THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

This far from shore, the night an oceanic emotion

I’m bobbing in like an empty lifeboat,

a message in a bottle among the stars

as if I had nothing to lose, nothing to rescue,

no voice on the hill calling out in the fog

to see if I’m still here or salvage by now.

I’m a runner of the woods, a courier de bois,

portaging across the moon to shoot

the black water rapids on the far side

of a wilderness with ten thousand shattered mirrors

as if every lake wanted a little piece

of the big reflection as a keepsake

of what they see in themselves when they look.

I light a fire like the memory of daylilies

that used to bloom beside my mindstream

and I’m humanly at peace with the immense

impersonal intimacy of the solitude it inspires.

Everyone’s journey might be no more

than the history of a wavelength woven

into the fabric of a vast intelligence

pervasive as space in which everything is created

like the flash of a firefly out of the void

to ride around on the flying carpets

of the sky or the water like a fish or a bird

or the nucleating bubble of a membrane in hyperspace

as if the multiverse were a playful idea

that got out of hand in the elaboration of it,

an inspiration that hasn’t burnt itself out

like a fire in the starfields, at least here,

for billions of years, the godhead run amok

with appearing in its own imagination

like a stranger in the doorway of its homelessness.

It would be unkind to say nothing about it

except to say there’s nothing you can say about it,

but compassion demands you offer the gaping silence

of a wounded mouth a little lunar scar tissue

now and again, and not deny the nightbird

the lyrics to its longing, and even

in this desert of stars when it get’s cold at night

let your mirages dress up in your hand me down delusions

if it keeps them warm for awhile. Truth

can walk naked if it wants, but love’s all

silk in the summer and flannel in the winter,

and come the spring, a ball gown of apple orchards.

In autumn it trails a robe of smoke

like an era of pageantry magnificently adorned

like a dead muse on a pyre of bird bone flutes

and unpublished manuscripts brought to you

by the fruition of the letter apple, if the Druids are right.

Mellow sorrows ripen into expansive sunsets somehow

as you age, and the barriers of the self-contained

come down of their own accord like cedar rail fences

wearing lichens like tattoos of the moon not to forget

the redwing blackbirds that sang from its green boughs

and how it all changes if you take your mind off it

even for a moment to dream of writing a loveletter

to the eyes of some beauty who never promised to understand.

The arms of the old moon may be empty,

and the new too late for the future of yesterday,

but to plague yourself with disappointment

is an eclipse of black mould eating away at the rafters

that uphold this house of life like the rootless tree

of a human doing their time standing up as

they look time straight in its one good eye

and say to themselves under their breath, bring it on.

I am a peer of eternity as much as you are

in your labyrinth of mirrors, as I am by my fire

looking up at the stars shining down on me

with tears in their eyes for the way I feel their light

ripening in me like a brandy of the spirit

I warm in my hands and breathe deeply in,

the bouquet of a heart that’s been tempered

like an alloy of joy and grief. The hour keeps an edge

on my blood as soft as rain that can’t be blunted

by the pain of knowing one day, soon, I’ll

fall upon it like the shadow of a sundial,

the petal of a flower that denied it loved me,

the paling of a gate I lived my way through

like the flightfeather of a waterbird in passing.

No stranger to the garden, no foe of the mystery,

my prophetic skull will go on singing

long after the snakes and ladders of my flesh and bones,

my arteries, my chromosomes, have taken down

the scaffolding I climbed up on like a boy

the highest tree in an abandoned orchard

to paint a myth of creation in the hues

of my heart and voice, listening to the wind

in the apple bloom whispering evanescently

as I prick out the cartoons of my fresco

like new constellations of an enlightened imagination

on the roof of a private chapel of a tent

I cart around with me like the skin of a serpent

I once shed, but will leave like a blossom

on a green bough awhile to remind the leaves

and the nightbirds what the wind meant about love and life.

I’ll spread my wings like a starmap to everywhere

and nowhere in particular like a river

that flows through a small town at night

and I’ll let the fire that burns within me decide

as the ghosts of many springs past gather around me

and the winter stars blaze in the still clarity

of their savage distances like messages

from an eleventh dimension that don’t

ever seem get to me on time, whether this life

I let live me out of respect for its crazy wisdom

were a dream, a poem, or the picture-music

of an unfinished lyric about a firefly of insight

that caught its breath, as I did, like a thief of fire

on the run, pausing a moment in a midnight garden

I didn’t feel wholly estranged from like an exile

seeking shelter in the shadows of its trees

somewhere between a seance and an exorcism.

PATRICK WHITE

AFTER YOU LEAVE

After you leave, a bell

deeper than the sea strikes once

and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire

and tries to evaporate; gusts

of the most graceful emotions,

eloquent clarities of the heart,

shake me free of myself

like leaves and petals and pages,

the tender radiance of nightskies,

and I am astounded in the openness

of an embrace without limits,

of boundary stones being hurled delinquently

through the windows of ice-age mirrors

that have wept so long and slowly

over the silver river locked in chains.

How easy in this solitude

to declare myself to you,

to undo the delusions and the fears,

to flip through the chapters of the onion,

take off this last layer of skin,

and shed the final masks of snow

in the warming recollection of your presence,

in the way your beauty exhilarates me

then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,

and my heart sets out by itself toward you

scintillant everywhere, gold

flowing out of the dark ore,

as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,

the legend of a secret constellation

behind the vital starmap of fireflies

that makes me want to shine for you so intensely

in this dark doorway of pain and passage

that the light hurts with the poignancy

of its longing to fall like a key

from the spirit’s lost and found

upon your planet;

to open gardens that have no word

for fence or gate,

to bridge your streams

with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.

My heart sets out for you all by itself

like a lantern on a road

that unspools with arrival at every step.

After you leave I am possessed of the will

of an anvil and a forge

to become a chalice for you, a sword,

an axle and a plough, a strong bolt

against the miscreance of battering circumstance.

I raise your reflection to my lips

like a cup from a watershed of wine

and in every single sip

swallow an ocean like a potion

from the tears of the moon,

knowing how dangerous it could be

to miss you, to become

an addict of your light at the first taste,

to wait for eras for the return of the dawn

that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.

No more than the sun from the vine,

the moon from the dreaming apple

the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,

could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines

undo the vision you have already mingled

like a night rose of fragrant fire in my blood,

not to drift again alone

like an empty boat

ferrying the corpse of the ferryman

through the fog to a cold shore

now that I’ve been washed up on your island

like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,

a frenzy of light and love in your tides,

a drowned lighthouse

coming to life in every wave of you.

I want to be brave enough

to risk the possibility

of listening to the night together

with the unveiled bride of the moon

in the bay of my arms,

I want to be the sail, the flame,

the gull of her breathing,

the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.

I want to swim like a mirror

the sea holds up to her face

to do her hair up with starfish

she tresses like galaxies in the depths;

I want to devote myself like a candle

to the shrine of the September moonrise

that saturates the far sky over the sad hills

like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass

when she smiles

like the wind over the abundant harvest

of the ashes I’ve stored against

this famine of passion

in the silo of the blue guitar.

I want to place my life

like a feather of fire

on the mysterious altar of lunar rain

that splashes like stars everywhere

in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,

and turn these deserts of space and time

back into grasslands

crossing her thresholds

in whispers of pollen and dust.

She walks into the room

to help me paint the bedroom walls,

as I try to cover the graffiti

of my vandalized soul with white,

and a dove in a cage

panics at her approach

before an open door.

She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush

like the moon over a lake,

behind a cloud,

through the branches of a leafless willow

and everything in the room

is enhanced by her shining

and I’m rolling new skies over

the scars and fossils of old stars,

worn faces with plaster patches

to rewrite the shepherding lies,

the myths and symbols of my solitude

in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.

Now it’s four a.m

and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room

like the pendulum of a heavy clock

that aspires to be a bell,

threshing words like wild rice

under an eyelid of peacock blue

to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,

the small boat of her hands,

with the eyes of a precious gathering.

And the tender snow falls quietly outside

on the crow limbs of the winter trees

like flesh returning to the bones of the dead

in a silent resurrection

more unsayable than a veil of white

that puts its finger to its lips

like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood

to hear what the hidden nightbird

under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE

O, YES, THE STILLNESS COMES ALL IN ONE WAVE, ONE CARESS

O, YES, THE STILLNESS COMES ALL IN ONE WAVE, ONE CARESS

O, yes, the stillness comes all in one wave, one caress,

like a tide, the salve of a cool kiss of the moon

on the scorched eyelid of a black rose that burned

like a reincarnation of fire, the dark enlightenment

the stars reach for beyond the eyes at the end

of their fingertips. The unattainability that lovers

demand of the night when they blow the candles out.

A warm gust of peace on the nape of my neck

at the base of my skull, the brain stem of the daffodil

not uprooted from the bulb of its head

by the sudden moonset of a guillotine with blood on it,

but washed in a warm rain that makes it glow

like a tungsten streetlamp in the aura of a ripe apricot

in a real garden it never expected to wake up in.

There’s grace in the silence of the garrulous seance.

The ore of my labours have brought forth

a nugget of gold of inestimable age and value

among the asteroids I’ve been mining with my third eye,

strange translucencies that tremble like fluid jewels

when the nightwind is playing the lake like a harpsichord

and the fireflies are trying to read their starmaps like sheet music.

As if the sadness and the fear, the evolution of indifference,

the intermittent sobbing in the muffled asylum,

the terror of a child’s first night in hospital,

or a long term prisoner’s first night out alone on the street,

were absolved of their emotions like turbulent rivers

easing into a halcyon sea that whispers with uncanny assurance

it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, just a bad dream that kept you awake.

Almost a voice I recognize that’s been

following my echo for light years like one attentive star

I’ve caught sight of now and again on long night walks

where the eyes of wary animals glint in the dark

like a nocturnal substitute for flowers along the roadside.

One among many who shine more brilliantly but are

merely clever compared to this sibyl of compassion that turns

their furious flames down low on the night wards of the heart

and gentles the wind that plays too hard on the broad-leaved

basswood guitars of the trees troubled by the lyrics

of the cosmic dissonance that can’t hear what the music’s

been saying before the beginning of the universe

about suffering, about love, about the soul of matter

that’s been raising the dead out of the ashes

of the urns of light like lanterns full of fireflies and stars

for 13.7 billion years now as the crow flies,

prophetic skulls aroused by the longing of the nightbirds

to add more beauty to the truth of their words,

to sing in the quantum notes of an eleven piece string theory

like a band on the corner of anywhere and the universe

banging on membranes like a pulse in the name

of a good cause, bubbles nucleating the wavelengths

of their original rapture to expand a little riff of intimate bliss

into a universal joy as pervasive as the time and space

life’s jamming in like an electric violin with a blues harp,

like an emission spectrum in the starcluster of the Pleiades,

like a moment of peace blooming along the shores

of a winter mindstream like a galactic waterlily

of oceanic awareness blooming in a crystal skull

like life in the Saturnine waters of Enceladus

inconceivably thriving in a greenhouse of habitable ice.

PATRICK WHITE  

A NICK OF THE MOON

A NICK OF THE MOON

A nick of the moon. Thin smile of circumstance

and the paint rags of the few, modest dreams

I had left, are bleeding out again. Alizarin crimson

leaking like lipstick out of a slashed mirror as my blood

congeals glacially and gives my heart freezer-burn.

Crazy alert. Three alarm anxieties. Loser brigade.

Should I drown like a new moon in the calendar

of my waterclock mindstream going through

all these phases or rush to my rescue again and again

and again, the lifeboat of a waterbird with oars for wings?

I’ve been exhausted by mundane terrors.

The man gets scared. And he sings in the face of despair.

He waits for the night to heal. An injured wolf

in the bone-box of his lair. And the stars like Arcturus

for months above the dark roofs of the glaring town

always the charm of a long, hard-won childhood

lightyears away from this creosote of a life

that gets left like the slag of a dragon that’s gone

up in smoke like a short-cut through a chimney

all over the inside of the dead furnace of my heart

where I’m still trying to keep a few fireflies alive.

Poetry, my sanctuary, my asylum, my chrysalis,

my fortune-cookie of oceanic consciousness in a seashell,

my Braille koan laid out like a starmap for my eyes only,

my spinal connection to the blue guitar of my imagination

in an ensuing phylum of Chordates, black box of my soul,

anti-grail of my worldly aspirations, look

how I’ve worn your lip down sipping from your elixirs

like a devotee walking up the sacred stairs on his knees

he’s blunted like a pestle and a mortar to throw

his crutches onto a pyre of fossilized wing bones.

My curse. My blessing. Inkwell, thorn, heart, pen.

Could be a bad choice of metaphors or a pillowcase

full of flightfeathers I wear like a war bonnet in my dreams

when I’m ghost dancing off the reservation.

Cowboy Zen art martyr from the lunatic fringe,

I’ll make it cosmically through the Leonids somehow,

if not by will, by a spiritual reflex of my imagination.

I’ll walk barefoot over the ashes of my root fires

like a rusty cedar down to the bedside manner of the lake.

I’ll watch Jupiter bobbing like a lure in the narrow field of view

of an atmospherically unstable telescope waiting for a bite

and when the swim bladders of the northern pike

mythically inflate like nuclear submarines surfacing

off the Lomonosov Ridge. I’ll carve a barbed spear point

out of the tusk of the moon and reign sovereign

over the ice like a dispossessed Inuit hovering over a bubble.

In an oblivion of heroic numbness, I’ll wear my laurels

like razorwire proudly to the stake of my heretical desire

to let the nightbirds return to the gentler nests of last year

in the heartwood of a rootless tree, undisturbed

by the unconfessed holy books of the leaves

that burned in their absence like the sky burial

of a snake in autumn that won its wings, at last, from the flames.

I’ll climb the burning ladders of my own lunar vertebrae

like a dolmen of moonrocks that stood its ground

in a firestorm of solar flares in the Sea of Tranquillity.

Even if my tears blister into glass, I’ll water

this desert of stars like a dragon tending a garden

until it blooms like an ocean of broken chandeliers.

PATRICK WHITE

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