BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

for Pat, Jeremy, Sarah and Sean

to the memory of their mother, Linda Robertson

Maybe if we all started out relating to each others’ deaths

we’d do a lot better loving one another while we’re alive.

Even in the heart of the swallow, the great finality

of our blood dropping the heavy red curtains on the play

stepping out of them from a womb like the sea

contained in a medicine bag of water with nine holes in it always

leaking out of itself like a body learning to walk on land,

loosely mastering one medium after another, water for land,

land for air, air for space until we get to the gateway

of the clear light of the void where the masters unlearn

their wisdom to go skinny-dipping in their eyes again

forgetting everything about what it was they were supposed to know

as they revel in being more buoyant than innocence or bliss.

Before we step back behind the curtains to listen for an encore.

This is the floating world where the waterclocks

run like wavelengths, serpents, Pleiosaurs, Loch Ness monsters,

as if someone were stitching the seam of a lake up

like a sail they intend to raise like a moonrise

on the masts of the tree line anchored in earth like a fleet in port.

And the waterlilies rooted like the rigging

of our lifelines, umbilical and spinal cords

to our starmud, are what the hands of a clock do

in their off time, or when they withdraw their shadows at noon

and time stops as if its petals had returned

to the bud again like a snake with its tail in its mouth.

Dark abundance fulfilling the potential of its bright vacancy

over and over again like a stranger walking down

a long road alone, all her thoughts and feelings,

shadows of the moon, stars breaking unspeakably beautiful

through the crowns of the trees intimately whispering

to one another, Who is she? Who is she?

As her imagination welds the wounded shards

of the constellations, gathers up every splinter of a star

she’s washed out of her eyes in tears, or plucked

like a thorn from her foot that pierced her

like the path she was on at the time like a firewalk

and makes of all that light, not a broken starmap,

but a mirror she can see her face in like a housewell

scanning the sky for fireflies like the first signs of her arrival.

Who among the evergreens has ever been

so intimate with death they know enough to fear it?

Hasn’t life been carrying us forth as long as death

has been eloping with the bride? The empty bucket

of the new moon tangled in morning glory

is lowered like a coffin into the dark waters of life

and winched up by the wheel of birth and death

comes up like the lost coin we retrieved from the river

like the one they place between our teeth when we die

full and bright as the harvest moon everytime

we take a bath in our own graves without holding our breath

like pearl divers seeking the white and black eyes of the moon

in the depths of their souls as we rise and fall

like Orphic skulls, shipwrecks and eclipses

bobbing and sinking on our own thought-waves,

the mountains we climb as high as the valleys we plunge into

are deep and inexplicable. Everyone, even a Buddha,

is a sophomore of life on earth. Foolishly wise, wisely foolish,

but look how dangerous it is to send our children to school

to learn about death as if it were something

you couldn’t hide from them by closing your eyes

like the happy ending of a fairytale they’ll out grow

believing in like garden snakes shedding their skin

as if you lied to them without meaning to because

death isn’t anything you can live your way through

without accepting the dark wisdom of the enlightened eclipse

even at noon that folds the tents of the flowers up

and sends them back to their beginnings

like the unopened loveletters of the pine cones

that bloom in fire, and the night lilies that open

the eyes of the water to the mysteries and metaphors

they hold in common with the root fires of the stars.

Our seeing is a living turmoil of mud and water

not a glass shard we’re looking through darkly

to protect our vision from the sun in eclipse

as if you had to wait till you got to heaven to clean your lens

or wipe the dirt and crumbs of a bad dream out of your eyes.

Whenever we occasionally come to peace with ourselves

like a sea of awareness on good terms

with its own mental weather, kingfishers in the sunlight,

skimming the fire-gilded waves, or no one

in the wheelhouse of the zodiac in a great, Pacific storm,

everything is reflected clearly in the stars and the clouds

that pass overhead like the prayer beads of the Canada geese

returning like empty urns in the spring to gather up

the dead again when the leaves begin to fly in the fall

and take them somewhere eternal where they get

to shine a light on it all like a new medium

they’re learning to work with to express themselves

as sentience always will like a hidden secret

that wanted to be known by whispering whole galaxies

in the black holes of our ears listening like seashells

on the far shores of the islands of light we’re washed up on

like a message in a bottle we sent to ourselves in a past life

like the Cutty Sark, and arks of doves and crows under full sail

we sent out looking for land, knowing full well, one

would be delayed by what it found as its feathers changed

from white to black, and the other would be sent back

like a sign of peace that rinsed the bloodstain of the red sky

in the morning like a false dawn out of the white flags of surrender

that blow like curtains of snowbunting and white star

from the open windows of spring gaping in incredulity

at what time it is with so many hands of the wildflowers

pointing at all hours of the clock, day and night, as if there were

time enough for everything when the mindstream

weathers the flashflood of its own tears and comes to rest

like the Burgess Shale at the top of a mountain far to the west.

Sophocles once said never to have been born is best

as if death were the solution to the tragic horror of a painful dilemma.

When has life ever not been just as open behind us

as it is up ahead? But surely his one-eyed advice is the crutch

and flying buttress lambda leans on and not to die

like the Conservation of Data Principle in a black hole doesn’t

is the better of two worlds when less is more and more is less

and death doesn’t spread the lungs of the hourglass out

like the wingspan of a blood eagle or the waters of the Red Sea

closing up after us like wounded curtains healing after the play.

More like immortal bees returning to their hives at night

to churn honey out of the eyes that looked upon them in the light

and tasted the sweetness of life at work in the starfields

in the belt of Orion, in the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades,

in the Mons Veneris of the Beehive star cluster between

Regulus in Leo and Castor and Pollux in Gemini

gleaming like first magnitude insights into why

we die to live and live to die like fireflies and stars

rising like new constellations over the event horizons

of our eyes that never fail like waterlilies to take us by surprise.

PATRICK WHITE  

I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I have seen the stiff, brittle leaf that clung

to the tree of life throughout the unforgiving winter

like the flagging page of a gnostic gospel at half mast

drop off in the spring to make room for the green underneath.

Strange timing, as the stars give up the nightshift

for the graveyard, Virgo complementing Pisces

on a colour wheel, but maybe its poem

were meant for the snow as it lingers in the doorway

of a long farewell, a faithful flame of the burning bush

in the annals of fire, one last testament to love

as if a silver tongue in the moonlight couldn’t say as much

about the mystery of life as the sacred syllable

of one old woman dying in an albino hospital could

as if time itself would be uprooted by her death.

The saying and the said. The coming and going

of stars and waterbirds, the searching tendrils

of words from the heart that reach out to touch

the grieving world like grapevines reading Braille,

like the promise of chandeliers of new planets

growing like wine under the wings of their leaves.

Sometimes best just to sit at the edge of a death bed

like a Buddhist monk and say nothing about

where the ghosts of those we love go uncoiling

like the smoke of a candle as if the nightwatchman

of a passing wind had just blown all the stars out

as the exhausted pain in the eyes of the morning

comes on like the numb grey of a hollow dawn

too early in the spring for the shepherd moon of the heart

to wholly thaw, for the exile and the orphan to weep beside

the rivers of Babylon like glacial windowpanes

calving into a sea of awareness like an ice-age giving way.

The mind peeks like a skeleton through a keyhole

into an abyss into the green room of an oracle

that’s taken off her wig of snakes offstage to remember

in the black mirror of her ambivalent prophecy

that doesn’t lie about such things, who she is

under the deathmask of the moon that falls

like the crone phase of a blossom from the dead branch.

Unborn it’s been said. Unperishing. No more

waxing and waning of a pulse, no more sunsets

and nightfalls under her eyelids, no more dreams

of waking up in the morning exhilarated by starlings

nesting in the calderas and chimneys of the old crematoria

that made ashes of her passions, and sowed seeds

in the starfields of the wildflowers in the wake of the fire

that consumed her evergreens like heretics at the stake of themselves.

Are we awarded wings by the wind for enduring

a lifetime of the transitory like a rock in the river of time?

The deathshead of the Hell’s Angels patched like colours

to our back, or the flightfeathers of mourning doves

returning to the green bough of a black walnut tree,

our coffins smothered like underground guitar cases in the decals

and leaves of the places we’ve been to sing ouR hearts out

in one station of life to the next along the road

that always leads us like the voices of nightcreeks

through the woods to clearings we’ve never stood

and looked up at the stars as if we’d never seen them before.

Like faces in the audience waiting for us to open our mouths,

like willows tuning the strings of our battered guitars

as if they wanted to know what it was like to weep from the heart

like a human growing soft, blue shades of stargrass

on our graves, or the flowing jewels of the sad, sad, eyes

that kill us back into life with the beauty of the melancholy

we’ve conjured out of the ore of our scars, as if our tears

were water-gilding the treble clefs and kells at the beginning

of every lyric we sing, leafed in gold sprouting

from the sacred letters of the alphas and omegas

running in the rain like an alphabet of blood freaked with light

not even death can wash out of the sheets like the music of life

burning its face like a moondog into the shrouds of our cloud cover.

As if it were nothing for us to leave our fingerprints on the air

like our names written in our breath disappearing on cold windows

like the last word of the moon’s lost atmosphere leaving home,

like the pollen of auroral roses dancing in delight

for the midnight sun like the undulant veils of the wind

that reveal us to ourselves like the sea to a widow walk,

parting the constellations, spider webs and fishing nets

in the unfathomable depths of our eyes we’re entangled in

like Delphinus rising over the fossilized remains of the cedar trees

standing like burning ladders up to heaven in the rootfires of earth.

Our gravestones can’t say but a whisper of it all.

They don’t speak for what lies under them.

Their rumours of life don’t travel very far compared

to the myth of origin of the dandelions that grow

all around them, scattering their seeds like stars with parachutes,

letting the light fall gently like down from a nest

or Leo in the west just after sunset or east of the dawn

when the cock crows at midnight and the owl wakes at noon.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.

It’s me that hurts. But without meaning to,

I’m bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.

A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink

before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,

to make sure it isn’t toxic. No goat skull in a well

of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.

What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell

and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit

it’s hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream

with your waking life, though they’re both just two waves

of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis

at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart

is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans

shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.

And I’m not as mindless in love as I should be,

though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled

from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon

as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances

along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,

I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries

eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows

pecking out their eyes like dark jewels

in a crown of thorns. And there’s a feeling

with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth

of an orphaned universe that resonates within me

like the poignancy of the embrace of one

of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears

with a star’s worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread

left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I’d

break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it

if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering

as I’ve heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,

just to make things better a little bit, if I could,

though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,

knowing among the selfish and indifferent,

a gift is a kind of minority protest

that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality’s just a truce people make with the way things seem

and what they don’t understand, a consensus

of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials

in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.

Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,

The chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,

but what it does, whether you agree or disagree,

is what moves me to underground rivers of tears

that flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory

to want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,

or smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.

To die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,

and the animals enter death as if they were observing

the protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours

but to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see

the labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring

extinction after extinction to express their shining in us

as if we were the content of the message

they sent on ahead of themselves and we can read

so much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it

like a child’s eyes, or the luster of a lover’s hair

in a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man

who smiled upon us because he knew he was younger

than we were, and the return journey

was better than the first because from cradle to grave,

he knew the beginning walks with us all the way

like a star through the leafless trees

that’s following us home at night down

one long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams

to one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.

To die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.

To love deeply and see what we’ve cared for,

unspared and squandered as if time had no more use for it

and there was nothing rare or precious that wasn’t rendered

more fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns

for the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming

who could ever claim they were who

they were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery

of what we’re doing here in the first place

trying to wake up in time to find out why we doubt

our own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime

to love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing

we’ve never met, to enlighten our disappearance?

What doorways of farewell must linger in us yet

for all the graves we’ve already filled

with everything we’ve ever loved, autumn after autumn,

like wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,

each trying to fill another’s bucket of emptiness

with the rush of their own blood

like the emergency exit out of a burning theater

featuring a seasonal re-run of the lies

we tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?

Yet here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.

Delivered and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity

like a darkness it’s already the ore of waiting to be refined

like stars emerging in the night, flowers

from the starmud of the earth and though

we have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves

that are capable of breathing in the light

of mystic atmospheres one planet isn’t enough to cling to,

most of us still candle back to the earth we arose from

like weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.

As a playwright looking back in anger once said.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion kisses the burn.

We get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.

The secret’s out in the open which is the best place to hide,

if you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.

Now you see it. Now you don’t. It sees you.

And you draw the blind. But the sunflowers

turn with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise

and in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished

like the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,

and there’s a scent of smoke in the air

that makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life

and how there’s even a palpable beauty in the passage

of the fallen leaves among our gravestones

that’s always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead

that can’t shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost

from the future, summoned to this seance of now

by a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars

light years before either they or we will even know we’re dead.

PATRICK WHITE

THE EMPOWERED POET GETS NO SLEEP

THE EMPOWERED POET GETS NO SLEEP

The empowered poet gets no sleep.

There are lines written on his forehead

that his eyes must see in the dark.

Time, destiny, the shells he shucked

for the pearls of the moon

in the middens of his heart.

Spring moves like serpent fire

through the xylem and phloem

of the wild apple tree breaking into blossom

like the voice of a forgotten lover

recanting her long denial.

Soon the lilacs tinting the air

with the fragrance of guest-room pillow cases

embroidered with the memories of old women

spinning the threads of fate

they snap between their teeth,

and swept wing swallows in a ballet

of aeronautics dedicated to survival

when the gnats and flying ants are dancing

like globular starclusters in the sunset

above the tarpaper roof tops.

He waits for words he dropped in the fall

to reach the bottom of his wishing wells

like an echo of birds in the tree rings

of his heartwood carved into fledgling arrows

fletched like the fountainheads of twilight comets

smudging the western sky like chalk

on a blackboard starmap of fireflies.

The silence talks to the ghosts

at the seance of his crowded solitude

and his tears are spiked with flavours of laughter

wadded under his desk like dead gum

that school him in the labyrinths of the Thus Come

as he freefalls through the cracks

of what he had to do and what was done

by a human standing in the shadow of God

like a single-petalled sundial in the middle

of an abandoned garden that loved him

and loved him not. Love’s a waterbird

that drowns in the sky of the mind

and falls back to earth, its feet on the ground,

its heart in the stars, the liberated lyric

of its disappointed cry, the art of scars.

He looks in the mirror to watch his face

thaw like a candle tallowed from old dreams

as his vision of himself breaks up

like deconstructed ice-sheets on a bottomless lake,

the crumbs in the corners of his eyes,

all that’s left of his loaves and fishes,

his three wishes, as he loops his e’s

like nooses around the necks of the lesser selves

of his small i’s like a moonrise reflected on water

as the particle of the point he was trying to make

turns into wavelengths of shedding feathers

as if he just had a pillow fight with moonlight

when no one else was watching him.

He’s uplifted by his vertigo on the stairwell

of the wind like a leaf in ecstasy where X

marks the spot of the secret treasure

he’s buried in like a coffin of underworld jewels

he’s swimming through like the midnight sun at sea

drowning in a flashback of insights and afterlives

he only gets to see through the eyes of the dead.

He’s omnidirectionally orientated like a Sufi

who’s wheeled down many crossroads

every step of the way to self-annihilation

in a long lifetime of rapture and extinction

where the ecliptic and the celestial equator meet

in a dust storm of stars like whirling dervishes

spiralling off into space in golden ratios

of sunflowers, seashells and Andromeda galaxies

unchained from their rocks by a white horse with wings

and a hero who holds a mirror up to nature

like a snakepit that could turn him to stone in a flash

or a lover that went Medusan on him

in a nightmare that’s lasted for lightyears.

So many things he wanted to know,

he’s wise enough now not to ask

and let the answers come to him

before he’s even framed the questions

under glass like diving bells trying

to get the bottom of his wishing wells,

like the longing of nightbirds in echoless valleys,

or words stuck in his throat like creosote.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

The night that heals the broken day.

The dark that mends the shattered lamp.

The moon that salves the puncture wound.

The star that welds the injured eye

into a stronger bond than the original vision.

The silence that tempers the battered heart

in its own tears like a sword of light it fell upon.

The word that tends the forsaken voices

in our ears, like water whispering

into a dry wishing well on the moon

or bees and hummingbirds come like shibboleths

and sacred syllables to the larkspur and hollyhocks.

Down by the river where there are no mistakes

I can sense the long sorrows of the willows

making preparations for spring. The dead branch

troubled by a dream of leaves it didn’t expect.

The ancient hills washing their own corpses

laid out against the skyline like anonymous chthonic gods

led out of the labyrinth of their watersheds and roots

by melting snow welling up in their eyes

like the first signs of life coming out a coma of permafrost.

There’s a renewed hope in the lyrics

of the night birds exorcising the echoes

and mirages of this albino desert of ice

from their leprous solitude growing back

new limbs and flightfeathers at the approach

of the vernal equinox, moved to sing more earnestly

for reasons quite beyond them

because there’s no logic among the muses

anyone can follow like music rationally for very long

without getting lost in a starmap of metaphors

like a field fire burning off the short straws

in the hands of isolated scarecrows on nightwatch

all winter long, as Virgo offers them all

another chance to feel the wind caressing

an ocean of starwheat again like a new riff in the urn

of a greening guitar sprouting out of its ashes

like the first note of orchards, windfalls and harvests to come.

Soon the sun will treble the clefs

of the wild grapevines like tendrils

and the mushy raspberry flesh of the old women

grow firm again and the green-stick fractures

in the hospitals of the birch groves

raise their branches up to the sky

like wands of wine witching for stars.

And the young will be exhilarated by seeing

everything for the very first time

like new lamps for old and the geni within

understanding why it’s cast aside by their elation

will smile with the affectionate wisdom

of a third eye that’s been watching

this riot of apple bloom and trout lilies for light years.

And the rain will root like wild columbine

on the skulls of the moss-pated rocks

and the cochineal crocuses in the dilated pupils

of the wide-eyed snow will put their petals

together in prayer like eyelids appealing

to a stranger in passing like white water

over the rocks in the wake of his heart

and say, hey, mister, please, we could use those tears

if you’ve got no further use for them. Come here

and help us turn the waterwheels of the eternal recurrence.

Or lend us your breath, if you’ve forgotten what it’s for

to enhance the shining tenderly burning in our starmud

by blowing on the kindling of the fires of life

like a volunteer arsonist attending a nesting pyre

of yarrow sticks from the Book of Changes

we can lie down upon like the phoenix of the sumac

refeathering its skeletal wings in fledgling flames.

The ant that repairs the tunnels and doorways

of its snow-covered barrow to let the light dispel

the shadows from the bone boxes of its dead

like a stem cell happy to be at work again.

The red-tailed hawk repairing the burnt rafters

of its last sky burial by shouldering the wind

upon its shoulders as if the earth weren’t

such a heavy burden to bear as it sometimes seems.

The scarlet cardinal that kept the memory

of lost poppies alive like the lantern of a dream

burning in the windowsills of long, dark nights

of returning one day like a prodigal

to the firepits of hell to discover

they’ve been sown by the dipeptides of meteors

like circular gardens bordered by

Martian fieldstones lying like the kissing stones

of black Kaabas in Antarctica to celebrate

the renewal of life and the return of the light

to the radiant gateways of the trilithons of Stonehenge

where any place you shine like a firefly on the horizon

face to face with the night is the true direction of prayer.

The pine that sweeps the needles from the stairs

like the rusty eyelashes of shipwrecked compasses.

The blue shift of the Canada geese beating their wings

like a drum circle of wavelengths on the eye of the lake.

The garter snake that slept for an eternity

with its tail in its mouth ungnarling the knots in its hair

to seek its own equilibrium like water

in the tree rings of a warmer rain

rippling through archival calenders

like a higher frequency of life in its heartwood.

The thorns that stung like locust trees

beginning to take down the Chinese lanterns

of the hives of the paper wasps and replace them

with the blossoming pinatas of honey bees

singing in a beatific cloud of unknowing

to the metamorphic glory of compassionate mysteries.

The dragonflies drying their wings in the light

that wipes the tears from the eyes

of the rubble of fortune-cookies they emerge from

like gerry-mandered shrines of transformation

with stained-glass windows cracking like old paint

to open themselves as wide as they can

like an aubade of pagan totems at midnight

to the lifespan of the sun enlightening the moonrise

with prophetic fire flowering in the eye sockets of an eclipsed skull,

chandeliers of votive candles burning in the sacred niches

of a holy wall of secret messages riddled with nesting swallows

like waterlilies and love letters from the distant stars.

Breaking like the womb of a beaver dam

with the waters of life flooding the roads

we have to take to make our way here as we are,

the broken tea pot of Aquarius that mends

the continental shards of the rifts of old ostrakons

like Pangea in the spring with scars of gold.

PATRICK WHITE