BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

By the time you say it, you’re a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.

Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging

from this cold oceanic reflection, how good

to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,

your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash

of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.

A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.

Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart

mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge

and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.

(just so the peasants don’t storm the moat again,

thinking we don’t know where we’re at)

I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.

Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void

and sticking your flavourless gum messiah

to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind’s face

I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.

A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed

preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables

and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters

of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble

like constellations at a crossroads and then

got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,

fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else’s hand. The albino sun

high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you

as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.

People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain

that pushes up a mad flower of poetry

through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet

hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a drop of water

on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil

of your blood-weather. And now the vast night

crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows

and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light

experimenting with brown-out dosages of prozac

like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck

of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood

on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision

is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons

who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough

you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents

singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines

under the foundation-stones of untenable temples

abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars

a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.

Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last forty years of my life

devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight

that beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more

than a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment

whole to the furthest star, every thought

sufficient as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions.

It’s true things change and change is a clock without hands.

Here now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods

that trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish

that have schooled into vagrant poems

for a gesture of provisional expression

timeless as now, I stop and bend like light to show you

how the black water-lilies are night mirrors

returning your eyes like water to the river. And yet,

most astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,

nor anything that swims like the language of a lost people

through these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god

over the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living intelligence

whose awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,

all the worlds in every directionless direction

resplendent in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up

by a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane

with the scintillant gnats and fairies

whose lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.

Here, by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,

I offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers

wheeling joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?

Nothing approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.

There is nowhere that isn’t a tree, no moment

that isn’t the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event

already achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world

when everything you fall into, someone’s else’s face,

the violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play

is nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon

full of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head

upon the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,

whisper nightbirds of ecstatic seeing

into your abundant emptiness. The point is

there is no point that isn’t already the whole of the radiant point

drawing long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,

out of the dream deserts of her lostness and longing

like a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look

at the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace

and consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis

for fishtracks. Here, I’ll sing it again on a page of water

because you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones

who stand at the gate and swear by dawn

the light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,

the original home of the many who make one face without flaw,

because I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves

even as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts

of ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned

from the empty pockets of a generous dawn,

because great sleepwalking moons of faith

are shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals

releasing mysterious fragrances of time

in the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars

feed their growing families by cobbling their tongues

like new leather fixed with nails of light

to the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,

because even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,

and death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,

and hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness

and rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,

because there is no less of your whole celestial orchard

in the butterfly that lands on a dead branch

like one of your smiles

than there is in all the thundering worlds

that fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,

because most people’s seeing is a kind of love blind to music

and you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,

the divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,

and because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart

of an embryo word and nudges it into flight,

the ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird

hurled from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl

to express the joy she is

at the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing wine,

I’ll lift my voice again to you and sing.

A black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon

unwrapping her bandages on the water like music

to reveal her concealed beauty to no one.

Isis and the Sphinx cry out like loons.

A singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter

to the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,

who toys with the weakness of kings.

On the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU'RE NOT WALKING THE WATERS OF YOUR OWN MIND

IF YOU’RE NOT WALKING THE WATERS OF YOUR OWN MIND

If you’re not walking the waters of your own mind,

seeing through the eyes in your own blood, you’re

in danger of falling through somebody else’s mirror

and like one less star in the sky, we’re all a little more blind

and there are a lot of eyes out there depending upon your light.

Shine, my friend, shine. Intensify the grey shadows,

the nipping eclipses and blackflies of pestering doubt

until two days of hot sun at the end of May

puts them all out like pitted match heads and asteroids

swarming your atmosphere and orbits like acid rain

trying to make a sea-change. Go pearl-diving deep enough

into the darkness for the singularity at the bottom

of the black hole. And you’ll break into

a whole new way of looking at the nightsky

with billions of stars you’ve never seen before

waiting to greet you at the end of a tunnel of light.

Just as poverty makes me more generous and wealth

diminishes the value of the gift, doubt is merely

a left-handed way of affirming what I deny

as my denial bears witness to the fact that I am

this suspension bridge that sways between one precipice

and another, one breath, one step, one pulse, one leap

from one shore, one peak, one valley, one wavelength,

one extreme to the next. One moment

I’m Hermes Trismegistus firewalking on stars

with a heartfelt message from the gods, and the next

my winged heels catch fire and I’m Icarus falling

like a cinder into the third eye of the sea that’s going

to wash me out in the flashflood of the very first tear it sheds.

When you fear the abyss. Turn into space.

If the serpent fire of the dragon begins to feel

like a prophetic furnace of cold ashes you’re buried in,

show it how long your eyes have been dancing

like fireflies on a flammable starmap around

the axial Maypole of the vernal earth

and how many times you’ve immolated yourself

in the starfields like a wild flower that blooms

in its own flames, consumed by desire without being burnt.

Let your song conform to your voice

like the skin of music, like the moon’s reflection

to the laryngeal wavelengths of the lake

thriving with subliminal fish that will

jump into your lifeboat of their own accord

as if you were the high note they were trying to hit.

Sing as if you were the first submarine on the moon

to sound the depths of a sea of shadows.

Long before the Impressionists, the sunset

was painting the effect of its own light like burnt sienna

glowing on the cedars and pines at dusk. Write

like midnight and dawn in your own eyes,

not the scenic calendars and schools

of retinal responses to a dying love affair with the light.

Admire the fountains, but seek out the watersheds

of your own efflorescence in the depths of yourself

if you want to shine by your own light

in a darkness that’s never been touched

by the sun and the moon and the stars,

and you’re the only candle, lighthouse

and constellation it’s every known. Shine

like the lantern of a sea star in these depths

long enough and it isn’t the lustre of what you see,

though that’s not a negligible gift, but the eyes

that evolve out of your lucidity that’s the real blessing,

the light upon light of the dark revelation

beyond the obvious mirrors of the moondogs and irises

chromatically abberating the lens at the other end

of the telescope like the eye of a crab

under the carapace of its cretaceous observatory

as if it were enlightened by the flashback of an old acid trip.

The stars don’t abjure the black holes

for not shining, and the black holes

don’t despise the stars for not going deep enough.

Everything’s perennially new under the sun

at every moment of creation, if you open

your eyes wide enough, despite what those see

squinting through seashells in their deathmasks

as if they were hiding something from themselves.

Surrealistically crazy and wisely unrestrained,

the picture-music never uses the same voice twice,

like an oracle never repeats a prophecy

if you weren’t listening to it in the first place.

Every morning’s a new dance-card. Every night

a standing ovation for the lyrical improvisations

of the wind in the leaves of the willows

and Byzantine silver Russian olives with metal feathers

that never rust, until they want to, down by the river.

Sing your heart out, your eyes, your mind, your blood,

your doubt, your confusion, the evanescent absolutes

of your jubilation, the fireflies of cosmic eurekas in the dark,

the heavy bells of the sorrows you had to abandon

by the side of the road like one room schools and churches

and walk on lonelier and lighter down the road

like the wanderlust of a wayward spirit that blindly trusts

in its own imagination to reveal the hidden harmonies

of chaos as well as the cacophonous dissonance

of conditioned orders of consciousness going to extremes.

The logic of metaphor doesn’t move in a straight line

like an interconnected freight train whistling through town

as bars at the railroad crossing come down and go up

like the thresholds of duelling swords on the clock

while jaywalking immigrants cut through a hole in the fence

and have no idea what hour it is, except

none of the dream grammars of their mother tongues

have a past tense, or a table of contents for their solitude.

PATRICK WHITE

HARSH METAL IN THE WELL

Harsh metal in the well, small black bells, plum blossoms wearing iron masks, and the ghosts of violet salt that haunt her tearsas if blood wanted to become water, as if
all her lakes, the hazelnut trees in her eyes, and the bruised dawns of the salmon beneath themwho wait for the rocks of poetic wisdom to fall,
were wounded in their watersheds.

And I’m trying to patch the sun
with old eye-patches, unused eclipses, sunpots

and the moon with blue-green lichens,

and the blooddrop saline drip of crimson columbines

mingled with the visionary mist

of soft, grey morning voices, ashen butterflies,

to keep the light from leaking out.

There’s a hawk tearing at the cherry of her dove-heart

and long red wavelengths soaking into the blue-black of starless skies,

quicksilver rain on the hovering windows

and looping spider veils of slashed paint in a race of rivers

letting go to weep themselves

to the bottom of their lilies,

the burning tentacles of jellyfish wine

sweeping its tresses across the distant hills

like the bridal smudge of a lost storm,

ashes on its gown. Her lanterns are covered

in the scarves of her sorrows like the hair of reformed widows,

and even from here, I can hear her trying to tune

the ashes of a burnt guitar

to the songs of a happier day

and the goblets of softer voices

that touched her like snow at night among the pines.

In the irretrievable lostness of now

she lingers in a dream of savaged shrines

with the crow priests of the sacred echoes,

grieving for the frost on the mirrors

of her farewell oceans,

rosaries of autumn migrations

hanging like a string of skull-faced planets,

her lifelines beaded with tars and tears,

and the slow coagulants of time

that rose the pain with scabs and badges

and later, the distorted pearls of our scars.

And my heart’s going off like a fire-alarm

because I love her, because

love panics at a wound,

immolates itself in the green flames of its own tenderness

to kiss the sting of the world away

to remove the thorns

in the eyelids of the beloved

one by one between its teeth,

between the silver tweezers of the moon,

and lay a salve of cool kisses on the ruptured berries.

And it’s cruelty to feel the divinity of love,

this godfire that exceeds our furthest horizons,

like eagles in the stairwells of the stars, wingspans of light,

and remain a human, remain

a boundary stone with a sword in it,

a liferaft of punctured powers and straining oars

when everything within me

calls for the dragon arcana of sleeping wizards

and the invincible excaliburs of pauper kings,

when all I have in my hands are these words,

these withered embryo eyes,

these dead beans of a fallen giant

to remove the arrow from the heart of the blue gazelle,

to keep the sky from bleeding,

to answer the baffled eternity of mortal sorrow in her eyes,

the apricot of her skin raked by the crystal claws

of sidereal lions that rage like minerals

against the fairy fountains and solar-paced sunflowers

robed in the elephant ears

that spill like hearts from the supples vases of our blood.

I’m a hand without fingers, an amputated starfish,

the monk of a blind wick, the wet fuse

of a star too weak for ignition

who’s been praying to all the wrong gods

for the loan of an ambulance and a white cocoon

to bandage a vineless severance with wings,

to pour my blood into hers like a tide

that will lift her dolphin of light,

the waterwings of her lungs, lead pears,

weighed down like bags of stone on a desolate shore,

into a liberty of leaping bells, her body

a crazy tongue of joy saying the sea,

and her spirit the limber spire of breathing free.

Who throws the sparrows against the glare

of a brittle window pane; who

devises these labyrinths of thwarted emotion, who

teaches us to blaze among the wincing galaxies

only to stifle the mouth of our exaltations

with rags of grief, with the crusty towels,

the soiled sheets of ravished rainbows,

that daub the tears of the shining

that always weeps away like light from our paintings?

And love answers that it’s suffering

that hurls our voices into the morning, suffering

that taught us to sing to Venus in the dawn, suffering

that pours the stars into the chalice of the heart

and bids us lift and cradle the heavy head of a planet

too weak to rise from its injuries

and offer our thread of mending light

to the parted lips of an ancient wound.

Love answers that it’s love that scalds, love

that breaks the thorny arms of the aloes like starfish,

like bread and the pincers of boiling crabs

to free the cool honeys of love that heal the burns,

to teach the mouths of our wounds how to kiss.

But even so, even so,

I can feel the spear in the flesh of the moon,

and the fireflies faltering in the urn of her heart,

and the empty hand of the wind that misses its leaf,

and the sloughed skies in a solitude of lost gloves,

and the fallen irises of limp swans

puzzled by the failure of their green swords,

the splayed feathers of their rearing wings

to lift them out of the breach of encroaching winter

and appoint them like a trumpet heading south.

I can feel the weeping braille under the eyelids of my lover,

the dark queen of my radiant bees,

and my heart is a crucial hive of urgent ashes

hanging like a paper lantern

on the night bough

of a burning apple-tree.

PATRICK WHITE

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