms off the green boughs of their night songs

so that an apprentice of your heart like I am

might sweeten like an art in the afterglow

of the many journeys, many sunsets that have flavoured it

like an old brandy remembering what it was like to be a young wine.

I don’t want to broker your light through the middle man

of a lens, a mirror, a window that treated its stars like dirt.

I don’t want to analyze why you’re sitting on the futon

crying, and feel the supple silence after I ask you why

rigidify into a maze of lab rats looking for antidotes

to a snakepit of radioactive wavelengths that can’t be trained

to bite somebody else if that’s what’s on their mind.

Why spring? Why autumn? Why passions you pick up

like a fever from the stars on a hot summer night

when you fall in love with the cool poultice of the moon

lying like a waterlily pad on your forehead, trying

to draw the infection out like enlightenment from

the iris of your third eye rooting in the spiritual looking glass

of a crystal skull suffering from the chromatic aberration of its rainbows?

I promise not to shatter your delusions, if you

never stop setting my doorways on fire everytime

you walk into the room like a total eclipse of the senses

in black underwear with a smile like a starmap on your face.

I want to walk down a long, country road at night

with you in a state of grace that intensifies

the hermit thrush’s longing for the unattainable.

I want to feel your golden needle penetrate my voodoo heart

like a love song that never mended, a wound

even the latest surgeons don’t know how to stitch up.

If I praise your body like the resurgence of a sea on the moon,

don’t misconstrue that as an insult to the fire

on the altar of your mind. If I touch you and light comes

on the first day of creation to the fingertips of the blind,

how is that different from nocturnal wildflowers

opening like eyes in the starfields of the mystically inclined?

If I seek illumination from the dark mysteries of the blood

like a black rose in a cult of thorns, and my intensities

engender life forms on planets that seem uninhabitably mad to you,

and you’re not convinced there are evergreens that germinate

and bloom like a Zen garden of pine-cones in fire,

I won’t challenge the evanescent vapour of a dream

that’s haunting you like the fragrance of a song for the dead

you can’t get out of your clothes, or those boas of moonlight

that feather the bays and contours of your lonely island shores

as if someone who had drowned in the emotional undertow

of your breakers, trying to get to you, were about to be

washed up like the master of some lost purpose

under the eyelid of the next wave, and you, just out of reach.

I will not ask you what that was. Enigma favours you.

More than one petal on a sundial and time flowers

in all directions at once. I will not disturb the dead

that are buried in you. I have my own, and sharing

isn’t disclosure. Tell your ghosts they’re as free

to answer the seance of your longing as they ever were.

I don’t expect you to translate the poetry of your silence

into the same language you speak to me in, nor the river

to uproot the tributaries of the lifelines that sustain it.

In every affair, one is the grammar, and the other,

the inspiration of the holy book they collaborate on

like the biography of water’s fathomless afterlives.

And none of the rules, like your tears, indelible

should the wind or the rain decide to wash them out

like a flashflood of stars in a spring run-off

that sweeps your heart downstream like a message

in a bottle for someone else should you decide

you need a stable bridge not an unmoored lifeboat like me.

If you’re attached to the danger of living as I am

when I’m with you, who’s in need of saving

when you can drown a whole ocean of sacred syllables

in a few simple tears or a dragon of crazy wisdom

with fireflies in its eyes and a moonrise in its heart

in a single star in the rear view mirror of last night’s dream

where objects, like lovers, are always closer than they seem.

PATRICK WHITE  

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

Someone took the grey day like a dirty rag

and wrung all the sunshine out of it.

Ten thousand poems bloom like flowers,

beam a little light back to the stars

and go back to seed before I’ve put

a word to the page. Infinite worlds,

infinite possibilities and all of them

inter-reflectively true. All the cosmic eggs

hatch out like a choir in a nesting church.

Pick a nightbird and give it your voice.

See if you can sing the frequencies of the stars.

The mystery doesn’t exist until

you start exploring it. Not to prove

how wonderful you are. Take my word for it

we’re all uniquely magnificent each

in our unexploited way. Liars err

on the charming side of the truth.

If you ever had an emotion as big as that

you wouldn’t be able to lift it.

Just because you sit down at your desk

like a sacred clown with a bag of bruised balloons

doesn’t mean your feelings are

universally inflatable. Tell a big enough truth

often enough, and everyone will deny it.

Look. They’re laying salt and sand

down on the icy roads like a Kuiper belt

of asteroids. Whatever you can’t

relate to here you befriend in other worlds.

Long before Heisenberg, lovers discovered

the truth of uncertainty principles,

spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement.

Cookie-cutters of black matter

shaping templates of dough sprinkled

with galaxies for the abyss next door.

I’m plotting a starmap of my neurons

and everyone of the poems I write

is a myth of origin in someone’s eyes.

The wind doesn’t fuss over the seeds it sows.

I’ve seen wild columbine like a tender carillon

of fragile bells suggested by the rain

growing out of the skulls of Cambrian rocks.

Even the lifers at Millhaven have poetry in them.

Deepen the darkness of your own nightfall

if you want to see the same stars they do.

You want to radiate like the stargates of Orion,

shine with the brilliance of Sirius in solitude,

show up like a bad penny in an abyss

of the first magnitude and see if the moon

comes up heads or tails, bearing in mind

the donkey at the end is in the lead

when the electron reverses its spin

without an intervening medium or even

a reasonable alibi. -290 on the dark side

of Mercury that close to the sun, what’s

the point of deciphering the scars of crescent moons

on icy membranes laid out like rinks in hyperspace

when you could be out there with the rest of the quarks

figure-skating for yourself like the language of poets

who don’t know what they’re dying for,

but let the heart make a generous guess.

Here’s one. Elaborate as sophisticated a universe

as you want out of your own simplicity

and where it stops is your seabed for the night

and write of all the myriad forms of life

that thrive in your dreams, agonistically

dependent upon one another and exhilarated

by the rush of a creative avalanche see

if you can make the same indelible impression

with sacred syllables of your own upon life

as the Burgess Shale without your name on the cover.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

Putting a little finesse in my solitude

I befriended a river as the intimate familiar

of my mindstream flowing under three bridges

of my vertebrae where I can stop where I’m going

once and awhile and look down, just look down,

look down a long time into the rippling

reflection of the sky’s third eye looking up at me

as if we shared the same tears in common.

The swallows nest in heritage stone along the canal.

And the moon, the willows, the lime-green water tower

trying to look colossally spaced out among the trees

plunge their images into consciousness like a telescope

without an inverting mirror to reorient them.

As above so below. Twenty stars at the most

due to light pollution, I walk past a Brink’s truck

emptying the vaults of the bank, looking

suspiciously unsuspicious as I step into a crossfire

of overenthusiastic hellos from the flaps unbottoned

on their guns trying to pass for one of the locals.

Back door out of town, upstream half a mile

where things aren’t quite as dangerously trivial

and the stars aren’t cosmetically occluded by make-up

and I can hear the river walking on its own waters

like moonlight writing wave functions in chalk on a blackboard.

Everything feels closer to eternity out here

in plain view of what there is to cherish, perishing

as I remember a woman I’ve remembered for so long

without ever stepping into the same recollection twice

like the eye of a jeweller swimming through star sapphires

as if the patina of time hadn’t found a way

to dull their shining yet, cling to their translucency

like a snakepit of oil, breathe on their clarity

like a milky cataract mistaking a window for a crystal skull.

Here, I can say she was beautiful and it doesn’t

echo across the waters like the night call

of a distant bird always saying farewell to the music

of some hidden tree the wind’s been playing

like a flute for the last twenty years. It’s crucial

to give your past a future to look forward to

so it can go on growing in your absence

like the painting of a garden you planted and abandoned

like a constellation of crocuses breaking through the snow

to get the rest of the way there according

to their own starmaps. Follow their own shining

wherever it leads, as mine keeps leading me here

where I can tend the beauty of the wound she left me

without listening to all kinds of scar tissue

offer me well-meaning worldly unasked-for advice

like scalpels of the moon that wanted to cut

my heart out of my chest like an ice-age arrowhead

congealed out of my blood like flint-knapped rose petals

long before the rock doves discovered

the invention of the bow like the shadow

of the wingspan of a ferruginous hawk.

Even if you were to uproot all your sorrows

like weeds from your solitude, what have you done

but exhume the lightning from your own grave,

defang the crescents of the moon from the serpent fire

at the base of your spine? Shame your passion

with a fire escape, burn out like the root-fire

of a candle into an echo of smoke that smudges

the bats from the house of the zodiac you were born under

like sage and smouldering cedar boughs that never

break into flame? No. She was beautiful

and as much as it hurts to remember that

clear-eyed as winter water worthy of the moon,

because she’s gone like the fork of a river

that’s moved on like the other half of a wishbone

from this our secret meeting place,

and the sadness and the beauty of the fireflies

that are missing among the paradigms of the stars

that once echoed their earth bound radiance

sometimes leave an abyss in my heart

a thousand deaths wide I’ll never be able to fill,

still, like the ghost of a phoenix unfeathered

like the staghorn sumac in the fall by the wind,

though space burn as hard and cold as glass,

I will spread my wings and rise like a fire

equal to the moment in passing that shines

through my tears like the arcing flightpath

of an arrow of light dipped in the waters of life.

I will celebrate my wounds as a measure

of how deeply I was seized

by what was irrevocable about her eyes.

PATRICK WHITE