A PAINT RAG OF THE MASTERPIECE I USED TO BE

A PAINT RAG OF THE MASTERPIECE I USED TO BE

A paint rag of the masterpiece I used to be.

Is this humility? Or time to quit? I refuse

to listen to my muse as if she were a whistle

on a graveyard shift. A nightbird or nothing

but the white noise of the cosmic hiss

cooling its afterbirth off ? I make a point

when I write, or paint, or make love

of never knowing where my mindstream’s

going with me, and everything sings mysteriously

as if it were oracular. I let the world

come upon me by surprise, expecting nothing

beyond the moment or behind me, and it’s twice

as spectacular for being unanticipated

than if I were in up over my head

in an ocean of notions of what it was all about.

I’m on an enlightenment path through the gutter.

I’m swept along with things like log jams

of cigarette-butts and dud lottery tickets on the rain

and then things pan out expansively in my flowing

and I’m able to reflect the constellations again like a starmap

of mirroring consciousness, and I’m utterly astounded

by the beauty of a peace deep within that makes me think,

despite the apparent facts, the most prevalent element

in the universe, is an exquisitely subtle intelligence

that gives to everything that exists, and, I suspect,

doesn’t, as well, not a God particle, but to each

its own measure of a wavelength from a firefly of insight

to an apocalyptic supernova of mind-blowing revelation

so intense, you glimpse it once, and your eyes evaporate.

What a way to spend your life though. A poet on the road

he took at a fork of his own walking on stars, thorns,

the eyelids of black roses in eclipse, night seas

that forbid the false hopes of lifeboats

and the buoyant despair of the shipwrecks

that lay on the bottom like a black box that had lost

its voice in the depths calling out to the fish for help.

Maybe you have to drown first to be a good lifeguard

with gills you can trust, or return to the womb like I do

from time to time to hear the allure of the mermaids

singing me up onto the rocks of my birth

as if the waters of life had to break like an urn

before the dragon could be born again like a star

out its own ashes. The light out of the dark like Draco.

Hic sunt dracones. The eye out of the shattered lamp

it used to go by like a nightwatchman among the shadows

it cast like soot on the dark glass of windows into the heart

as it made sure the doors were locked on what

was stored inside like the unknown potential

of the collective unconscious in the comatose warehouse of life.

In order to be all inclusively lyrical, I learned a long time ago

to pipe on a hollow silo like the wind or a drunk

on the neck of an empty whiskey bottle beside the canal

in the spring because it was too late to fish for evolution

and satyr I may have been, there was no other syrinx

or turtle-shaped guitar or lyre within immediate reach.

Sooner or later, your Dionysian past is going to catch up

to your Apollonian future, and the measure of a human

won’t be the palm of a planar hand laying out the Parthenon

caryatid by caryatid, but a starmud temple of sacred prostitutes

leaping naked through the fires of Isis at a rave

of tattoos in a mosh pit of esoteric constellations

dancing on the dark side of the moon like a cult of fireflies

initiating your imagination into different altars

than those you’ve been knocking over for lightyears now

like the pillars of false idols that call down the mountaintops

of nemetic avalanches to bury you in for calling their bluff.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been

carried home on my shield like the phase of the moon

I was gored by like an island-hopping mercenary

quixotically tilting at prayer wheels fighting to right

the toppled axis of Neptune with its head stuck in the seabed

like a tent-peg in a desert of stars on campaign

in a holy war with myself I knew I was doomed to lose.

What did Archilocus say? Some Thracian’s got my shield.

O, well. That’s tough. But comes a time you’ve had enough.

You just want to sit like moss on the rolling stone

of a prophetic skull and listen to what the crowns

of the elm trees swaying in the wind are whispering

to the deep violet storm clouds mobilizing at the edge of the sky,

embedded like a third eye in a hurricane of razor blades.

These days I give hermetic poetry readings open

to my solitude, after keeping my mouth shut for years,

nacreously knitting my broken skeleton in a bone-box

into the black pearls of sacred syllables dawning under my tongue

like new days of darkness ahead expanding like space

in the heart of a voyageur that’s left the solar system

like an explorer that’s breaking twigs like blips and beeps

along the way should anyone back on earth be following

what I’ve seen and been to have gotten as far as I have in life.

My heart is free. My spirit as uncontained as a flame

that paints outside the lines of the mirror I used to look through

like a reflecting telescope on a cold mountaintop

trying to escape the light pollution of cities in the valleys

I once rose from like a coffin of a comet over Sodom and Gomorrah

or the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion

looking straight into the eyes of the sun like the vapour

of a rainbow that went blind looking back like a pillar of salt

at what time can wreak when the light gets turned around

like an ingrown solar flare of a mind that’s lost at sea

on a liferaft surrounded by the fins of circling sun dials.

I’ve privately reprieved all the doves on the death row

of the aviaries of my voice, and released the stars

like chimney sparks from the bad contracts they’d signed

early in their musical careers with the managerial blow hards

that pumped the volume up on the celestial spheres

until you couldn’t hear anything but the sound of your eardrums

breaking like chandeliers of hard rain in an ice storm into the scene

with big dreams of shining one day like creosote

in a crematorium of genuinely undiscovered talent stars

that burned the whole house down like a zodiac

over the slums of London in 1666, or Rome

while Nero fiddled his way through 180l literary awards

on tour in Greece lying through their eye teeth like Corinthians.

My childhood a progressive demolition of norms.

No regrets. I was born like a heretic into this madness

of homicidal fictions dismembering Orphic corpses

in nondescript bathtubs after hanging them upside down

to bleed them like roses and acoustic guitars, ear to ear,

their vocal cords cut like downed powerlines

that used to accompany the starlings on their staves.

I have a lot in common with extraordinarily ordinary people.

Art for art’s sake is akin to masturbation and about

as productive, so I don’t try to prove when I write

I’m so unique you have to ask someone else for an explanation.

No people. No painting or poetry. No communication.

People come first. Art is for people, or it’s just the wind

moving the sand around in an hourglass to no effect

like moments of life lived on the seabeds of the moon,

cul de sacs, dead ends with no time to reflect

on the possibility of pearls rolling like dew off their tongues.

Everyman is No one, the same who lifted the veils of Isis

and revealed himself to the Cyclops. Poetry’s

the long, hard discipline of learning to forget your name

going beyond the unpublishable lovers of fame

with one hand down the muse’s pants like an amanuensis.

You’ve got to sit at the side of your deathbed at every moment

in order to be fully alive and free of yourself

so you can sing for the dream figures on the corner

of Gore and the universe as if they were listening

to their own voice in the crowded solitude of their passing.

There’s mercy in this, a way of life, a form of worship,

celebration, devotion, sacred circus clowns, ghost dancers

elated by the crazy wisdom of praying off the reservation

like poetry readings in the basement catacombs of busy bars.

Reality wholly conformable to the surrealistic facts

of an active imagination looking at the way things are

as they pass from one transformation to the next

like the waterclock of a mindstream pouring itself out

into the empty forms of dry housewells waiting

for water levels to rise on the moon like a temple of sandbags.

I write like a river overflowing its banks like the Milky Way

or the soft shoulders of the Road of Ghosts to flood the earth

with the alluvial silt of burnt out stars that renew their light

by breaking bread with Spica in the hand of Virgo

like the dark abundance of the autumn equinox

pouring its bright vacancy like a harvest moon

into the inexhaustible silo of an hourglass

the wind plays its picture music on

like the urns of starlings born like a voice box

caught like a song in the throats of exorcised chimney pots.

True to my circuitous blossoming I refuse

to give up the ghost of my evanescence

like the smoke of a draconian fire roaring down below

to keep this house of life warm by laying down

on the pyres of my cracked heartwood like a fossil of rain

singing to the beatific stars like a heretic

in an auto de fe of blue jays and sunflowers

blooming in the creative wake of my self immolations

as a way of exacting as much ecstasy as I can from the pain.

Absurd as it seems, I’m trying to live up

to the aspirations of rogue fireflies untethered

like a dream of what could be released

like grains of wild wheat in the starfields of a feast

from the treadmills of conditioned consciousness

like constellations of the usual myths of origin

rising and falling like life and death from the east to the west

while everything that thrives on earth is aberrantly turning

against the flow of things like salmon summoned from the sea

by the mystery of a counter-intuitive voice upstream the other way

as my embryonic stem cells listen to what it suggests

and pro-creatively hearing what its eyes have to say

about the immanental vision of life that burns within me, radically obey.

PATRICK WHITE  

MY GHOST IS DANCING ON THE ASHES OF MY BONES

MY GHOST IS DANCING ON THE ASHES OF MY BONES

My ghost is dancing on the ashes of my bones.

My blood was always a rose in this house of thorns

and it blooms and it blooms in a fountain of fire

and each of its petals, a farewell in the eye of a flame.

Ghost dancer, what do you pray for, who do you dance for,

what do you celebrate? Are your tears drying like paint

on the lifemask you left out in the rain? Are we

ageing into the scared silence of doomed children

listening in the other room to a stranger raging in pain?

Should I bleed with the warrior or heal the medicine man?

Whose life was this that kicks its heels up in a gust of stars?

I remember when I used to smile at my scars

like arrows that hadn’t been fledged yet in their own feathers

as they hastened to taste the blood of the mark they left on life.

Do we fly like hawks for awhile, coming down

like a decisive answer of the gods to what the dove

was wondering, and then as we age and mellow

like the gourd of the moon in late October

and the harvest’s in, and the stars have been beaten

like wild rice into the wounded canoes idling

like fish in the shallows, does the lunacy of our wisdom

teach us to evaporate like a quiet suggestion

of the grey wraith in the moonlit mist

that unravels from the lake like another way of life

we’re going to follow like the path of smoke

from our own fires and the calyx of shadows they cast?

Did we heed the protocols of the magic and the mystery

well enough to have been worthy of the wonder?

Did we part with gifts or did we die with our hands closed?

Does our disembodied heart resound like the whisper

of a black snake sliding through the grass down to the river

to drink like the ripple of a long wavelength

from its own watershed, or does it still boom out

like summer thunder and grasp at what’s unattainable about life

like bolt lightning with open talons? Does our voice

still grow silent in the aftermath of the most beautiful absurdities

after the nightbirds have finished singing in the black walnut trees

that taught us to forego the star tracks we were following

like blood through the woods, for the more powerful hunting magic

of the understanding that exceeds the signs we go by

like a dream we had when our ancient totems slept at the side

of this Road of Ghosts wandering like wild geese across the sky?

I remember lifting the veils of my tears

like curtains of rain over the distant blue hills

and the sound it made like the plectra of a harpsichord

playing adagios of music in accompaniment to itself

as it fingered each clean note on the keyboard of the leaves

with the agility of a spider seeking shelter from a downpour

as the fireflies appeared in its wake like the chandeliers of the Pleiades

shining in the valley fog like constellations that weren’t yet

quite sure of themselves but had a nebular insight

into what they wanted to be as I watched like a shapeshifter

enthroned like a rock intrigued on a neighbouring hill.

I can still feel the spell they cast upon me

like the bliss of enlightenment when I realized

how extraordinarily unnecessary it was to be anyone

I would recognize tomorrow wearing my own skin

coming the other way on the same path I followed

like a mindstream on the moon that shed me

like one of the last phases of a lost atmosphere

it breathed out on a deathbed unmindful of the weather.

Do you remember the name the wind addressed

the willows in that night or have all the words

we used to speak to one another about the secrets of life

been taken out of our mouths and replaced

with a whole new vocabulary of light we have yet to master?

Or are we deaf-mutes now and the dream grammars

we once chanted around our fire pits like wild irises

irrevocably indecipherable to the unborn and unperishing

who always had less to talk about than we did

who lived among the dying like a compassionate stranger

as one of them moored on the moon to the same fates they were?

Old ghost, no regrets? Is that why you’re dancing

on the ashes of my bones? Because we didn’t sign

a truce with the starmaps that put a lie to our shining

like a limit on the sacred mindscapes we wandered freely in

without taking possession of even the little we needed

without seeing it as the gift of a magnanimous spirit

that expressed the measure of its own creative power

by how much it could give away like the sun or the full moon

or a light nocturnal rain on the dusty wild flowers that needed it

to keep on blooming back at the stars that shone down upon them

for never having put gates on their gardens

or guarded their exits and entrances with warning signs

that the birds and the worms and the deer and the dragonflies

that came in the name of life to gather the fruits of the earth

had no right trespassing here as if they weren’t walking

on their own land beside a deed of free waters given

with the open-handed blessings of a habitable planet

amazed by the starclusters of New England asters

and stamina of pale blue chicory along the side of the road

this late into the fall like the parting gesture of farewell

to everything that passed before them like the moonrise

of a dream just waking up on the far shore of a deep sleep

sweeter than any that even the love of peace had ever known before?

PATRICK WHITE

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct?

PATRICK WHITE

AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

AMONG SO MANY ATROCITIES OF HUMAN AND INHUMAN NATURE

Among so many atrocities of human and inhuman nature,

what forbidden grace adorns the suicide or the ballet of the drunk

obliterated on razorwire wine at nightfall

as the abandoned bottle exchange for empties and grails

prays for rain to wash the acid from a young girl’s eyes

who wanted to learn to read what everyone else

had forgotten about taking advantage of their fear of death

to remember how beautiful the world once was

when the fireflies emerged like Venus in the dusk

growing brighter as the darkness deepened

into riotous starmaps playing charades

with a bestiary of antique zodiacs in the crowns

of the black walnut trees whose mere presence

was enough to astound anyone. How once you could

open a milkweed pod like the womb of a fortune-cookie

and find a Monarch butterfly inside like infinite riches

in a small room, a wishing well that wasn’t

some kind of tarpit that had just swallowed the moon

like a cosmic glain light years before the dragons

were allowed to carry firearms but the mercy of the rain

that used to fall like cool tears on their scorched wings

like leaves in a drought, without putting the green flames

of their fires out, was strictly forbidden by the greed

and undue influence of the lustreless arrogance

of very mediocre men who ate like a plague of locusts

in a field of genetically modified stargrass

that blighted the wheat in the hand of the Virgin

like seeds of light the wind was forbidden to sow

and poisoned the bread we used to break with each other

like black dwarfs of ergot on the taboo spores

of a bad mushroom trip in the tourist trap

of the mind blowing Eleusinian mysteries on crack.

Apocalyptic opulence runs before the storm

like a herald of the rich and ungovernable

with a message to the poor who can sense

what’s coming like the angel of death to the door

by the way it doesn’t eat what’s put before it

like a crumb of flesh and blood off their own plate

they’re still willing to share, in part, like a crust

from the empty cupboard of their heart

with any stranger who’s come in the night

off the road, asking for directions to Wall Street

like the parable of the man who ran to Aleppo,

like the market share of a corporate nemesis

who insisted upon their personhood like a stem cell

that lied to itself posthumously in anonymous board rooms

where issues of life and death were settled like executive coffins

that closed the book on the matter as if

there were no more to be said to the press

than the obituaries they released like doves they read from

about how much damage had been done

to their reputations by the protests of the vociferous dead.

One false idol pushes another idiotic ideology down

and there’s a domino effect of apostate holy wars

that throw their children like strawdogs

into the bonfire of the inanities to bear witness

to the act of being worthy of their futureless afterlives

like the strangle-hold of tapeworms, the dry rot of termites,

the methane vapour trails of maggots in the dungheaps

and mass graves covered in snow like grey hair

on the skull of the body politic that cuts its nose off

to spite its face if anybody contest its right

to eat the eyes out of the roadkill like blow flies

as if there were no greater vision of life than a body bag

wrapped in a flag, placed in a hole, with the stone of the world

resting on its chest to keep it from rising again

like smoke from the family hearth they buried it under.

On the borders of Rome, just before it fell

the hungry Visigoths were compelled to sell

their children into slavery for a haunch of dogmeat

that used to sit under the emperor’s table at Ravenna

and beg for scraps that fell like the superflux of gluttons

to the bestial floor like pork in a budget proposal

to let the poor eat their own and the rich grow fat

on the cannon fodder at the front lines of the war on poverty

like cattle prods and firing squads in an abattoir,

political bloodbanks feeding on the needs of the people

like lobbyists and leeches, ticks and invasive species

of mosquitoes, flies, drones, killer bees and conservatives

that suck the light out of the life, heart, mind, spirit, will

of humans to go on surviving their own exit

as mechanical confabulations of metallic stem cells

with micro chips for Hox genes, oversee the mass extinction

of life grown suspicious of its own food supply,

the air, the water, the sun, the earth, the sky, each other

like a hive of surveillance cameras keeping their third eyes

on the dying wildflowers by the polluted mindstreams

hydrophobically foaming at the mouth of their own headwaters

like an industrial strain of rabies eating its own rotten heart out

in a chaotic rage of conditioned consciousness nemetically resigned

to its own lies, to the intelligent design of its own demise.

PATRICK WHITE

GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH

GREY, MILKY SKY IN MARCH

Grey, milky sky in March, less ashes than the whites

of someone’s eye. The sun without a yolk,

the day, the tabla rasa of a cloaking device

I’m effaced by like this blank page I stare at

until I can see through my third eye without

being in disguise, how sad it is most of our lives

are paper-mache masks of lies we’re dying

to believe in like crutches convinced

they’re the flying buttresses of medieval cathedrals.

And not the unfeathered wings of skeletal fledglings

that fell from the nest a long time ago,

naked, vulnerable, the post-mortem effect

of embryos with big flight plans gone awry,

winged horses that weren’t on the agendas of the wind

for that morning’s sky. For every angel

that falls from heaven, a demon rises from hell,

and it’s wonderful how the more spiritual among us

can disguise a helpless yell for help in the white noise

and crystal skulls whose silence is almost

a colour unto itself. And imagination is

a gravitational eye that can bend the light

anyway it wants, so no one sees in straight lines.

Void bound, eyeless, no profit staring into the abyss

hoping to see a quarry of star sapphires

suddenly appear before you diaphanously

like the Pleiades over the eyelashes of the tree line.

It’s hard to break bread above or below the salt

with a human that lives by signs alone.

Harder still to remain compassionately blind

to people who wear the bluebirds of happiness

like chips on their shoulders you have to hood and chain

your falcon to your wrist, to keep from knocking off

like the revelatory shock of meeting your mystic nemesis

like lightning on the road, or a Zen master

beating you out of the zendo with your own broom

after watching you sweep mirages like starmud

off the mirror everyday to keep it clean and open

as an orchid blooming in the shadow of an outhouse.

Better to mudwrestle with the angel in the way

that take a bath in your own grave to renew

the virginity of the moon in iridescent bubbles

that break like fuchsia fragrances of light in hyperspace

when they wink at blood in the water,

like watercolours of poppies in the rain

washed away down the gutters of the slums

like the echo of a gunshot that stains your meditation.

After Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle you can’t

experiment with life, you can only experience it

as a wavelength or a particle depending upon

whether you’re looking at it or not. The same eye

by which I see God is the eye by which she sees me

as Ruysbroeck said, unaware in the fourteenth century

of the quantum entanglement of gender, but just the same

I look at the stars and I can see the resemblance

of the mother of fires in the eyes of everyone I meet.

Even in the sleet weeping in the cracks of the sidewalk

they didn’t mean step on like their mother’s back

or the thresholds of sheep the shepherds of wolves

used to run through this town like clouds in a mud puddle

that soiled their golden fleece like sunspots on their radiance.

Even in the stretchmarks of the memory of rain on Mars,

even in the way the smooth sailing of your heartwood

sometimes knots up like a rock in your mindstream

or the pebble of the world bruises your heel

in your wing-tipped shoes, or a koan of a poem

you can’t get out of your gut like a haiku of bad sushi,

I see the likeness of desperate measures in the beauty

of the stars above the Parthenon, or the waterlilies

in the mystic gardens of the black Taj Mahal.

However immaculate your firefly of insight into the night is

your shining’s just a lamp in the hands of a nightwatchman

unlocking the gates of compassion from the inside out

like the wingspan of a dragon in an aviary of burning doves.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this

even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was

about so much, how much I risked for so little,

I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,

I don’t want to have lived short-minded

as if my brain never grew to its proper height

and I had to live close to the ground

with burrowing wasps and centipedes

trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.

Tried to live like a magnanimous man

with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace

with my generosity. Didn’t want to die

knowing nothing about the stars, that shining

that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.

Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,

the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,

and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,

make one up of your own. Don’t waste

the great creative potential of the absurd

and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience

into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.

Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?

If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.

You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet

falling out of the black halo around the sun

can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,

Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot

to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile

standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,

your simian continuum at a fork in the road.

Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still

rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.

You grow an exoskeleton, then rib

the walls and rafters of the house and soon

the sun decides where the windows are going to go.

The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if

you were listening in on yourself,

all those voices and things

for words you don’t understand,

bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,

the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,

and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.

Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.

The rush and turmoil of the picture-music

going on all the time, shapeshifting

from one musical scene into another

and even you with your hands over your ears

sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,

climactic cymbals in the great performance

just waiting to come together like a hadron collider

deep underground where black holes in space

are born of the impact. If you’re not already

too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird

by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money

down on yourself as if you had one to lose,

and if for nothing more than the exercise,

kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon

with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.

Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.

If fools rush in where angels fear to tread

the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings

on the horns of your head. Learn

every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,

of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind

be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,

apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd

the imagination delights in elaborating

like people with the personalities of apple-trees

or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.

I am is not the cornerstone of anything.

I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent

that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower

that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.

Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss

to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom

be the private life of space, your time on earth

be passage and transformation, and your heart

cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,

who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE  

IN A DARKENED ROOM

IN A DARKENED ROOM

In a darkened room I see shadows in the hall

moving under the door like an astronomer

counting the planets around a distant star,

transits and occlusions and axial perturbations

of insight into the possibilities of life.

And more than life, it seems, at times,

the cosmic odds of love not being the victim

of the way it has to live to preserve itself.

Yevtushenko writing Lima Junction, first line:

As we get older we get honester. Most of us

either exhausted into the truth, too lazy to lie,

or trying to make an anonymous impression upon life

like the Burgess Shale on a grailquest for oxygen.

How much can be made of so little. Predators

growing eyes and prey encased in exoskeletons.

Pikaia drops a thin lifeline into the waters of life

and everyone’s been climbing up their spine

like scarlet runners and serpent fire ever since.

Burning siege ladders storming the parapets of heaven.

Thermophilic cyanobacteria the hard drive of the planet

look at the software that’s evolved from that

like happy apps to keep our left front parietal lobes amused.

I never planned on a purpose in life. I think

all paradigms of the truth are potential liars.

There’s something more honest about an iron chain

than a gold. One smells like blood on the snow,

the other, too much cologne on a sunset. Religion,

art, science, the disclaimers of secular spiritualism

like a ghost denying the gene pool it’s hovering over,

all well and good, the junkie’s got his moonrock,

and we’re well protected by an umbrella

of intercontinental, ballistic Clovis points,

and the shepherds of the black camel, obviously oil,

are raising tall buildings in the desert like the horns of unicorns

among the obelisks and minaras, and I’ve got

more ways of expressing myself than I’ve got

things to say, but, hey, it’s the twenty-first century

and still the heart’s the mushroom cloud of a stromatolite.

Lady I wish it were stars and fireflies with me too

all of the time, windfalls of golden apples

in the orchards of the Hesperides, ripening

like the halos and auras of moondogs

and mystics wheeling in their shadows

at the crossroads of sundials in a vertiginous trance

at the thought of meeting you like a willow at midnight

at the zenith of a bridge in an aquatic garden on the moon

where the mindstream is always at ease

with the oceanic night sea it’s flowing into

and the poppies in our blood were dancing like solar flares

to the wild timbrels of the savage celebration

of the conflagration of life they were returning to

like a watershed of light. Fire flows in the dragon’s veins

and a corona of solar flares turns into a rosette of flame-throwers.

Fossils flower in our starmud as the earth’s answer to constellations.

No suffering. No salvation. And the physician left

to heal himself. First from his ignorance. Then the wound

of salvation itself. Private conjuring put on public view

is propaganda, not spiritual art. I have a symbolic mind.

A paleolithic future. I wear the hides of my insights

like wolfs’ heads. I die like a shaman in front of my paintings.

Bury my bones under the hearthstones like a pyre of kindling.

Spit paint my portrait in red ochre like dried blood

bound by animal grease. There are elk horns

in the middens of my starmud, mother of pearl in my eyes

like another moonrise whispering strange dream grammars

that express the solitude of the creatures of night.

And an inexplicable longing to understand the mystery of sorrow.

Were the first hominids troubled by the birth signs

of the new mindscape they were emerging into

as most of us migrating with the big-game stars into

the available futures of our vagrant imaginations

looking into an abyss of gaping astonishment and silence

at ancient galaxies rising like smoke from distant fires,

realizing we are not alone with our genetic codes

like surrealistic poems looking for happy mutations.

Relative to the future memories of stars yet to shine,

we’re all troubled apes in prime time trying to crack

cosmological koans with the rocks of good ideas.

Sponges filtering the krill of the stars through our pores.

Wisdom teeth pushing up through our jawbones

under the molars of the bi-valved goose-necked barnacles

of our observatories on wilderness mountaintops

several mirrors closer to deciphering the stars

as the creation of the intel of our own senses.

No dirt. No pearl. Whether you throw it before swine or not.

The true harvests of the soul are still sown

under the fertile crescents of your fingernails.

PATRICK WHITE