AND THESE LINES

AND THESE LINES

And these lines like the opening wake of a boat I’m not in.

Or is it the opening of an old wound unsealing itself like a loveletter?

Or the world held up to the lips of this fever like a spoon?

There are shadows in the valley of a scar

that sometimes mistake themselves for leaves

and turn their sewers into wine

and reel in the unmoving delirium of a black noon

when the hands of the clock disappear

into the cool centre of their turning

and time is sheathed like mercy in the darkness.

Suffering shadows my blood like a map

and so I look for joy in everything

as if my death were already achieved and behind me

and I could linger over the morning and end of everything

like a wet winter fog that doesn’t try to cling.

The tree outside the window in my writing room

is the axle of existence

and every ring of its heartwood

is the expanding wheel of the world,

as it is with every breath. But this is precisely where

I keep losing myself in the ineffable urns and ashes

of the unsayable beyond, not just of death,

but of all that life hasn’t been

to one who loved it like his only chance.

A firefly agitates the darkness more

than all the lightning of my awareness

when I consider the spectral vagrancy of my thought

calling to me like a hill to an unmoored lifeboat

to see if anyone survived the last sinking of the moon.

And my sorrows are bells of water that toll like the sea

for all the incredible dead who are buried in me

like marrow in the bone.

Which is to say no more than another

labouring under the weight of being human.

And I know of a lyrical clarity that’s free to sing what it wants,

that lifts the snake up with wings

and enfolds it in the infinite solitude of the sky

and lets it shine eyes beyond the reach of the light.

Here words jump like fish on the moon

and the dead branch is an orchard in bloom

and yesterday picks up its shoes and roads behind it

and there isn’t a shadow born of the light that can follow me

and tomorrow isn’t the ambassador of my next breath

arriving with urgent news

to wake up the dead

like a poppy or an ambulance in a nightmare.

Here the lucidities ripen like eyes with every eclipse

and the bright vacancy of the glaring moonskull

is broken like the bread of a dark abundance

that feasts in the seed of everything.

I watch the snowflakes fall randomly outside

and try to assess the chances

of finding the moon in an oyster,

remembering the unattainable has no threshold

to blunder my way across like spiritual junkmail.

The world is a drop of water flowing out of its own eye.

A squirrel natters and gnashes its annoyance

at my propinquity and for a moment

affirms that I exist by the intensity of its denial.

And it wasn’t just seas that the moon lost, not just seas,

but the sky that softened her stars as well.

The thought falls like a key on rock,

a fly at a winter windowpane,

forgetting what it once could open,

and I let it take its place at the table

like a ghost of salt that looks a lot like me

because we both mourn for the same lost sea,

born of the same bell. But let the starmud settle,

the dust compose what it will, thoughts fall

like the flightfeathers of passing birds

that do not stop to sing because my voices

echo in the cocoons of ten thousand transformations,

and who I was in the prelude that just walked past,

is now the likeness of my dissimilarity,

hobbling like a bridge on crutches downstream

or a disoriented pilgrim on the smokeroad to fire

as all the Gothic glaciers evaporate like churches.

Do you see how space conforms me like the wind

to the shapes of my own faceless emptiness

as I stand over the silence like a heron or a pen

waiting for fish that slip away like waves on the moon?

Madness or enlightenment? Asylum or shrine?

I have deepened my ignorance enough not to care.

My flesh, a wardrobe of ghosts.

My mind, the gesture of a star in the dirt.

My heart, blood on the thorn of the moon.

And still, my spirit cries out like an abyss

for the dead wasp on its back on the windowsill,

as if there were a will to my foolishness

tangled like wild morning glory

in the trellises of the constellations

where the great roses of the night

are enthroned in their bloodlines,

and do not acknowledge the passage of the small urgencies

that are dotted like periods at the end of their own sentences.

I accord the wasp, the squirrel, the tree,

full rights to my identity

in this agony of being,

this fellowship of suffering,

and with no more authority than the spontaneous value

a jest of compassion attributes to my clownish humanity

and the solitudes of anguish it must endure

to keep on approximating its life

like the long draw of the straw in a hurricane.

I have lived and wept long enough

not to trust any insight

that doesn’t feel the pain

growing eyes like a gate in the rain.

How have any of us not suffered

and cried out in our alienation

I am human, I am human,

as if our despair could voice

the violence of our relentless insignificance?

And when I say this, understand,

there isn’t anything it could possibly mean

if it doesn’t heal, if it doesn’t say

to the widow alone for the first night

or the scar of the moon in the window,

or the child savaged by atrocity

who was left torn and alone in the dark,

there is no one to whom we can plead,

no one who could hear

the scream of the hell

poured from your blood

like the iron voice of a misshapen bell,

no one who can unseed the life you’re rooted in,

no one, not even you, to know your need

for intimate fires in the ashpits of your stars

that suddenly flare up like flowers

to consume that which surpasses itself in wonder,

but when you’re wounded by the horsemen in the night

who trample you like a pulse, know this, I bleed

like the same resonance of ruptured atoms

and my harp is split like a wishbone

and my heart is the wilted lily, the failed parachute

of a sidereal hemorrhage, and I

am darker than the eyelids of the gods

with anger that you should suffer so

and not know, not know

the delirium of the seed

that is buried in your wound

like the herb of the eclipse that lived you like enlightenment.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING ORPHIC SKULLS ON THE ABACUS OF A SPIDER WEB

COUNTING ORPHIC SKULLS ON THE ABACUS OF A SPIDER WEB

Counting Orphic skulls on the abacus of a spider web.

Listening to them click like pool balls, crabs and castanets.

I’m beading new solar systems out of the nebular air. I’m seeding

clouds of unknowing with genetically unmodified meteors.

I’m lawn bowling with black holes. I’m collecting

echoes of zeroes from the rain on shepherd moons

and trying to link them like empty buckets

into a waterclock of life that flows inflammably

like thicker tears of methane on the surface of Titan.

I’m Saint Darkness in a sensory deprivation tank.

My aspirations are houseflies belly up on a window sill.

My longings have all been exorcised like the baby ghosts

I keep in incubators like the mangers of messiahs

on the night ward, knowing no one will ever come

to claim them. I give them names and raise them on my own

like poems that take me for granted as I teach them

to walk all over me like a starmap you could drown

your sorrows in. How not to be crucified

for the metaphoric content of the message you deliver.

And if you’re going to rise from the dead, rise

like the unknown headwaters of an alluvial river

that can grind civilizations of wild starwheat into bread.

So the angels can hover over the town

at four in the morning, knowing no one

went to bed hungry and listen to the prayers

of the people they can’t do anything to help

except hang there like the curtains of the northern lights

as if they were thinking out loud in the dream grammar

of a mystic trying to paint the mystery of life

in a palette of picture-music that hurts as deeply

as it illuminates the beauty and the agon

of staying alive long enough to know what for.

I celebrate the dangerous awareness of my crazy wisdom

on the merest of hunches that play on the bird bone flutes

of my deepest hopes lingering like lyrical spirits

around the asteroid belts of my archaic graves

rolled like thousands of stones away from the tomb of Sisyphus

trying to beatify his absurdity like an orbiting avalanche.

Good luck, my brother. Watch out for low-flying telescopes

trying to shoot out any stars it catches in its cross hairs

like a spiritual trespasser trying to transit two thresholds at once.

And don’t be discouraged if you hear them calling Einstein a dunce.

Sooner a persistent fool ageing wisely than a sporadic sage

acting out like a bitter green apple in late winter.

Put it down to the age I live in. The fountain of youth

is syrup in a Coke can everyone is sipping from

like hummingbirds on crack, fish in medicated water

outside their dilated kitchen windows next

to the hemorrhaging thermometers of their patriotic syringes

at a needle exchange for global warming.

No mercy asked. None received. Take all the space you want.

The gravitational eyes of the universe are upon you, sunbeam.

Shine on, shine on, shine on. You’ll be a wildflower yet.

I’m trying to be rationally surrealistic about the perversity

of the ambitions of perfect vacuums sucking the life

out of their fellow insects like parasitic guests

of the corporations they’re elected by like mud slides.

The free press has become a screening myth, a smoke screen,

a trivially, distractive one-eyed liar. Politicians

lead with their anus like mouthy monostomes

for whom it doesn’t make a difference what end

they speak out of, to, or for. How deranged

does it have to get before the electorate stops consulting

expert proctologists who speak like rubber gloves

for spiritual advice about their innovatively tragic lives

in the most pleonastically, lucrative of times

before everyone starts talking in tongues

to the local nightbirds like I do whenever

I want to get something off my chest

like an avalanche of gravestones and asteroids

trying to jumpstart my life all over again

by upgrading the quality of the starmud

they spread all over my alluvial plain

like lunar corn silk and a few more scarecrows

that get along, whatever the song, with the nightbirds

in the hallowed valleys of my brain

where I sow thorns and question chaos about my solitude.

PATRICK WHITE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A LITTLE THOUGHT IN A BIG SPACE

A little thought in a big space, I’m falling

through my own immensities here at my desk,

one of my Icarian propensities for plunging into things.

My voice intimidated by the violence of the silence within.

I’m on the dark side of my eyes.

No one’s ever been here before.

No window, no wall, no door,

I’m on the threshold of my homelessness again.

I’m looking at stars, but I feel like rain.

I’m talking to ghosts that I don’t remember.

Might be the wrong medium, but it’s the right seance.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here myself

but it seems I’m free to go or stay as I wish.

I’m wearing my shadow like a candling parachute

that didn’t step back from the edge in time.

No point in pretending you’re an airborne dandelion

when you feel like a rock with a message

someone just threw like the moon through a mirror

disguised as a sky the night birds keep flying into blind.

No one asks your name here on this pyre of a sky burial

if your birth certificate says you were born in fire.

Desire anything you like. It was all written in smoke

before you came. And these words that are saying me here

have been out of the aviary of the lantern for light years.

Who knows where the light goes or what if falls upon?

Trying to shine in a dark time without taking anything away

from the lunar eclipses that aren’t in need of enlightenment.

Don’t know if I’m a solar flare, a firefly, a matchbook,

or a lightning bolt that keeps stressing my starmud out

by sneaking up on it from behind and overdoing things a bit.

If you find yourself trying to pry the flowers open

with a crowbar or a koan, and it’s nightfall, it’s

time to turn your hourglass in for a waterclock

and see how the stars emerge out of nothing

as soon as you deepen the dark with a more acute sense of timing

that let’s everything happen spontaneously by itself.

Even if you’re the lighthouse of your dreams

that doesn’t mean you’re the nightwatchman

keeping his third eye on you in the shadows

like a theft of fire you can get away with

this second time around with only a warning.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

And if you did, whining about it in your sleep

isn’t going to help and who’s Spartan enough these days

to stash the fox under their tunic to keep

from being caught while it eats them alive?

If you want to be a dragon you’ve got to learn

to swallow people’s hearts like hot coals as if they were chocolates,

without wincing. The stars don’t come out

like emergency candles you’ve been saving

for exactly this kind of situation. And if

you really want to know the truth about illumination,

try and blow one out. Quick, now, look

and see immediately into the clear light of the void

what it’s like to shine without a metaphoric reflection.

The stars here don’t hide their nakedness under a cloak

of black holes and dwarfs that take it all in

but give nothing back like the second hand clothes

of serpents shedding their skin. One size fits all

like a bubble in a watershed of dark worlds

dazzled by how much a single eye can contain

whether it’s hanging from the lip of a flower in the fall

or going down the drain in spring. I know

you hit it like a snowflake on a furnace

and do your damnedest not to cry. Thing is

as unique among billions as you think you are,

there’s not a star in the sky that isn’t a rite of passage.

PATRICK WHITE

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings

were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time

where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline

of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath

its waterclock after the house had burned down,

the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow

frosting the streets outside and my rage

at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,

weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,

hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars

for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence

that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,

knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted

as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes

an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,

meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat

like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,

I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time

as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword

I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces

like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light

on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute

like the falling of the snow, and remember

when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep

so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down

like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have

sweetened over time like the labour of a human

that tried like the light and the rain

to add an element of heart to the mix

before the work were taken out of his hands

and returned to the root as he must be soon

with a little more love, a little more beauty,

a little more compassion in the visionary tastes

of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams

this passion for life can seem sometimes,

and how strange the vows of the fireflies

we once exchanged, pledging ourselves

to each other’s stars as if they’d forever

remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.

Dream-figures in passage who don’t always

wake up with us when we do and so much

torn like a purple passage out of the book of life

like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do

is share your memories with your solitude

like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,

autumn burning in her green eyes and the council

of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips

where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs

that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now

it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,

all the mystic details conserved like data

in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates

that once banged in the wind like applause,

unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,

and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls

we consulted like new moons every spring,

thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath

gone from the windows we used to draw in

trying to get the light right on our tears

when the sun came out after a lightning storm

and waterguilded the rain that dripped from the leaves

like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,

and gently restored the direction of prayer

to the deranged fields, standing the goblets

of the poppies upright on their altars again,

combing the hairknots out of the disheveled grass,

coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings

to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines

as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill

for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

LIKE A RIVER IN ITS RUNNING, LIKE LIFE, LIKE TIME, LIKE MIND

Like a river in its running, like life, like time, like mind

no point of departure that isn’t also a moment of arrival.

Toxic parasols and meteor showers shot precisely

out of the green radiants of the candling umbrellas

and half-hearted parachutes of the water hemlock.

Starbursts of flowers that scald like welding sparks.

Bouquets thrown backwards over the shoulders of mean brides.

Alone in the high, wild grass, I just want to lie down in the sun

until half of me leaks into my watershed and the other half

evaporates into the cerulean bliss of the oblivious sky,

just breathe myself out into unfathomable volumes of space,

a riff of sacrificial smoke from a guitar on a pyre

as unconcerned as fire about where I’m going from here.

I like the metaphors that spring up like wild irises

along the mindstream, so I guess this is flowing,

though I could as easily be walking down a dirt backwoods road

feeling many of the same things, as I exalted

in the early blossoming of the chicory as a cosmic event

with mystic implications for those who can see

eternity embodied in the earthly simplicity of flowers

and that time, in the long run, has nothing to do with enduring.

I’m going to trample out a deer bed and lie down here

sketching starmaps of this year’s flotilla of waterlilies

until the light of the isoscelean Summer Triangle breaks

like chalk on a blackboard. I want to clear my mind

like the Nazca Plateau and let the fireflies build runways

like well lit jungle zodiacs for the extraterrestrials.

Not expecting the wind to whisper secrets in my ear.

The trees can keep their secrets to themselves.

I’m not here to read the private life of the moon

left open like a diary of telescopic wavelengths

too intimate to be revealed to the one-eyed peeping toms.

Just want to settle into my own wake awhile

like dust kicked up by a wheel, numb the turmoil

on the wonder of things that embrace me as if

I were a stranger to myself the same as them

and our chief function in life, if there’s one at all,

were merely the expression of our presence here

arrayed in the eyes of all like moon rise in a drop of water.

Things flashing into this openness like constellations

of fish and dragonflies in a mirror elaborating their ripples

into flying carpets of musical effusion

that are never out of hidden harmony with chaos

even when seeds are scattered like dice

on the ghost of a chance on the wind lamenting its luck.

Don’t want to mean, or be, or do.

I’ve been through those doors so many times

I’m beginning to think my feet are retrogressive thresholds

or stone mill water wheels grinding out my daily bread

like a Mayan calendar with a new moon at harvest time.

Nothing’s resolved except perhaps you perceive

how the sublimities of life arise like Arcturus

out of its utter insignificance through an opening

in the crown of the black walnut tree you’re lying under.

Whatever I am, whether I bear a message or not,

or I’m just a witness that wasn’t called upon to testify,

comes a time when it seems more fruitive to let

the medium adapt its grammar to me to say what it wants

than I should try to shape it to the unsayable

that always leaves the taste of abandoned books in my mouth.

It’s possible to flute your emptiness through the top

of an empty whiskey bottle making nautical sounds below decks

like the s.o.s. of a lifeboat in distress. Or you can percolate

like a breakfast clutch of black-capped chickadees in the willows

trying to get them to take something seriously for once,

or mock the crows like lumps of coal too cynically short-sighted

to spot the diamonds in their soul. Or you can

stop imitating yourself as if you were the proto-type

of someone who hasn’t made it to the showroom floor yet.

They’re all feasibility studies in pragmatic absurdity.

Given time, any lifemask you’ve carved out of your unlikeness

will grow to resemble you as space

has become a similitude for the dead.

Me? I just want to lie here until all I’ve got left for a voice

is a bird homing in the twilight, and when I roll over

to look in the water and see what remains of me, is a face

as unrecognizable as the universe.

PATRICK WHITE

EXISTING NOCTURNALLY IN A COVERT HOLE IN THE DARK

EXISTING NOCTURNALLY IN A COVERT HOLE IN THE DARK

Existing nocturnally in a covert hole in the dark,

I eat the stars like a trap door spider taking the hood

off its telescope, a black hole ten million times

the mass of the sun, I shine from within, beading

new constellations on my trophy lines from

the corpses of the mummified remains of flying ants,

butterflies, honey bees with medicine bags of gold.

New mandalas of meaning to replace the trite zodiacs

that compile bestiaries of our eyes. I bend the light

perversely to see what lives on the underside of its leaves.

Dawn, my epilogue, I drink jewels like forbidden intimacies

from the heart of the ore, and reel like a drunk

trying to play the guitar, hammered on sapphires,

weeping in sympathy with tragic emeralds

and broken-hearted rubies expansive as red giants

imploding on themselves like bitter, black dwarfs.

I open my mouth like an aviary and let the doves go free.

In the apple-green and peacock blue of dusk

I’m the singing master of a choir of crows

roosting in a bone-box of birches that never bury their own.

I’m the undertaker at a sky-burial of the unidentified remains

that whisper in silence like ghostly nebulae at the mass graves

I gouge out of space like the eye-sockets of black swans

murdered like carbon on the coal road to diamonds

that cut like insight into the meteoric nature of things.

Nightwatchman, I beam my lighthouse through

the window of the sea and check the locks

on the chains of its tides to see if anyone’s been messing

with its dna. I tinker with the fossils of shadows

pressed like flowers between the pages of old love affairs

that read like amorous extinctions in the Burgess Shale

at orgiastic seances with the lyrical daughters of memory

engendering the echoes of muses among the holy mountains

I climbed like scars to see if God had green eyes or not.

I treat my demons with the dignity of noble heretics

and they let me howl with wolf packs on the moon

at the rising of the earth like a striated marble

of water, ice and air glowing in an aura of life

blooming in the impeccable dark of an inconceivable abyss.

I’m still trying to foster an ambivalent truce with angels

that haven’t fallen to earth yet, but give it time

and I’ll convince them of the wisdom of my starmud.

I labour like a mutant to recast the bells of our suffering

into something more radiant than the usual

cannon, nails and ploughs. I want to forge

a sword of moonlight in the burning bush of evolution

and lay it down in tribute on the waters of life

like the plumage of a white rose that didn’t bleed for nothing.

I understand that pain is a great liberator, but a statue

isn’t creative enough anymore to compensate the dead

for the loss of their eyelids, and the faces of the living

stung in squalls of killer bees and snakepits of toxic whips

as if death had a wavelength of its own without a red shift.

Humanity isn’t a consonant. It’s a vowel.

And I say it richly to the empty parsimony of hollow silos

that gape like mouths at the audacity of my dark abundance

talking back to their bright vacancy like a total eclipse

with a chip of the moon on my shoulder

it’s going to take a whole lot more than the threat

of a backward thinking apocalypse to knock off.

Defang the staple-guns of bureaucratic wars.

Put peace on a diet to starve the corporate cannibals.

Establish petting zoos of dangerous reptiles

for the distempered fools of the iron rule says

do unto others before they do unto you

what they so nemetically deserve for shrinking

from the waterstars of life as if they had

a hydrophobic fear of the light turning around

and biting them like an anti-venom in a syringe

they’re flagging with rabies like a rusty bloodstream

cloning them from the stem cells of experimental clowns.

Not to kiss hatred on the other cheek of the moon

but teach it how to wash the feet of the children it’s killed

and taste the coldness of forever in the last kiss

they place on their lunar foreheads before they’re enclosed

in the same darkness lined with nacreous satins

as its victims wear at nightfall, to initiate it solo

into the same excruciating transformations

that must be endured like a karmic sea change

of a children’s crusade of new moons scotched in the seed

by the horrendous ferocity of the creative fire

that will enlighten them eventually like pine-cones

transplanting the roots of evergreens

on a clear cut mountainside of retributive sorrows.

If what I say seems absurd, that’s probably

the right word for it, but if what’s imagined is later proved

let’s embrace our own folly and imagine it

as the crazy wisdom of people with compassionate preferences.

If it’s meaningless inside and out, let’s expand space

to accommodate a meaning of our own making

big enough to lose the whole human race in the labyrinth

of a single fingerprint that identifies with everyone

and all animals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects and plants

as if the whole universe spoke through each of us

in the dream grammar of a common genome talking in its sleep.

Is it any more mad to tilt at quixotic dragons like the earth

at the sun in its helical wheeling through space

than it is to write indelibly in the invisible ink

of a left-handed eclipse in a diary of starmaps?

Let’s rack up an abacus of unified field theories

like quantum leaps out of the orbital ruts of our skulls

on occasions not at the beck and call of our photons

and firecrackers breaking our elemental tables like electrons

or if you’re less rowdy, lawn bowling with the solar system.

Let’s stop experimenting on each other

and calling it love. Let’s stop stitching up our wounds

with razorwire and trying to put a smile

on the face of the scalpels that nick our arms and thighs

and cut our hearts out on sacrificial days of the vernal equinox.

It’s not a choice of the gloriously absurd

in contradistinction to the realistically petty

to grow well beyond the dead metaphors of ourselves

like coral reefs and shipwrecks teeming with life

at the bottom of our unfathomable seas of awareness.

Let’s stop listening for the logic of water

in the conch shells of our cretaceous fortune-cookies

and put the universe up to our ears to hear

the beating our own hearts in the lockets

of our estranged children pleading in bloodbanks

for attention like poppies and field fires in the starwheat.

In limping back from the holy wars in celestial realms

that wrestled with us like angels in our own way

to this earthbound garden of paradise we abandoned

like a ghost town of Incan temples with baleful altars

to the surrealistic imagination of the jungle

it’s crucial to remember there are no weeds to be uprooted

or need to cultivate the wildflowers among

the minor miracles of the morning glory

like native schools of sweetgrass to the genetic modifications

of our way of thinking about the future without a past

we can return to more prodigal than when we left.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE