WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

WILDER TIMES THAN WE THOUGHT THEY WERE IN THE MOMENT

Wilder times than we thought they were in the moment,

savage intensities cultivated in the name of art,

the children of the bourgeois afraid of violating

the mystique of genius as if there were a lumpen proletariat taboo

like a magic circle drawn around it, cordons of spinal cords

at a premier of the polymorphous perverse

melting down like emotional nuclear reactors

irradiating Pleiadic insights of white phosphorus

like jelly fish trying to plug into the scene.

First magnitude stars that weren’t quite sure

whose legend they were shining in

as long as there were something Icarian about it

and infallibly tragic, as if to be destroyed by your gift

were certain proof you were a snakecharmer

with a talent dark enough to curse your own blessing

in the sacro-sanct way sacrificial heroism

is a judas-goat for the gods to coax them out of hiding.

What addictions, what madness didn’t we tolerate?

No weirdness, no twisted perversity of fate

unacceptable in order to keep up the morale among ourselves

that our own derangements were liveable humans.

Stoic sobriety with a touch of the infernally noble

as long as there were enough star power

to be derived from it extemporally to fool yourself

you’d been to hell, you’d conversed with the gibbering ghosts

in the underworld, and now you were ascending from Hades,

empty-handed, except for an abalone inlaid guitar,

a voice, a repertoire of songs you used to sing

from coast to coast like a ghost at your own seance,

or if you were a poet, three books under your boa skin belt

like wampum, a wounded heart channeling Horatian odes

to staunch the bloodflow like a hemorrhage of fire.

We lived as if we were always spitting into the face

of librarians moved by poetry enough to write about

making raspberry jam in their amazingly savoury kitchens

and that wasn’t very right or nice of us, regardless

of whether they deserved it or not, but it would be

less than frank not to admit how alarming it would be

not to be able to muster a cobra of spit the same way now

to punish the eyes of the snake-oil salesmen

with a taste of their own medicine for fouling

the housewells of the muses with all that bleach and brine

they scour their poems with as if they were keel-hauling them

on the hull of the moon out of fear of drinking

from the same skull cup as everyone else on the nightshift

deep in the mines of their starmud working with

a candle and canary to bring the occasional jewel to light,

out of fear of getting some life under their fingernails

or contaminating their lips with human elixirs.

At least we killed like tigers, not tapeworms,

though needless to say, because that’s the way the world is,

we did more damage to ourselves trying to stand out

like someone real from the mob of the middling and maudlin

to suffer the black farce of our former radiance

lightyears later in this ventriloquial dawn

where wooden dummies have mastered the art

of throwing their heartwood around like the voices

of decoy waterbirds in front of a hunter’s blind

trying to bring the words of those who can fly

down to their level of poultry and pettiness.

Every quarter asked, every quarter given,

a disastrous expression of compassion,

but when you’re trying to live with largesse

as if you had a soul that was more mammal than reptile

of course you’re going to err on the side of generosity,

your winged horse spurred on by pussywillows and burrs

until you’re thrown off by a star under your saddle,

the dupe of your own unaccountable gesture

as you ride off into the sunset with Don Quixote

feeling like Sancho Panza tilting at the futility

of counter clockwise windmills on lifelight savings time.

Too many swine. Too few pearls unwilling to be trampled

like the grapes of wrath getting indignantly drunk on us.

Don’t offer your tears and sacred oils to someone

with a drinking problem. Though I encourage you

to ignore my advice so you can be what I mean for yourself.

Incandescent ingratitude. As if genius

took its tragic lifemask off, stepped out of its skin,

tore the curtains off the windows like the northern lights

and showed you the blackhole of the ego in the spider web

that spun a myth of origin like a starmap that knew

only a few chords and barred its Fs as an excuse for music

that maintained the world began with an arachnid

but kept that fact hid from the frenzy of friends

around the streetlamp of a public image on the radio.

Ego. That paper dragon that likes to play with matches

creatively, a brush dipped in paint, a nib in blood

that flared up like a bouquet of sulphurous little chapbooks

straining to convince you their personality is black magic

once you get past the alibi of words that smack

of saccharine and formic acid, ants and stinging nettles,

and taste how shallow and unclever a cynical lack

of sensitivity to things ego doesn’t understand is,

to that mess of neurotic avarice that sticks like gum

that’s lost its flavour in the tresses of a flypaper muse

as it lackadaisically strums the guitar like a Ferrari

warming up, to disguise the fact, if you go by the work,

it can’t really play and the wheel hasn’t been invented for it yet.

Dramatic brawls at midnight, out on the street,

at the top of our lungs, embodiments of nemetic karma

defending principles willing to settle the score here and now

if you were crazy, drunk, or daring enough to risk

losing more than you ever had or intended to give

to substantiate your reality with fists that would later bloom

like bruised crocuses and waterlilies lyrically inclined

to deadly nightshade and moody orchids in an eclipse.

But most edged the Texas toe of their cowboy boot

up to an unseen line drawn in the stars like a Tropic of Capricorn,

that said for all your talk of figs and horns, a coward

goes this far and no further for self-preservative reasons

that have been canning him like jam since childhood.

More than one night I lay in the dark sobering up,

proofreading my name in the sooty contrails

of bic lighters on the ceilings of Ottawa city jails,

Orphically exalted to have left my mark

in an underworld anthology that didn’t depend

on a political jury of friends who elected things into print

as if they were pensioning off candidates for the senate

with two free copies, fifteen minutes max

at a mass reading, a minute on the local news

and enough notoriety to incrementally con

a few more false friends they might have been

wrong about you, and accordingly adjust

their parallactic affiliation with your twinkling.

My elders, the ghosts of older owls, the afterlives

of stars that had burnt out romantically on alcohol,

who spoke like legends of themselves in a refugee camp

for broken chandeliers and abused constellations

performing off Broadway like the loveletters of a mailman

who delivered them like the wind in a tree in the autumn,

since imprinted like the cambium of last year’s spring

in the hall of famous tree rings that have stopped growing.

Honoured with urns. But for awhile, precociously,

peers of mine, fish dying of thirst beside a freshwater lake,

artificial respirators crying out for back-up parachutes

because they thought it was poetically cute

to always be the one who was rescued from themselves.

Ego grease. Black farce of a circus on tour

with drugstore carnies, clutching at straws

like the rungs of a trapeze someone was always

falling from like a star you caught and put in your pocket

like a safety net that counted on your friends’ sense of timing

to save you from your own web like the spindle you made of fate.

Metamorphic larvae in the coffins and cocoons,

the lifeboats and chrysales these shepherd moons

moved into as if they were on a grand tour of the zodiac.

Pageants of wrecked talent showing up like queens

of stage and screen, who adorn your table

by letting you sit at it with them below the salt like a foodbank

as they told you lies about the famous fireflies

they used to cavort with like radical root fires.

Memories of the last literary scene I ever wanted to be in,

eyeless images of overcast dreams, the business

of art spinning the lack of imagination into

some tear drop of a bauble for public consumption

that made evaporation look deep by comparison.

Treacherous metaphors. Nasty similes

that thought they were teaching you a moral lesson

through petty betrayals of the trust you placed in them

against your better judgement, only to ignore

with Olympian indifference the kind of dung heap wisdom

that tried to disenchant you from ever trusting your likeness

in another again like the alienable bonds of mutual opportunism.

Old men now, many dead at the hands of their vices,

nine dog paddlers for every synchronized swimmer, prima ballerinas

that could really write and paint, sing and dance once,

crucible steel hammering out the slag of their impurities

like sparks that shone for a moment like starclusters

that hung in the air and then disappeared

into the great reservoir of one-eyed mirrors.

I can remember when that bag lady was a rose.

I can recall when his charm partially concealed and compensated

for what is so obviously feeble about him now

as he waxes mellifluously nostalgic, trying to squeeze

a drop of honey out of his stinger like the good old days

when he used to hang himself from the green boughs

and dead branches of poetry like a pinata of killer bees

coming on like a kite or Black Hawk sneakers tangled

like bolas and medicine bags in personably contemporary powerlines

you can still hear humming and hissing

like a red shifting snakepit gone long in the tooth

whenever it rains on the ashes of a smouldering guitar

trying to serenade the moon under her Medusan window.

PATRICK WHITE  

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

AFTER THE LONG LABOUR OF ASHES IN THE RAIN

After the long labour of ashes in the rain

the phoenix is shrieking like fire into life again.

I can hear it in the valleys auditioning the mountains

like a voice torn out of the heart of pain.

My shadow is in complete empathy with the ghost

I cast like an imaginative projection of myself

into the emptiness of my crowded solitude

where everyone is recognized by the inside of their faces

in the light of the return journey to the seasoned innocence

of my homelessness beyond the gates I’ve passed through

like an earthly garden blooming in the star fields.

Singing again, as if the stars knew all the lyrics to the song

long before I opened my mouth to swallow their fire

without setting myself ablaze like a funeral pyre

gone supernova in a neighbouring galaxy.

As if a lighthouse off the dark coast of the shipwrecks

knew that timing was the medium of the message

and it was time to rise again on the updrafts

of these buoyant adagios of picture-music,

like a heart immersed a long time in the depths

of its own crazy wisdom abounding

in the bliss of an unknown treasure

rising like a lost continent that drowned in its sleep.

And even in the weeping for things that have passed

through the immensity of the solitude I was the last to leave

like the captain of a lifeboat going down on the moon,

an undiscovered joy in the way I learned to breathe underwater

in the ocean of sorrows that overwhelmed me

like the beauty of a rose that burned

like a torch of blood in the rain.

I’ve given up trying to save the world like a moral ransom

I pay to the one-eyed pirates of circumstance

for the redemption of a self that was more a mirage on the moon

chained like an empty cup to a wishing well

than real water that flows like the tears

of diamonds thawing like glaciers from my eyes.

And may all the wildflowers of this circuitous blossoming

astound the nostrils of God like a fragrance of music

growing like white sweet clover along the roadside.

May every firefly and lightning bolt of insight

illuminate the whole universe like the flaring of a single match.

Let the dead whose souls I bear toward the south

know that I remember their names like loveletters

I’ve sent on ahead like the return address of the future

that waits to encounter them again like birds

that came to the windowsill of this burning house of life

like the notes of a song from a voice well beyond

these spinal cords that bind us like kites to the sky.

I scatter my cremations like ashes on mirrors of ice

for those who would follow me to ground

like the cornerstones of a tent

pegged to the wind like a flower.

I gnaw on the dice of my bones

like a wolf above the timber line

mining the white gold of a motherlode of marrow

and I let tomorrow sing of the things tomorrow brings

like hungry lovers to the round table of feasting stars.

And bless the sword that guts me like an envelope

that bleeds like a wound of love that never scars

the words that are written on a magnanimous heart

that doesn’t pace the rate at which it gives itself away

like a poppy dreaming in a field of leonine dandelions.

And though I fall like an oak on a hill in a lightning storm

let me not live on my knees dumbstruck by the revelation

that burns in my heartwood like a calendar of fire

where somebody’s fixed the dates of spring

as if they didn’t want to forget how to be taken by surprise

like a scholar that can’t bring himself to believe

in the chameleonic nature of his own eyes.

Though I fall like a waterclock of rain from the sky

into the deepest blackholes of time, let no root say

it was ever denied access to my watershed

that even the dead were the guests of a living host

that welcomed them like the voices of a familiar solitude.

Uplifted by spirits of fire, stone, and water,

I’m flying through stars with my wings ablaze

like a comet that exalts in jumping for the sheer joy it

from the black halo that encircles the beatified sun

like the prophetic zero of the final outcome.

And I shall not set my circumpolar throne

on the hills of the skulls of my traditional enemies

nor abide by the jinx of the birds on a prayer-wheel

turning in the direction of cosmic destruction

like an ill wind fouled by the contagion of time.

Every moment of the day, every era of the night

I shall remember the infallible atrocities of blind religion

that gouged the eyes out of the light like gravediggers

cooking rocks in the shovels of the backhoes

rummaging through the remains of the resurrection

for the relics of the names on vandalized gravestones

weathered by the acidic rain of the great desecration.

A little bit of joy balancing on a perilous precipice.

I know about falling. I know the risk. Not a mandate

nor anything I choose to take as if the danger were all mine.

But just a little sweetness in life, a wild grape, the eye of the wine.

A moment stolen from behind the backs of the calendars

like a man in space, with no time to reflect on the outcome

of being younger than when he left. Not listening to signs

but resonating with the hidden harmonies of myriad symbols

arranging picture music for the eye and the ear and the tongue

like dew in the night, whole notes and semi quavers

on the staves of the dreamcatchers and spiderwebs

when the shining comes to the morning as unprepared as swallows.

All my Platonic ideals, the black matter of desire

in a goldrush of the heart that can’t hold anything back

in a Zen panic to stake its claim on nothing

as the fairest jewel of all to give back

to the ocean of awareness you retrieved it from

and hope the moon among the corals appreciates the gesture.

Buddha, too, had an ill-advised attachment to the unnattainable .

I won’t starve my delusions, just to please my insights.

My mirages drink at the same well I do without condition

and it’s ok if they want to leave their veils on too.

And I’ll observe an ethical truce with society

But more goes on in the dark, inconceivably,

than even the light could possibly visualize

on a cold seeing night from a mountain top

with an asphalt road that coils all the way around

like a serpent doing research into the seven ages of man

trying to keep its credibility up with the times.

On my left palm, the star of Isis, keeps me from drowning,

and in my left ear, enough gold, if I’m washed ashore

on some galactic island after another shipwrecked exemption

to burn me down by the sea on a pyre of stars this time.

I want to ingather my ghost out of the smoke, and watch it shine

like fireflies in the fog, like lighthouses along the coast

off the starboard side, looking for moonboats

on the slopes of the swells heaving easily

like bells full of emotion swinging out over the edge

to prove it’s not afraid of falling back

to the ground it arose from like a boy

daring the devil to an apple fight

in the crowns of the trees to see who

can climb high enough to scare the other down.

PATRICK WHITE  

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

THE GREY RAIN RIFFS ON THE WINDOWS

The grey rain riffs on the windows

as if it’s been listening to too much rap.

Fragrance of gasoline blooming in the gutters.

People all look like daffodils in baseball caps.

Wish I wanted something enough to buy it again,

and it’s been a while since I’ve been with a woman

who wanted anything for me. I’m inside here

dethorning the intensity of the black rose

imploding under its own mass as its core

condenses in a withered star like a heart

whose light’s run out. The fire in my blood

took it all one nightshift further than red

and now I can see in the dark like a black hole.

Nightvisions in broad daylight. I can see the stars

shining through the smudged pearl of the sun

trying to glow its way through the clouds.

I can see the skulls of insurrectionist dreams

deep underground in the cults of my cells

trying to assess the direction of the bomb blast

to insure the maximum damage. Not all roads

are trying to make friends with people

who walk them like cowpaths littered with road kill.

It’s better to be lost as the lesser of two evils

when clarity scorches the heart radioactively.

Dissociation, Deconstruction, Disintegration,

I’ve evolved like a language into a grammar

of oxymorons just to keep my thoughts and feelings

together in a syntactical world of unpunctuated scalpels.

Alloys of a stronger metal are not estranged

like copper and tin from the cutting edge of the sword

by the colour of their skin or religion in the Bronze Age.

Love comes at me in the darkness of these depths

like a crossroads of light from all directions at once

by which I know the radiance that’s found me

is not just another flashlight that’s still looking.

And there are Sufis whirling like weathervanes

in blue woollen robes, and enlightened Zen masters

gently picking the fleas out of their chest hairs

and thanking the thieves for leaving the moon in the window,

and demonic demons with the insight of black diamonds

all telling me you lose control if you hesitate in the moment,

or stand up, sit down, walk, or run, but whatever you do

don’t wobble. And I plunge into the galaxy with both feet

hoping to make a big splash in the red tide of the stars

and I either drown in the light, or I end up

blowing hyperbolic bubbles into a bulky multiverse.

I haven’t turned my senses into lenses,

starmaps, and spectrographs, but I’m not blind

to what’s living under my eyelids in a chaos

of crazy-wisdom playing picture-music

in a band of clowns, just to get a good laugh

out the oracles that are prone to never

take their own advice so seriously

they couldn’t change their minds.

You can’t refit a round suggestion

into a square meaning, and it’ cruel to try.

I have long wavelengths of thought

that burn like iodine and salt in sea kelp

but I don’t whip the eyes of the tide

just to get things flowing like tears my way.

I don’t throw acid in the faces

of tomorrow’s beauty queens learning to read

the writing on the wall as just the wall’s way

of threatening you into letting it protect you.

I don’t boil kids in their mother’s milk

and I don’t practise the kind of spiritual judo

that uses a person’s best ideals against them.

Especially as I get older, I would rather be

obliterated by wonder and gratitude

that I got to be all this without any effort of my own

than have my awe underwhelmed

by petty renditions of the black farce

that welds some people’s eyes shut like

an eclipse stronger than the original bond.

But there again, if you’re happy being a scar, mend.

What could it mean to the stars

if you can’t see them during the day?

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again

to those of you who have taken a more radiant path,

blazing is a kind of blindness too

that keeps you from seeing the diamond in the coal.

Yesterday oxygen was alien ore as toxic

as the love apples of superstitious tomatoes

two hundred years ago it was death to eat.

And it’s poignant to remember that any ground

you plant your flag in like a flower without a root,

like a placard without a rally, is

a charged particle field that reverses spin

synchronistically like a revolution

in an hourglass relationship with what it overthrew.

Consciousness is necessarily bifurcated by its blossoms

into two points of view, but deeper down

in the bloodstream of its darkest roots

it doesn’t make a distinction between an I and a You.

Subject and object aren’t separated

by a skin of water empty as the mirage

of a bubble within and lustrous as the stone

that broke the window without. This world

isn’t happening to you from the outside

and you’re not making it up within like a lie

you can tell your children about being alive.

No one’s wholly wise who still possesses a mind.

No one’s totally ignorant if they give

a red cane to a blind traffic light to see it coming.

I don’t trim the wicks of my comets

as if they were candles at a black mass.

I can breathe fire like Draco at the North Pole,

but when I’m not axially aligned with the earth

I can look into the eyes of my fiercest dragons

and see at the bottom of a telescopic well

millions of fireflies lost in a labyrinth of mirrors

looking for an insight into the nature of life

that would true all the others like crystal eyes

caught in the eleven dimensional net

of enlightened lies where time and the timeless intersect

and synteretic sparks ricochet like spiritual eagles

off the slopes of mountainous eras of grace.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

Time to stop dying and praise the sky.

Time to set your eyes free from what

you’re looking for and marvel at the stars.

Time to forgo the Leggo girders of your intent,

and offer up a few sand castles to the tide,

release your mind from the petty chores

you apply it to and grow astronomical

in the way you let things come about as they will

without trying to raise a sail or attach

a rudder to chaos, as if you could so easily lead

chaos astray into doing things your way,

forgetting you’re not the road, you’re

just the one who walks it like a dream figure

in the omnipresence of the rain. So many eyes,

so much to see, and you’re still looking at it all

from the angle you were born with.

Sylvia, uncuff your shepherd moons

from the dungeons of your bedposts.

Life is cruel. Stop blaming the swallows for it.

You ever get caught nude in a squall of fireflies before

and stay in the water long enough to feel the delicacy

of their lightning sending little shocks of ecstasy

whitewater rafting down the axons of your deltas

as if you had a chance to drown in your joy

at being alive for a change, instead of holding your head

underwater in your sorrows to see if you’re a witch

that’s huffed too much rue? Time to let go,

fledgling, your first nightflight into the abyss.

Time to ride your own thermals, my kestrel,

like bannisters down the stairwells of the maple keys

then swoop up like an arrow from the bow of a lead guitarist

and take hold of the moon in your talons.

You can do it. Turn your scales into feathers.

The low raised up high like moonrise

on the threshold of your wingspan, come on, dragon,

one big gulp of atmosphere to overcome

your fear of koans at these precipitous heights,

stop lingering in the doorway like a portrait in a picture frame

it’s time, it’s time, it’s time to jump.

Don’t tax the tolerance of the wind for shore-huggers.

Get rid of all those thought chains that tie you

to your own wrist with a hood over your head

and designate your prey like an agenda with a menu.

Thinking about freedom enslaves it. Don’t try

to earn it like a gladiator longing for a wooden sword

from the emperor, take it. Be a great thief of fire

and do a victory roll because you got away with it.

You jumped into the black hole of chance

and trillions of stars smiled favourably upon you

like a zodiac of fireflies when the sun’s off road on its own.

Sylvia, dry your tears like puddles on the footpath

and let your eyes, vapours in the sky, fly on the wind

as if your seeing weren’t a lapwing and your crying

weren’t a housewell with a lightbulb that keeps burning out.

Get around like sentience in a dream for a while,

No lack of nightmares in the world to make you sleep

like a trap door spider peeking out from under your eyelids

like a false dawn, or squinting at the stars as if

you were looking into oncoming highbeams,

frozen in your tracks like the ghost of a doe on asphalt.

Lavish some space on yourself and take a bubble-bath

in the universe and you can tell the gargoyles

on your Gothic cathedral you’re sitting in a blast furnace

trying to come up with new ideas for stained glass

and you think you might be on to something

more seraphic in its zeal than fire and blood.

You’ve got the attitude. Maybe it’s time

to de-alpha your beatitude as if life were a friend

with nothing to prove like a river that isn’t always

swimming for its life or a waterclock that overidentifies

with aqueducts and is convinced time runs in a straight line

only a slight gradient off true midnight well within

the margin of error between the mountains and the swamps,

between this inconceivable life and that unbelievable death.

What are you holding your breath for, it’s

a generous atmosphere, let it out like genie from a lamp

no one’s ever wished upon before. Imagine,

a star of your own. The first time the light’s ever

seen your eyes you weren’t trying to hide them

like sunspots, though all those beautiful

auroral storms of yours were a dead give away

there was a star sapphire somewhere beneath

all those bruised orchids of yours you grew for lightyears

in the shadow of an outhouse in a shitty world.

Don’t be so corvid in your approach to the moon

you forget you had a bright side once as white as doves

when you went looking for land and they went looking for you.

So what if the dove came back with a leaf in its beak?

Silver-tongued cousin of diamond, you still speak

less incorruptibly, an eye to the eloquence of moonlight

on the dark side of your neglected veracity.

Black is always the colour of wisdom in an aniconic abyss

that compassionately takes every wandering wavelength in,

every one of them a prodigal daughter of the dark mother,

that’s you, Sylvia, raven flint-knapped from pure obsidian,

all around you like the thorns and petals of a black rose

little chips and lunettes of a spear point in an eclipse

of the new moon, the new moon, Sylvia, opening

its eyelid like a star or a waterlily out of the muck

in the cauldrons of our fetid starmud working its morphic magic

already one white feather into the flight of a wild, wild swan.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE

IN THE CEASELESS SILENCE

In the ceaseless silence, is it my soul I address

in these barely audible whispers of blood,

you, are you there, a friend to me, aloof companion,

intimate stranger, are you just the longing of an echo

after the nightbird’s flown, the light that goes on shining

well after the star is dead? Did I create you

out of the loneliness of my imagination

to talk to under the stars down by the river,

where life seems so sad and beautiful much of the time

and even the most trivial seems supercharged

with a significance that bears no resemblance

to the tiny fireflies of meaning I attribute to the stars,

vaprous candles sublimating in the blaze they try to illuminate,

my eyes, mere raindrops in an infinite sea of awareness?

Science too dazzling right now to be wholly credible,

blinded by its light, its field of view narrowed

by its own expansiveness, is there sorcery beyond this

that isn’t quantumly entangled like you and I in the same dilemma

or is it all clear to you who you are and what you’re doing here,

my simulacrum, my shadow, the dream under my deathmask

that will carry on without me like a creekbed in the absence of rain

waiting to return to consciousness like a fish buried

in the sediment of its own starmud, an urn in a kiln

baked to hold its own ashes like the prophetic skull of the moon

until you return again like an atmosphere and the wind

delights in making the waters of life tremble with anticipation

all that has thrived and died within them shall be renewed again

in your presence standing at the gates of all my arrivals and departures

as if your greeting and farewell were one and the same

gesture of acknowledgment. Or am I second-guessing myself

in a monologue of the alone with the alone that sees

eye to eye with me as if we both made each other up

creator and creature of our interdependent origination?

It’s late on the graveyard shift and I can’t help asking

though I know you won’t answer, am I at least getting

the questions right? In this floating world, are there

shipwrecks at the bottom of a mirage, or are we

walking on stars like spiders at the edge of a lake

trying to connect the dots like a waterclock of constellations?

Are we pearl diving in these bubbles of life

for new moons that will help to keep us afloat

by keeping us self-contained like fishing buoys and crystal skulls?

Mindstreams digging our own graves in our travels,

do we labour to see what we have achieved undone

by hands as busy as ours once were? Are we

working at one another like habitable planets, spiritual proxies

of each other’s supersymmetrical afterlives,

the interreflection of moonrise in an hourglass,

the donkey looking into the well, the well looking back at the donkey?

Times I feel I know what you want of me

and you’re easy to adapt to by holding my mirroring awareness

up to you like a shapeshifter, like a lake to the moon,

a candleflame talking to the wind, and things seem

to find their own equilibrium like water flowing

into puddles of starmud and the clouds not getting dirty.

My earthenware integrity is renewed in the peace I enjoy with you

and nothing is excluded. Resigned to whatever

diminishment must be endured as the aperture narrows

the cat’s eye of the needle I’m trying to thread

with a narrative theme that could weld the disparate parts

of my discontinuity into something whole like a loaf of bread

I left out for the ghosts or some kind of chrysalis

I can crawl out of to dry my wings like a dragon

on the celestial parapets of the waterlilies, or the sunset

of a scar that did the decent thing and gave the wound a proper burial,

fulfilled in a way that’s more a grace of the moment

than a reward for anything that was done or left undone,

the shadows of my life are reconciled to the light that’s casting them.

It’s wisdom and beauty, untroubled freedom

and the lyrical enlightenment of inconceivable myriads

just to be alive as a peer of your complementary presence

I’m always breaking into like a star in a windowpane.

But what does it mean to have lived in vain? To spend

the whole of your life on your hands and your knees

looking for a key in a duststorm, whether it’s gold or dirt

that’s lashing your eyes into tears? Time’s holy commandment.

Don’t waste it. You might wish you hadn’t later on.

Not because any immaculate omnipotence is going

to punish you for it but the very sin of omission is itself

the karmic nemesis that arises synchronistically

like a teaching device that doesn’t impart anything to you

you don’t already know. It’s crucial not to underestimate

the inconceivable. To tempt the truth out of hiding

when you’re not prepared for it, duped by your own ideals.

When the stars aren’t there, our eyes are the less for it.

For the lack of other signs, even a mirage sometimes

serves as a direction of prayer like a scaffolding serves

the bigger picture without intending to. Reality is not

a static state of mind, it’s a supratemporal creative event

and everything that happens, irrevocably once, indelible as space,

inseparable as the moon from its reflection on the lake,

is neither fictive nor true, not one, not two, no gap

like an abyss that must be bridged between one

distinct extremity and another, no thought moment

billions of lightyears old between you and I.

I hear you like music in a dream, I see you like a mindscape

painted in fire, I think of you as the bone-box of my innocence,

the avatar that embodies my experience of the intangible,

my scarecrow, my voodoo doll, my dolmen, my anti-self

my strawdog, my mentor, my buddha, my fool,

and a dead branch flowers on a rootless tree,

as we differentiate ourselves collaboratively

in the ceaseless silence of our configurative unions,

the many returning to the one, the one returning

to transcendence, whole in every part.

Five petals of a flower open and one hand blooms.

PATRICK WHITE