IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU'RE GOING

IF YOU WORRY ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE GOING

If you worry about where you’re going

before you go, you’re not worthy of the road yet.

If you’re not having some black-hearted fun

with your worst nightmares, because they’re

just as surrealistically absurd as the bliss

of your most recurring dreams are, how

are you ever going to avoid taking yourself literally?

If you’re not crazy enough to wander

through a cemetery saturated with the moon

in the early hours of the morning, trying

to organize a choir of singing gravestones,

how are you ever going to recover a voice of your own?

That dowdy wren you let go of when you first discovered swans?

If you ever want to sweep across the lava plains of the moon

in a rush of emotion of a homecoming ocean,

but you can’t feel the tide in a single drop of water,

you haven’t cried enough yet to drown in your own sorrows

and see everybody’s life flash before your eyes

as you go down in retrospect, wiser than bubbles

in the way you descend like feathers trying to smile.

O, it’s hard here, isn’t it. Isn’t it brutal at times?

All your beautiful teeth knocked out against a concrete curb?

Inoperable cancer. The savage inexplicability

of the death of children it would be sacrilege

to even think there was an acceptable answer

to appease the loss, to satiate the grief. And I know stones

I’ve turned over I wished for years I hadn’t, things I’ve seen

that make me wish I’d never been born with eyes,

that have rendered my nemetic courage dysfunctional,

estranged from the Pleiadic radiance of my seeing

as if it were a black farce on tour in Taurus.

But if you want to shine like the fire of a pioneer star

in the clear light of the void, as I keep reminding myself

like a mantra over and over and over again,

you’re going to light up the intensity of hell

as readily as you do the cruel immensity of heaven

when it terrifies you with joy. Be a brave boy, I say to myself,

resolved to live all the lives of the Tarot Pack

and then go looking for the cards the Sufis say are missing,

just to say and smile at the end of time, if only to myself,

yes, I played all the stations of my life

as if they were the winning hand of an inveterate gambler

calling my own bluff in an unbeatable casino.

Seven come eleven, I’ve rolled my prophetic skulls

up against the wall like a printer in inky coveralls

in the back alley delivery entrance of a cosmic newpaper

on its lunch hour, throwing snake-eyes around

like the fang marks of a prison tat turning to Braille.

If you haven’t blooded your sword by falling on it yet,

and hemorrhaged by a river wild blue irises, just to add

a little Zen beauty to your death in life experience,

if you haven’t felt love slash its nadir across your wrist

and worn it like the talismanic bracelet of an unmentored initiate,

how are you ever going to transit zenith

as if you were crossing the threshold

of that thirteenth house of the zodiac

you raftered with your bones to accommodate your heart,

to cherish your own ashes like the mystery

of the afterlives you had to live through

until you burned like a star that had learned

the art of shining is the art of inexhaustibly letting go?

More doubt in our joy than in our pain, if

you don’t learn to ignore your certainty to the point

you disappear into the abyss of an expanding universe,

giving no second thought to whether you exist or not,

with no nostalgic attachment hovering over your emptiness

like the halo of a black hole, how are you

ever going to evolve the mystic green thumb you need

to root sunflowers in the darkness like neighbouring galaxies?

How are you ever going to adapt to the things you cherish

if you can’t endure the transformations that come with them?

If you skip the cocoon and go straight to the butterfly,

all you’ve really done is traded your birds in for a kite

that doesn’t know how to sit or sing on the power lines

it’s entangled in, nor how to negotiate the wind with wings.

You may glimpse the unattainable, yes, like a moth

at a closed window, wondering what it must be like

to be annihilated in a candle like an old love poem,

but the vision’s not sustainable as a way of life of your own

until you’ve set fire to your own antennae like wicks

that are not consumed by the flame, or extinguished in the rain.

Spiritual diamonds don’t forget where they came from,

their perishable beginnings, and though they can shine

like water and rainbows, their clarity smeared

by the chromatic aberrations of their colour-blind telescopes,

they haven’t forgotten how to burn like bituminous coal

in a basement furnace, or melt the intensity of their emotions

like a glass river making its way to the sea or how to use

a meteoric explosion as a way of sowing adamantine insights

like seed stars in an immaculate ocean of enlightened awareness,

the life-mask of the inconceivable assuming form

to express itself as an event in time that outgrows itself

transcendentally without a revolution or message for anyone

but itself, thereby ensuring, given our inquisitorial nature,

that everything from stars to rocks to apple trees to humans,

overhears it as a revelation of angelic gossip

waxing the long after-hour halls of a demonic institution

that was founded synarthritically on the cornerstones of our skulls.

Zen might be the taste of tea. But if you’d rather spice the water,

do it with all the flavours of life, dip an eclipse

in the full moon of your cup now and again,

and let the darkness work its cure upon you like a spell

deeply steeped in your imagination like a school bell.

Attend to your shadows, not as a theft of flowers,

or the clone of a brighter garden you’ve lost your way back to,

but as mute voices with a grammar all of their own

deep enough to show you the stars you wish upon

from the bottom up of a well with fireflies caught in its throat

it articulates like chimney sparks, even at noon,

or when the black sun shines at midnight

through a clearing in the tree-line of the starfields.

The snake that takes your life grows wings

and turns into the bird and the dragon that uplifts it

with oxymoronic lyrics of fire and rain that are as real

as any symbolic gesture that plays suggestively with your heart

in the cauldrons and fountains of being

that elaborate you as you are, slack water in a mirror

that neither ebbs nor neaps, as the tides reverse direction

like a heartbeat or the flow of your breath.

This mysterious third extreme in between life and death

where everything you sought among the mountain peaks

finds you at the moment of your withdrawal

from your circuitous passage through the valley of longing.

And in every emotive thought, the serpentine wavelength

of the immensity of the transcendent silence

overwhelms you with the intimate impersonality

of its approach to you in every risky step you take toward it.

PATRICK WHITE

SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

SWEETER THAN THE BEGINNING OF A DELUSION

Sweeter than the beginning of a delusion

it wouldn’t be wisdom to resist, I see

waterlilies burning votive candles on the Fall River.

Even in winter, chandeliers of blood red chokecherries

feting the pheasant, the quail, the hermit thrush.

Mutable mind, mutable heart, out of this bleak night

of frozen waterclocks, I summon irrevocable time

to break the ice on my eyes and let me drink the stars again

from the unattainable grails of a prophetic skull

tormented by impossible longings the way I once was

when I walked with you beside the whisper of this river

after a summer rain, knowing it wasn’t me

you were crying for. You befriended the cure,

but you were in love with a wound, and I,

unwise in the way a lover’s blood

could taste of thorns forever as if each

were the gravestone of a rose you tried

to bury deep inside yourself like a moonrise

that came up every night to shed its petals on you

like the phases of the dead opening the fresh scars

of their eyelids over and over again to shock you

with the hydra-headed budding of your pain---I

who was an exorcism, could never hurt you like that,

even as you were a seance summoned by a ghost

I never tried to dispossess you of. Love, but not with me

as my voice disappeared into the silence

like a waterbird through a curtain of broken prayer beads

falling away like tears from my wings, like a carillon

of tiny bells that knew they’d never have anything

sweeter to sing about than that moment

they held their tongues and listened to the way

you talked about the moonlight gracing the waterlilies

as if you were addressing a loveletter to someone

so deeply embedded in your heart it made

the distance to the stars almost seem intimate

though it was your eyes I listened to in silence

as the river passed for the next thirty years not certain

if I bloomed like a man or died beside it like a child that night.

PATRICK WHITE

I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN'T SO DEEP INSIDE

I WOULD MISS YOU IF YOU WEREN’T SO DEEP INSIDE

I would miss you if you weren’t so deep inside.

I would send the fireflies out like a search party

to beat the bushes and the stumps to see where you hide

were you not the stars within that lead me home.

I would cry out in anger and tears, World, you are not fair,

were you not the mystic intimate of my indignation.

I would look upon the illuminated world

thriving in its garden, and accuse the sun of being blind

did I not see more in your eclipse, the abundance

of your darkness, than I do by the vacant light of day.

Let others bathe like birds in the fountainmouths

of happier lyrics, I drown in your watershed,

a starfish on the moon, and the darkness shines

like a nightsea the colour of your eyes. And there’s a sky

full of shipwrecked constellations without lifeboats

that went down into fathomless time with all hands on board

like a cargo of bones that reached its destination

by giving them all up to you, like yarrow sticks

to the Book of Changes, whether you read them as such or not.

Nine in the fifth place. Enlightenment in hell.

I am the nightwatchman with the moon for a lantern

that strikes the bell of his heart three times and says

all is well, all is well on the bottom of the sea.

I would be planting supernovas like a terrorist with i.e.d.s

in the Milky Way by now to add to the chaos

were you not the black hole of a galactic inspiration

that’s mastered me like a magic latent in the heart

to burn the sum of all my destructions in a blaze of insight

by which the light is known to the light, the way

a tree is by a breeze, or ashes know the fire’s out.

How could I reach out to you except with your own hands?

How could I speak to you in any way you’d understand

did not your voice coax the words from my mouth

like a dream grammar of sacred syllables betokening

the things of the earth like the echo of a prayer we forgot?

Too intimate to be the principle of anything

and yet your impersonality can only be approached

with tenderness, like a feather floating through space,

or the cloud that grounds the mountain like the cornerstone

of a temple to the emptiness it floats upon.

Were you not the valley my grieving shadow wanders through

like the lachrymose theme of another lonely psalm

trying to palm itself off as poem, how could the eagles

shriek eureka in the heights at the very next insight

into the nature of your vulnerability moving down below?

We might both dance to the same music as if it were true,

but you’re the silent witness when I listen to the wind,

you’re the charmed locket of darkness the light conceals,

you’re the secret jewel that’s wholly transparent

to all the eyes in the universe that have spent their lives

looking for you like a sky that’s been hidden from sight

right over their heads and under their feet

like an atmosphere and ocean that never left the moon.

Even here on earth, the silver fish are frenzied in your tide.

Lunar horses graze like waves on your seagrass

and run wild when you spook them like an ocean

with a bit in your hands, and the look of an angry teacher.

If your absence were not deeper than my solitude

how could I resist the consolations of oblivion

and carry on as if I’d never missed you? Who

would I long for to affirm my presence in this emptiness

that engulfs me like an eye with something in it

like a star that can’t be washed out? I was not

born a warrior to surrender to anyone less than you.

I do not open my heart and my mouth to sing

lullabies to houseflies growing dozy on the windowsills

as the cold comes on like the sheet music of ice.

Who would I dedicate the works of my nightshift to

like the journal of a dark demon writing to himself

about the spiritual intricacies of jumping from paradise

just to meet you naked in the garden again

as if we were born to be exiled together by the pain

that is visited like swarms of killer bees upon those

who break taboos like white canes over our knees

and throw their cornerstones around like dice

to entice blind luck into taking a chance on their disobedience?

Who would inherit the crazy wisdom of my human divinity

if I did not know how many lives you’ll outlive me

like the randomness of an alibi based upon a truth

that reprieves everyone from death on desolation row

by undermining the limits of our culpability with compassion.

You, the sorceress of meaning, you, the beast mistress

of my savage emotions, you, the fire sylph at the hearth

of my homeless wandering into these evictions of self

that bury the days with no names on their graves.

You shake the lightning like a spear of fury in a lion’s skull.

You wake the dragon from its dream of lotus fire

You touch me on a night when nothing else will

as if I were real, and the solidity of my atoms sublimates

like a ghost of dry ice into a mirage in space

so I could see in the grand paradigm of things

even the most enduring pyramids in a desert

are the work of the wind when the mind is inspired

to move things around like the grave goods of the heart

in the hands of a tomb robber that frees us of them

to travel light without baggage through the gates of Orion.

The past has no need of any other afterlife than the present

nor the future the prelude of a promise of better things to come.

Born into a life with a ferocious childhood for an introduction,

I have grown young again in the ashes of those fires,

like a skin transplant of flowers over a burnt face

to hide the scars, and give the stars some space.

PATRICK WHITE  

ALWAYS IT SEEMS A SOLITUDE AWAY

ALWAYS IT SEEMS A SOLITUDE AWAY

Always it seems a solitude away

from what I think I’m looking for.

Every step along the path, a precipice.

Another black hole in the middle of a third eye.

Call me Icarus. Even at sixty four

breaking out of one cosmic egg after another,

only to fall like a fledgling from the nest

at my own rootless standing in the world

or be swallowed whole by some reptile

like the moon and be regurgitated,

a used condom, a candling parachute,

a lunar phase of a snake shedding its skin.

At one point in his life he was so intense

he was the mainspring of a wind-up waterclock

or a pulse, now he’s hanging on

like a single wavelength to a mindstream

that’s flattened out into a perma-press abyss,

no crests, no troughs. The gas furnace

shudders when it dry coughs, a cold engine

trying to make a new start like a nightbird

in a dead tree in a frozen swamp. Shhhh

don’t wake the mosquitoes up. I’m still

trying to get over the welts of my last exposure

to the literary scene. I don’t want my blood thinned

at either end of the food chain. Doomed to drown,

let it be in something deep, not shallow.

Let my shipwreck lie in peace on seafloors of starmud

not tidal pools or puddles. I want to give God

a good scare for once because love doesn’t have

an accumulative effect. Too much beginning

not enough death. You can’t learn to breathe

by holding your breath. Here comes the dawn

like a janitor to a school for remedial living.

But what more does an ageing red-tailed hawk

have to say to the seagulls and pigeons,

aeronautical opportunists who can’t help

flapping and hovering the way they do

over the rooftops and fire hydrants

of a garbage dump that takes pride in its waste,

than a switchblade’s got to relate to a drawer full of cutlery?

What do the butter knives know about clawing

their way through life with the talons of eagles?

Or being so clear-eyed since you first broke

into this house of life, you leave so little evidence behind,

investigators arrest a mirror in a case of mistaken identity?

Or asked to give witness from your upstairs apartment window,

about what you saw on the night of the wolf moon,

you speak like the cloud cover of a screening myth

because the stars weren’t out and you spent the night

by yourself looking eyelessly down on the street

where nothing ever, ever, ever happens

and the streetlamps only quarrel among themselves

in the summer when the fireflies get away with everything

like freelance constellations on a starmap, and they get the blame

though they’ve gone straight all their lives?

Nights like this, things get so weird

I can hear the future calling to me like a seance.

And Cassiopoeia had she appeared would have

looked like an electric chair in a brown out of shining

that must have come like Jupiter

as a big disappointment to the sun.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

IF YOU HAD ANY COMPASSION FOR YOURSELF

If you had any compassion for yourself,

others wouldn’t have to suffer for you

and the world wouldn’t show you

such a sad, woeful, wounded face.

You wouldn’t see the withering leaves

and petals of the rose in autumn

as merely the scar tissue of its thorns.

In winter, mend your severance.

In spring, attend to your joys.

Like fishing nets and snow fences.

Like delphiniums in a garden bed

that’s beginning to bloom like a starmap.

And you know that stranger inside

that’s always witnessing everything we do

like a perfectly clear mirror, even in dreams?

Take another look, you might be surprised

at whose face you see at a meeting of eyes.

It’s important not to pass judgement on yourself

for fear of condemning the world.

Show me a mirage that isn’t a friend to water

or a wishing-well that resents a rainbow

for the pot of gold at the end, though

no one ever knows which end at the time.

Be kind to your delusive paradigms of life,

as you would an old skin you shed like the moon

when your serpent-fire could no longer contain itself

and broke out of its sacred chrysalis like a dragonfly

that had made itself a house of life out of matchsticks

and went up in flames like a snake with wings.

If you could see your life for what it is,

a teaching device for mentoring your own enlightenment

you might read the books of all the sages

rooted and flowering in you like the wisdom of a seed,

or the star in the ore of a panspermic universe

that was planted in you like the garden you’ve been from birth.

You might think that the wildflowers

are looking up at the stars to understand themselves

but, in truth, they’re looking up at their roots

like rain reveres the lightning that engenders it.

You don’t need to convince the wind of your freedom,

you’ve just got to ride it out to the end,

a friend to yourself, a worthy companion,

the intimate familiar of a cloud with a clear blue sky

or a subliminal lover of the darkness

love mushrooms up in like a moonrise.

If you knew how to nurture yourself

by breaking bread with the spirit of life within you

there wouldn’t be millions of children

all over the world who will go hungry tonight.

They’d be licking the spoon with stealthy laughter

like cookie-batter out of the begging bowl of your heart.

Enlightenment isn’t going to add one ray of light

or a single star to the night you’re already shining in,

and whatever wavelength you’re on, regardless

of the mystic polarities your potential flows between,

like dark matter and light, whether the journey you’re on

is orange or infrared or the blue white violet of the Pleiades,

absorption or emission spectrum alike, no wave

of thought or mind, light, heart or water

is discontinuous with the oceanic consciousness

they rise upon, so why turn back to the source

like a solar flare to ask for directions from a starmap

that sent you out like a bubble in the multiverse to look for land.

You know, if you were more of an explorer

without a preconceived destination, more

of a space probe leaving the solar system periodically,

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lost or out of place at your table.

And even if you’ve made a vehicle

of the wheel of birth and death

and think you have a firm grasp on things

with your arm out the window in the driver’s seat,

enjoying the passing view with the wind in your hair

without clinging to anything along the way

it still might be a good idea to learn how

to come down off your throne like a pauper

and change a flat tire now and again.

Your life is not an untimely interruption of eternity.

The eternal sky does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds,

and it even bends down sometimes toward the earth

to pick up Venus like a lost earring in the sunset.

It’s your point of view that turns your back on yourself

like the retrograde motion of Mars, not

the planet itself playing rope tricks with your spinal cord.

Why go looking for your mind

like a lighthouse with a flashlight,

a flame for the source of the fire

or a star for the constellation it belongs to,

or the homeless for a home when everyone’s

the foundation stone of their own habitation

wherever they are at the moment.

If you chase the wind, it will be you

that loses its breath like the atmosphere of the moon.

And when you run out of air, breathe light, breathe space,

and don’t try to fix an expanding universe

to your nostrils like a bicycle pump

to get you back on the road again.

Or you’ll find you’re swimming out of your depths

to run to the rescue of an empty lifeboat

that’s already unloaded its contents ashore.

If you don’t want to go blind as a starless night

it’s prescient to eclipse your blazing from time to time,

turn the lights down low, snuff the candle,

and learn to see in the dark there’s just as much reflected

in the depths of the dark abundance

of a black mirror, though it takes time to focus,

than there is in the expansiveness

of the bright vacancy of the white

that takes things in at a glance.

The seed of a every glimpse of insight contains

the whole of the vision in advance,

and at the core of the apple of the issue

is a green star with dark auburn eyes

on the nightshift of the maternity wards of spring.

And o come on now, how long can you hang on

to being this box kite on a string

watching another phoenix ride your thermals

like inspiration on the wing, without feeling

like the premature ghost of yourself at the onset of spring,

all smoke, and no fire, your flightfeathers smouldering

like a pyre of wet maple leaves who haven’t got the courage

to break into flames and flap their wings and rise above it all.

Better to be a weather balloon losing altitude like Icarus

or even a candling parachute taking the fall for all of us,

as daring said feathers and falling took flight,

than not risk falling through the black holes of life to paradise?

And what if I were to tell you’re they’re just the pupils

the light enters through like your eyes into your imagination

to be transformed from a visual into a vision,

the visible form into the invisible shining of the spirit

that raises everything in the known and unknown multiverse,

and the trees and the stars, the rocks and the clouds

are all counting on you to do this for them,

because this is what you’re here for,

if you’ve ever wondered,

to raise them up to eye-level

with a human who knows the names of things

like parents know the names of their own children

running toward them down the street. It’s how

we were meant to meet and greet the universe.

So if once, just once, for my sake, your sake, the sake

of the forsaken with their elbows on the windows of the world tonight

watching it all go by like stars on the firewalks beneath their noses,

that are not embedded in cement like a mausoleum

of movie-stars that refused to become fossils

before their shining was spent,

you took a chance, and that’s all it would take,

one step forward with no return address,

to risk falling down at the dance,

and seven times down, eight times up,

such is life, get up on your own two good feet again

and discover you’ve got wings and spurs on your heels

the rest of us wouldn’t feel so lame

when we came over to your place

like a riot of erratic fireflies to celebrate

the lightning moves of the rain that’s dancing on our graves

where the dead lie down like the corpses of candles

knowing they’ll be reincarnated

as wildflowers and Luna moths

because nothing that’s ever given its life up

to this business of shining on everything alike

from a first magnitude star, to the night light in the hall

that shoos the ghosts away from their portraits on the wall

so the whole world can bloom in the tears of your eyes,

the fire in your heart, and in the human divinity

of the spirit of your imagination, can ever be put out

because every shadow of doubt

leads back the light that cast it

in love and sorrow, time and space

to the life and death mask of your own face.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

The day with no ambitions. Grey. Grey.

Stained-glass stars chained at the window,

Medusan mobiles hang like jellyfish,

motionless solar systems frozen in time,

mystic blue of burned out candle holders,

their flicker of light, a Monarch butterfly

in winter, perfectly intact, a wick in a pool of wax.

Sunday morning. Five churches open.

No carillon of bells. Four liars and one

that’s trying to face the facts. Bank, cafe,

Mac’s, gas station, a hospital with a landing pad

helicoptering the week-end’s heart attacks to Ottawa.

Soiled snow slobbering in the gutters

of a bleak street. Heritage fieldstone

refitted with aluminium windows, grandpa

in sunglasses where the old meets the new.

Among the local tribes, Scottish settlers,

Irish immigrants, British half pay officers,

even if you’ve lived here a hundred and fifty years

you’re still passing through. Good-bye. Good-bye.

Not enough dead in my past to be one of you.

A chubby adolescent primes his black baseball cap,

hitches up his pants, swings the door open

to the crowded cafe where there might be girls

as lonely as he is, and makes a hopeful grand entrance.

A grey haired woman darts from the bank

like a sparrow who knows her business.

Retirement capital of Canada, things advance

from accident to accident like the old woman

last summer who stopped her car without warning

in the middle of the road and got out to ask

the passers-by if anyone knew how to park it.

The lamp posts straight as florist’s daffodils

but one uprooted by a drunk, leaning like a mast

to starboard, counterpointing the upright by contrast.

An orange cone, thumb-tacking the spot

something happened out of the usual to make

Sunday worth talking about after the plates

are pushed away and the waitress comes to the table

knowing what everyone takes in their coffee

without having to ask if they’re from here or not.

Everyone lives as if they’d just read The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock, though I doubt they’ve heard of Eliot.

You can tell by the way they walk how long

they’ve been landlocked beside the Rideau Canal

without mermaids, though they stock the lakes

with fingerlings of small mouth bass for American fishermen.

All well and good, I say, all well and good

though the suicide rate among the teen-agers

is the highest in the valley, I’m not passing judgement

from the God’s eye view of my upstairs apartment window.

I’m not logging the cadavers of dead trees

in the cemetery of a frozen swamp in winter.

I’m not trying to thaw the dreams of the mosquitoes out

beside the stove. Life here is a home remedy

for everything, mystic bumbleberry pies cooling

on the farmyard windowsills of rustic sibyls

who usually know more about what you need

than you do in the afterlife of some psychic catastrophe

and more often than not are uncannily right.

When it’s not being shown how to do things the smart way,

talent is quietly scorned by the schadenfreude

of incontestable skills that know how to fix it on their own.

Confess your helplessness with inquisitive humility

and everyone turns into Aristotle in a teaching cave

and shows you how to patch a leak in your radiator

on the cheap with eggs and pepper, or keep

the window in your woodstove clean by making

a paste of its ashes and rubbing it into your third eye

to get the soot and creosote off the way a poet

looks at things sometimes like an ambassador in chains

through a glass darkly, burning like a cubic cord

of green wood hissing at what the nightbirds used to sing

before the chainsaws showed up like a chorus

of morose delectation in the perils of insufficiency.

Better not to wear your surrealism on your sleeve

and keep your longings to yourself. If you get caught

crying out loud over some real or imagined agony

and you’re not a girl, things can get dismissively rougher.

Real men don’t waste their time feeling things

that can’t be fixed with tools. Fortunately for me

I’ve got a paint brush and a canvas I stretch

like a tarp on a pickup, though the poetry’s

harder to explain than the logic of metaphors

in a hardware store with emergency generators on sale.

Isolation’s just a red shift in solitude and my loneliness

is a small price to pay to get a lot of work done

like Roger Bacon in a woodshed without being accused

that often, of witchcraft. More hermetic by acclamation

than intent, an occupational hazard of what I do,

I’ve always got the river at night if I need someone to talk to,

and the companionable eyes of the stars to overcome

the cruelty of my cosmic cabin fever when space

turns to glass, and it gets so cold and impersonal in the abyss

even death shudders like a calving glacier when it realizes

how much holier things seem in my absence

than it could ever hope to be while I remained alive

to put the lie to it, like people in a small town, who survive.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE MILKY WAY LEAVES A TRAIL OF MIRRORS LIKE A GARDEN SNAIL

THE MILKY WAY LEAVES A TRAIL OF MIRRORS LIKE A GARDEN SNAIL

The Milky Way leaves a trail of mirrors like a garden snail

across the night sky. After the wounded joy. The scar

of enlightenment on the waters of life. A flash of insight

many years ago when a firefly emerged from the shadows

like a mandarin of Zen after a lightning storm and there’s been

no starmap for the creative turbulence in the valley of my heart

ever since I graduated with thorny laurels

from an abandoned schoolhouse of doors

that taught me to open them for myself. Now I’m the master

of a shipwreck under full sail on the moon.

But don’t be dazzled by all the hype. If you die into living

more immensely, even the apricot blossoms

when they come to the green bough with the incredible voice

after the marrow in your bones has been frozen

like the plasmatic slush of a winter dusk on the road,

are mythically incomparable to the cool bliss of the stars

that illuminated the afterlife you lived before this that made

every spring thereafter seem a post-mortem effect by contrast.

Meditatively I sit on a tatami mat of rusty finishing nails

practising the suppler Yoga of pine needles

under a broken evergreen with casts of snow on its branches

on an outcrop of rock over a lake I keep returning to

as if I lived here once like a waterbird and left something behind

like a reflection of mine with eyes that drowned in me

when I was walking on thin ice in the dark that growled

like an unchained dog, to get to the other side

of swimming like a hourglass with waterwings for lungs

on the estranged side of the moon, without hope,

when the silence forgot how to sing and every lightyear

I sank deeper into exile with an uncanny smile on my face.

The bush wolves howl. And everything that is

sad, mad, wild and lonely about me answers back

as if time were trying to express what it’s like to be mortal

and have a past it’s sometimes hard not to miss.

Wolf moon, snow moon, hunger moon, waxing,

Spica in the hand of Virgo, Capella and the kids,

Regulus, Aldebaran, Sirius, Orion and the Lion

the Pleiades garlanding the horns of the Bull for sacrifice

to the chthonic goddess of the island in the bay

that’s more witch than warlock by the way

the cedars thicken like mascara on the treeline.

I look at stars with the same anticipation I felt

when I used to check my flowers first thing in the morning

to see if any had opened like supernovas in the night

while I was dreaming about the light being a gardener that transplanted

hydromorphic constellations into a starmap that never uprooted its weeds.

Detached and free enough to be emotional about the dead

I scatter the ashes of my heart like things I’ve felt and said

swept like a gust of stars and snow off the thresholds

of my seeing by the silver green brooms of the moonlit junipers

that try to keep the flying carpets of the hillsides clean

of the Arctic mirages the mind tracks in like a zodiac

with bestial house manners, wherever I think it might do

the undernourished roots of the waterlilies of dark matter

the most good. I mulch my solitude with autumnal memories

of equal nights and days at the crossroads of my ecliptics

and celestial equators like the tree rings of spring in my heartwood.

Though my tears keeping jumping orbitals like ripples of rain

there always a discharge of light out of all proportion

after a quantum release of every mystic singularity

of a firefly at the heart of the galaxy from a black hole of pain.

I don’t cling to my leaves in winter, nor grieve when

the blossoms of spring let go of me like thousands of poems

free as geishas in the gutters of my starmud to shine where they please.

Like one old mushroom once said like the bald head of a man,

the birds are flying in my roots, the fish are swimming

in the crowns of my trees. And I know as well as he

what hour it is. The midnight sun breathes in its sleep

through the gills of Pisces. A virgin sows

the unploughed moon with beards of starwheat.

PATRICK WHITE