THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

The sun puts my eyes out like a star in too much light.

I wait for the night to return my seeing to a vision

of things unseen, the unnarrated themes of life and love

that move like migrant birds and sounding whales

behind the symbolic lifemasks of the moon, none of them mine.

Mystery within a mystery, my voice is not a camera

at a seance. I listen to what hasn’t been revealed.

I turn even the homeliest asteroid over like a jeweller

with a pygmy telescope for a third eye

holding a diamond in the rough up to the light

to see what’s been concealed like a secret of life

hidden within the ore of its savage shining.

I invariably rebuff the heavy bombardment eras

of the brutalities of love, though I had to suffer them

like noxious atmospheres in the wake of a cosmic pummelling

to arise so wisely here, the broken pine of my arboreal insight

into the nature of rootless trees. What doesn’t kill you

can wound you so badly that even death

looks like a redundancy in the maimed mirror

of your reflection. Be clear about this. After

every extinction passes like the cloned silhouette

of the full moon, it’s the labour of a lifetime

to publish your poems like apple bloom on the branch

of the lightning bolt that cleaved you to the root

like a French executioner with an imported sword.

It’s not strength to retool the innocence of an open heart

into a lethal weapon, even if it’s a righteous kill.

It’s one thing to heal. It’s another not to be destroyed

by your scars like a shy painting in an arrogant frame.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song. As I’ve said

before. The nightbird sings on the tongue of a serpent

as readily as water and wavelengths on witching wands

and tuning forks, the sound of sorrow in a human voice

where the rivers divide inseparably for life

like the strong rope of a spinal cord into the weaker threads

of a string theory of profoundly significant departures.

So be it. I trembled. I cried like an abandoned housewell

whose lightbulb just went out like the filament

of a genome that tried to keep its afterlife from freezing

when the world was destroyed by ice

in the terrible clarity of the eyes that blew it out

like a mutant candle that tried to add its odd gene

to the constellations of razor wire that imprisoned it

like the dangerous exile of its own dna. In this game

of musical chairs, I always try to take the low place

like a sea on the moon so all my lost atmospheres

and high tides returned to me, kinder, deeper,

more experientially seasoned loveletters than those that left.

Hatred isn’t creative. Judgement accuses itself.

History is written by the victors in dust on a shelf.

When we all lie down on the pyres of our deathbeds

may each of my lovers have enjoyed a better

dream of life than I did, more stars, more flowers,

fewer chains, less red shift in reality than in

their memories of the way things could have been

with the strangers we became over the long lightyears

looking back in arcane wonder at how love changes

to keeps its balance against a backdrop of creative chaos.

I observe the protocols of a poet approaching

the allure of an unknown bird at the gates of my voice

like a lyric I’ve only ever heard before at a lonely distance

from its source within me. The wind blown seeds

are more prodigal with insights into the mystery of life

than the genetically modified, and every exile

tends a secret garden that travels with them

like a vagrant motherland planting a starmap

of hyperbolic comets in the open fields beyond

the prize-winning asters of lesser zodiacs.

Petty monuments to transcend our mortality

won’t arouse the quiescent jealousy of time.

Truth doesn’t renew its virginity in an acid-bath.

Beauty isn’t marked by the singularity

of a star-nosed mole piercing a black hole.

The clock shows up with a second at a duelling sword dance.

Evolution advances surrealistically like a fast lane

for atavistic snails and the celebrity messengers

try to steal the spotlight from the message

they were created like flying fish with fins

on their heels to convey as a warning of pre-eminent change.

Circus animals in an abattoir of balancing acts.

Emotional jugglers and fire-eaters, sword-swallowers

easing the silver scimitar of the moon down the throats

of shallow lakes drowning in their own spit.

Freaky sages and anointed snake-oil salesmen

gulling the vanity of those seeking to be enlightened

like exceptions to a species going extinct

since some disappointed scribe divined

by the sunspots on his shining, every bloodline,

but the holy book of his own phylum, was a bad idea.

Not to be mean, vicious, feeble, ungenerous

to even those who tried but failed to love you in life

like crutches that didn’t break into blossom under your armpits

or the right idea with the wrong blueprints

for ladders and wings to get you out of the snakepit

that keeps swallowing your cosmic eggs

like albino whole notes, the stone cartouches of eyes

that never got to see how big the sky is because

you didn’t break out of your shell in time to see the stars

or even hear a whisper of the oceanic awareness

within you like the white noise of your afterbirth

still traumatized by your universal intrusion into this life.

One night laid out on your deathbed in a tidal pool

of febrile sheets, staring into a homeless abyss

like the return address of an anonymous enquiry

reviewing what you said and felt, or didn’t say,

because you calculated the effect in numbers,

not the words in your heart, like a silent movie

with more of a gift for pictures than conversation,

you’re going to see yourself unadorned as porn

in a snuff flick of all your myriad love affairs with life,

and the bloom off the rose, whether you were

a petal or a thorn, it’s going to be too late

to rewrite the black farce of the leading protagonist

as the rising star of the person you should have been

instead of the one you are in the sewer of fame.

The intensity of the clarity won’t leave you

a patina of mind to hide behind or insulate the view.

Naked, alone, out in the relentless open, for

your eyes only with eternity your sole witness

and you about to notarize it with your flesh,

even if it be the noblest folly of a leftover child,

a dragon-slaying firefly, an iota subscript of self-respect,

the taste of crazy wisdom you can’t rinse out of your heart

like the bloodstain of a rose, honour those

you have loved painfully like a morning frost

or in joy, though lost now, when you shared the dusk

with a moonrise as lovely as any muse

you’ve ever known, come down to the river

to drink from her reflection in your eyes, or just

for the hell of it because you prefer it that way,

let your heart remain as large and lavish

as any gesture of stars the universe ever squandered

on your impetuous love of life that embraced it all,

blessing and curse alike as the old moon opens its arms

both crescents wide to the dark abundance of the new.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

It’s not enough to hinge a new door to your heart

when the house is built on flowerless quicksand

and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books.

Poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,

of hawks and serpents boring into the corks of wine

to get at the heart, the passions, the dreams, the rage

of the vine that set out like a road that got carried away

and fell in love with the intimate strangers who took it home

and danced all night among the swords as if they were thresholds.

Born in the shadows of unbearable bells, early I found

they were bound to the cord of my spine, like the moon

among the kelp that oils its tides with the black sperms of creation,

and I learned to pull on their iron parachutes to ease

my harsh, hot descents into wingless, mute oblivions;

I discovered there was a voice beyond mine

that could gather and disperse, celebrate and divine

the secret weddings and deaths of the bridal ghosts that came

like castaway bouquets to the refugee altars of their torn veils.

And there’s an indelible secret as old as the eyes of the wind

that can whisper sand into pyramids, that won’t receive

the vows of the petty and clever who traffic in the shadows

of the great, wild dead who wore their battered crowns like fire.

Let them crib their poems on the back of another man’s eyelids,

real constellations don’t shine like this and the wells are mute

whose waters taste of fireflies; and there isn’t a river on the moon

that knows how to plead with the sea for a widow that mourns,

that knows whose prodigy of blood unravels on autumn’s horns,

or how the waterlily in the mouth of the dragon

is more dangerous than a shrine full of blind snakes.

Behind every name, behind every door with a brass threshold

is a man who was forgotten by his own violated treaties

with the indentured mirrors he consulted to cheat the lakes,

who comes up over his horizons like the solemnities of the moon,

looking for the pillar of his lost reflection in chunks of coal,

in the underfed crematoria of his sacrificial backyard fire-pits

in the lifelines of the empty hands he misread like maps of smoke.

Poetry isn’t an orphanage or asylum for the disenchanted,

though there is a deranged abyss under its relentless solitude;

not a showcase colosseum for famished lions at a petting zoo,

though mauled minds and bodies litter the unwitnessed field;

there are no paths through its unanswerable distances

strewn with petals or thorns, no bridges or waystations,

no branches of hospitable trees to perch in for the night,

no dawns that can erase what’s been written on your forehead,

nothing that can blind you to what you were born to see,

no rain that can douse the squandered fire of the poppy,

though the messenger is smashed like a bottle between

the tide and the rock; the star, the candle, the nightflower

snuffed by the morning, the last breath of the deathless moon.

And you must die enough to not be there

when the world picks up a pen like an axis

to spin in the direction of its wounded inclinations,

you must not walk into the house wearing a face,

your breath on the glacial windows of the furious stars

full of secret fingerprints, love-notes, names,

you must be more conversant than a ghost on a bridge

or a rose, or an empty mailbox, or a road that followed you

to where the river turns, with shapeshifting,

with pearling a body around a syllable of sand,

with showing a galaxy its shadow in eyelids and eclipses,

with standing like a scarecrow in the cornfield

that shucked the cob of a smile to batter you with birds,

with lying beside the dead like a lantern in a morgue

as if your blood crossed the threshold for them,

with waiting in the earth a long time, a root

that conceals orchards in the furrows of its dirty hands,

a buried boat that unfurls the blossoms of its sails,

the starcharts of the blind moles that shine underground,

like a voyage in search of the rudder of your tongue

to pilot it safely out of the ports of the moon,

a flame, a breath, a feather you’ve cradled for years,

the small measures of belief in an oceanic grave

that enrobes the flowing in the wake of severed waves.

Be stone, or be space; the emptiness is the same,

silver ore, or the motherlode of a black hole,

let your heart pan the long rivers of the night

for what the stars value, jewels of life in the light

that can be grown like a menagerie of blood and tears,

the eyes of the blackberries, eyes of the radiant bee

on the flutes of the wind that plays for a handful of seeds.

PATRICK WHITE

TOO DISAFFECTED TO WEAR THE MASK OF A WIZARD

TOO DISAFFECTED TO WEAR THE MASK OF A WIZARD

Too disaffected to wear the mask of a wizard

yet I don’t need to dance with fire to burn.

Poetry, flowers, stars, paint and women

have accounted for most of my spells,

and when I weep in concert with the windows,

a rosary of crystal skulls streams from my eyes

at a seance of nightskies I shall not walk under again.

You can take the grain of the world, the filth, the grit

and blur it like the sun on a cloudy day

into a foggy pearl, creative self-defence,

when it all gets to be a bit too much.

Or, like me, you can bead your spinal cord

like an abacus of new moons and hope for the best

though your friends are going to think you’re a little dark,

and even more demonic if you try to explain, but

don’t underestimate how much light owes to the night

or the mythogenesis of joy to plain-speaking pain.

Getting ambivalently old now, though my emotions

don’t seem to age, and there are no wrinkles

around the eyes of my thought like the deltas of rivers

reconciling themselves to the sea. Fissures maybe

of underground volcanic cauldrons under the oracle

still feeding sweetmeats to her pythons at Delphi.

Though the prophets I cherish the most

are still the trees in a nightwind that raves

like a crazy willow and shepherd moons

that keep the secrets of life to themselves

under an Arctic carapace of magma and snowblind turtles.

My light wanders like a drunk through an expired starmap

of gravitational eyes that drew me to them

like the women I have loved along the way

that flowered on the vine of my circuitous blossoming

and left me heavy and sweet with sorrow

like the fruits of the earth that bend the boughs

of dark abundance like the mystery of receiving

more than you ever knew you needed for awhile.

Grammar. Magic. Magician. I spent my youth

apprenticed to dragons learning how to turn

my scales into feathers. My intensities into

solitudinous islands fit for someone into sorcery

waiting for the first bird to drop the sacred syllable

that would elaborate the genomic lyrics of life

like an amino acid pulled like a sword

from the kissing stone of a lava meteor

I tried to send back to Mars by way of thanks.

To the spiritual clowns. Your perceptions are sound

but you haven’t learned to play profoundly

with your visionary insights into mystic fireflies

that like to play scrabble with your vocabulary

of archaic constellations. Are you still arguing

whether the ho logos that started the world

was a legitimate word? Or merely the slang of birds?

The mountain didn’t need a sherpa to be the first

to ascend its own slopes. If you’re lost without a guide,

things you couldn’t set out to find on your own

will come looking for you like eyes

that depend upon you to illuminate their seeing

like a star that’s never been misplaced by space or time.

It started out as a book, but now my mind

has morphed into a library of gates

I’ve walked through most of my life alone

into a high field, wading through wildflowers

and a low summer moon like the phases

of a waterlily blooming as tenderly as a ghost

breathing on the rhythmic swaying

of the tall silver-green grass like the future-memory

of a muse who walked with me here once

like a delinquent prediction of what was to come

when I learned to make my own path

through the woods and she was gone

as if the night were not a reward

and her beauty were the price I had to pay

for the excruciating freedom of my solitude.

An air of gracious danger still lingers about me

now that I’ve mellowed like a diamond in the rough

into a more fluid translucency of adamantine aspects.

When you liberate a black rose don’t forget

you enlighten the thorns as well like waxing crescents.

No heart cast out, your sorrows deepen

into the watersheds of cosmic wounds

even as your joys transcend forgiveness

like the insanity of bliss under the eyelids

and behind the earlobes of your most intimate eclipse.

Doesn’t matter if you understand me now.

You will. Every flower gets to look at the sun

and the stars looking back at them from the inside

as slowly the light and the rain shed their life mask

like the white peony of the moon losing its petals

on the black mirror of the lake that will strew them

on the obvious path you were intended to take

not the one you do. The one that whispers to you

like the muse of a wayward encounter as if she knows

something you don’t that keeps you awake at night

watching the gibbous moon approaching Jupiter

in the northwest quadrant of a window inspired

by the clarity of the fire that burns in your dreams

more lucidly than a madman who’s made all the mistakes

of common sense before he abandoned the way it is

to the way it seems realizing there was no need

to efface himself in an infinite number of parallel universes.

In everyone’s heart of hearts, a black rose, thorns and all,

wearing a mirage of water like a lifemask flowering

in a desert of stars drinking from the dark mystery

that flows from the wells of our own astonished eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S GOOD TO KNOW

It’s good to know you’re there,

though the world is a diatribe

of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it’s good to know

a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,

a bell waits like a nipple of silence

and your blood waits like a language,

a rose of rain in a starfield,

that my mouth alone can say to the night

in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,

sipping from a chalice of water

spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky

and buries itself like a meteor

at the cornerstone of a sightless temple

pillared by faithless candles

that flirt with the shadows

of the fire in their eyes,

and I’m bridges beyond any way back the way I came,

my wake the scar of a vapour trail

in yesterday’s cherry sunset,

and I still catch myself at my worst

whenever I’m good.

There’s always a thread of blood on the water,

and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror

scrawled in manic lipstick,

and a gravestone

I carry around on my shoulders like a skull

that feels like the weight of the world,

and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death

that is often afraid of me,

and a ferocity of freedom

that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,

and bleaches every feeling like a wound

in the antiseptic of the sun

that bites like a mystic arrow

that was feathered with a message

before I was born to find me.

But it’s good to know

your fury and your gentleness,

the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,

your altars of wind and smoke

spuming across the vastness of the solitude

like blood and chalk

and lines written after school

on the blackboard shale of my river skin

still trying to reform its way to the sea.

It’s good to look at the moon

through your passionate windows

and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness

attuning the tines of my tongue

to a fork in the road of your body,

to the delta of an unknown civilization,

to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words

that have sought me out

like blood vessels and burning bushes

and the blossoming fingers of someone

kneading a face

out of the huge volume,

the pure space of my unattainability.

O you have said things to me

in ink and water and brandy and fire,

in night and moonlight and poppies and tears

that have made the hardest rocks

on the highest slopes

of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed

to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter

by the tenderness of your knives again and again,

urgent with beauty and joy

to be overthrown

by the whisper of your voice in the valley

triggering this skyborn avalanche

of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases

and the vases into urns

and the urns back into the wombs

of a thousand terminal exiles

tolling like a heartbeat

with a passport and a threshold,

and though I am no longer

the leaf of hope

that aspired to rudder

the fire stream of these volcanic transformations,

it’s good to drift awhile

in the dreamtime of this endless night

like recoverable salvage

among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats

and the reaping eyes

of your eloquent islands of light.

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or Ak-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm

and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat.

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

The dark silence you embodied, twenty years later,

speaking to me now in the quiet of the night,

Jupiter flashing in the northwest, still trying

to shine by its own light after all this time. The air

so cold and clear, it’s a burning mirror

I can see you in discretely entranced

by the shapes of sadness cast by your small body

like a lamp of fire that swore never to go out

except in a blaze of light, supernova, one

last, wild, limitless, open-throttled ride

shrieking across the firmament as if at last

all that light, the wary tenderness of your compassion,

your wonder and your puzzlement at being so young

to have such heavy bells of sorrow tolling in your soul,

as if you carried within you the memory

of many rivers and seas and storms ago,

so when you shone you never dazzled

like a carillon of light on a shallow mountain rivulet,

but shine, you always did, even in your worst eclipse,

as if the romantic generosity of your expansive heart

had finally grown big enough to contain

the creative liberation of your enlightened madness.

Your intensity broke out into genius like fireflies

in a fog, the Pleiades out of the blue cocoon

of a nebular cloud. You could think

with your whole body as only a few artists

ever could. What most could only intuit at a distance

like someone weeping deep in the woods at night

as if they’d lost a child, or a lover for life,

and had come to rave in secret among the owls,

the darkness in the eyes of your blood intimately understood

without saying a word, and for a moment, you

were the shrine of a lost humanity

that used to forgive us for what we prayed for.

I can still hear the beginnings of wisdom

in the love and the laughter you squandered

on the ruinous amusements of the world,

without any fear of ever bankrupting your wine cellar

as if life were one long, surrealistic journey

of wandering scholars, defrocked Druids,

sacred clowns, lunatic poets and baffled pilgrims

each looking for exits and entrances on and off

the spiritual highway we were all hitchhiking on

as if all you had to do was cock your thumb

and the moon with one headlight blown out

would pick you up on some lonely backroad at night

and you’d see God everywhere on the way

to your mysterious destination. Dragons in exile

summoning rogue planets to orbit their homelessness

like the infinite ripples and wavelengths

of black holes standing like strangers in the rain.

Where the rivers joined we flowed into one another

as we danced like binary stars around

the invisible fires of our gravitational eyes

and where the roads parted like the wishbones

of the wounds we exchanged like the farewells

and witching wands we afflicted upon each other’s hearts

as if there were something deeper, a darker whisper,

a more compelling summons than the lightning

we were divining for in each other’s eyes

to strike the dark jewels of the dead we carried

within us, urns of our childhoods back into life

like an occult paradise of underground root fires

that could travel for lightyears in the valleys of death,

we were about to firewalk like barefoot stars alone,

I bowed like a gracious ice-age to thank you

for the ghost dance, and you went off

to carve the sphinx out of your tears

like rain on the fertile plains of a green savannah.

Many stars have flowed like sand through

the hourglass of the mirages we’ve become since then

and covered the grass and the eyes of the lakes

with lunar seas more desolate than the deserts of earth,

and though I’ve stopped at many wells along the way

and luxuriated in the oases of the soul alone

with the moon on water that ached like I did

to be loved by more inseparable reflections,

I’ve never been so far from you I needed to ask

anyone in my vagrant travels among the fixed stars

if they’ve ever seen your constellation rising

like a legend of love that only appears once in a lifetime

to leave an indelible impression upon the heart

like the thorns of a black rose still burning subliminally

on the star charts of the unearthly mystery

that wholly consumed us both in the radiant flashfloods

and ineffable ashes of starmud we emptied out of our urns

like two spirits of the wind swept up in the fires of life for good.

PATRICK WHITE