HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

Half the truth is a fraud of the heart

and a lie kills it outright. The silence

pretends it’s a window, and the night

throws the moon through it like a bad imitation

of the sky. I never tried to make your delusions

mine. Nor ask you to drink from the same

well of mirages I did. Even after we’d been

together awhile you seemed content

to be a rogue planet in your homelessness

without a star to shepherd you to higher pastures

so I never offered you a threshold

you couldn’t cross like the wind in a wheatfield

blowing on the poppies like a wildfire

I thought it was wise to let burn itself out.

Did I love you? Yes. Even your scars

were beautiful. And there was always

something intriguing about your darkness

that made the fireflies and dragons of your mystery

burning every doorway you appeared in

seem uninhabitably alluring and dangerous.

I never made a starmap of your shining,

where the ink didn’t run like the black tears

of a coming eclipse in a reflecting telescope.

Missing you was usually a prelude to making love

in a false dawn, but the effect was always the same.

The stars never paled in the ghost light

and none of our fountains were ever interred

in a fire hydrant like a urn of water

for the eyeless ashes of the self-contained.

Now the shadows that followed you

like a maimed cult of overly-intentioned volunteers

have nothing to fear from the black holes

you were always afraid of being swallowed up by.

Raccoon and muskrat skulls, albino planetesimals

you collected like chess pieces on your windowsill

and wrapped your mind around like an atmosphere

so they could shine again by your reflected light.

After so many extinctions, there must have been

nights that engulfed you like the womb of a tarpit

trying to give birth to a moonrise after a hysterectomy

in your early twenties when your boyfriend

left you in hospital because he couldn’t cope

with disease. Just another plague rat jumping ship

in Genoa. And then a man you later married

left after a month and the ring turned green

and the dog and furniture were gone when you

got home from waitressing at the club, your

art scholarship missing from the joint account.

Then thirty pills like phases of the moon a day,

thirty pieces of silver, and your heart

so severely betrayed, the eclipse indelible,

you couldn’t trust your own derangement

without reading Tarot to know whether

the next stranger who showed up in your doorway

were an exit or an entrance. Or another

rich clown looking for an Egyptian princess

on the black market of the spooky and occult.

I knew from the start you were compelled

to cut things out of your life, that the knife

that had cut you had been thrust like a scalpel

into your hand like a torch in a relay of death masks

with surgical skills. I never blamed you.

Always thought I’d do a lot worse if it

had happened to me like an Aztec sacrifice

that had torn my heart out and offered it up

to the gods on the altar of a hospital bed

to propitiate the blood thirst of ignoble enemies.

Of which I was not one. Nor yet a judas-goat,

as you could have told by the fire and shadows

slashed on my pelt, and the way I kept my claws

indrawn around you like an outdated calendar

of fangs and crescent moons in an ageing arsenal.

Or by the nature of the scars I wore like Mars

when its water went underground like a frozen house well.

I remember the thick, sloppy flakes of the blizzard

I drove back to the farm in that night alone in a black Le Mans,

after the last meal at the executioner’s restaurant,

your absence riding shotgun like a habit

still in shock that it had been broken so easily,

driving like the bullet of a northern pike

through the right temple of the storm as if

I were immortal even at a hundred miles an hour

passing the snails of the lonely snow ploughs

on roads like buttered mirrors I dared to kill me

knowing anything alive or dead or spectral

in the snowblind darkness of that pluperfect hour

that seemed like the past tense of everything real

had more to lose than I already had. So bring it on.

And it did. Through several love affairs after that.

It’s excruciating to watch someone you love slowly crushed

like a black swan in the coils of an anaconda,

or an oracle by a python she used to prophesy by,

the promise of a new moon swallowed by a black hole

of paranoia. I’ve known darkness, made my allotted share

of mistakes in life, but by luck and intuition avoided

most of the major errors of the soul, even my demons

endowed with a kind of largesse I’ve always

been grateful for, not so much for God, or an ideal,

maybe to keep from being keel-hauled by the muse

on the dark side of the moon, who ever really knows why,

but it wasn’t in my nature to betray you, though

you almost seemed to ask. I may have been

an odd kind of wavelength, skewed and twisted

by the spaces I’ve travelled through, bent

by the gravitational eyes that glanced at me in passing,

but it wasn’t in my scar tissue to wound you

as you had been so many times so grievously before,

so nobly, as you truly were, by making you fall

by default on the sword of your most precious nightmare

and even stranger to think it might have kept us together.

What a world of bubbles and thorns that elates

and breaks us. The chandeliers it drowns in our tears.

You get naked as water to go skinny-dipping in moonlight

with someone you love and you end up swimming

through snakes in the rear view mirror for lightyears to come.

PATRICK WHITE

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