I DON'T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I DON’T WANT TO HAVE MY EYES GLAZED OVER NACREOUSLY

I don’t want to have my eyes glazed over nacreously

if I were a grain of sand, a diamond in the rough,

living in a pearly world. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. I don’t want to live in a spiritual trance

blissed out like the first crescent of the moon

smiling down upon everything as if I weren’t

attached to any particular atmosphere and all

the waters of life were frozen like tears in a jewelled locket

I kiss once in awhile in a rush of gushing devotion.

I love the mystic details of the concrete specifics of the world.

The stylus of the birds that can write with their beaks and feet

like cuneiform on the skin of an apple,

and wormholes that burrow even deeper

into the sweetness of the flesh, neolithic barrow tombs

aligned with the vernal equinox, and that soft blue talc

as if the dew had turned to powder that clings to the autumn grapes.

I like the spelling errors fate makes

on the staves of our foreheads where it writes

the picture-music of our destinies in such a way

that everything that’s written there, over the course of time,

our eyes will live long enough to see.

I don’t want to turn my spirit into a cosmic perfumery

and extract my essence from the ambergris of my presence.

I don’t want to transform whale vomit into an alluring fragrance

that isn’t naturally its own. Or suggest to certain flowers

they gargle the rain like mouthwash, or smear

the eyelids of the rose with a snailtrack of stars.

What did the Zen master say? The stone is lustrous,

but there’s nothing inside. The ore is different

but from it comes gold. Why hide the bruises and scars,

sunspots like black eyes, or the pitted complexion of the moon

from the third eye of Galileo’s telescope trying futilely

to show a Vatican cardinal the mutability of the firmament?

Things are rough out there, and happenstance is neither fair

nor unjust. Things pass into their return like the earth

going around the sun in a five billion year old roulette wheel,

and every asteroid might dream it could grow up to be

the cornerstone of a planet, and then come down

on the dinosaurs like an avalanche without sin

that threw the first rock at Mary Magdalene.

I don’t want to disperse every breath I take and exhale

aurorally like veils, as lovely as they are, over the face of the sky

as if it had something indecent to hide like snow on a dungheap.

I don’t think the dung needs to be dressed up like a festering virgin

that needs to be purified. Snowflakes on a slow methane furnace

I think the dung and the snow go the way of all flesh

though some walk, some run, some flow, some evaporate

and some are just inflammably combustible, but all

know their own way back to their roots as well as anyone.

Never known a river that needed a guru

to find its own way back to the sea, or a cloud

that was ever unhappy about the way it was shaped by the wind.

I wash my hands, and I’m bathed in the waters of Jordan.

I open my eyes, and God says fiat lux, let there be light.

I walk over to the window and look down on the morning street

and Muhammad makes that my quibla, my direction of prayer,

and under the eaves there’s a mourning dove

singing the shahada like a muezzin to its young.

I put my clothes on, slowly rising to consciousness

until my thirteenth year and I’m wearing my tallit and tefillin

at my own bar mitzvah, listening for the Aliyah

to call me up and recite the Torah. I admire the stamina

of the petunias still brimming over the rims of the whiskey barrels

municipally placed between the parking meters

in a biting autumn wind, and the Buddha hands

Ananda a flower and smiles as if I could understand him.

I rescue a fly from drowning in a toilet bowl

with a piece of kleenex like something it can cling to

because I think one day that could be me

praying for a lifeboat, and Beelzebub commends me

for my lack of discrimination, and Lucifer’s intrigued

while Jesus befriends me because my compassion isn’t fastidious.

What’s so unspiritual about mundanity as it is?

Samsara is nirvana. Delusion the door to enlightenment.

Every chore, a religious ritual, a do, a path in a participatory world.

Every farmer in the Perth Restaurant at their daily coffee clutch

a sage as wise as the rocks and stumps he’s cleared

like a backhoe from his fields laid out like scripture

covered in mustard, goldenrod, vetch and purple loosestrife.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You want to touch the soul,

it’s not out there out of palpable reach, it’s

the starmud between your fingers and your toes,

under your nails, the sweetmeat of your brain

in a black walnut shell, the very stuff your hands are made of.

And this is more of a mystery than looking for it anywhere else.

The black-eyed Susans, the New England asters,

the last of the wildflowers aren’t just things to look at

but seers in themselves the stars consult like oracles

of what’s to come, and when you look at the maple trees aflame

who needs anymore martyrs or heretics than that,

and sometimes you can even see Raphael throwing his paintings

in the Bonfire of the Vanities while Savanarola rails like the wind

against the Medici he’s trying to drive out of Florence

or the Taliban trying to purge what’s she’s reading

out of a young girl’s eyes with the formic acids

of stinging nettles and ant heaps clinging to the Koran

like a no trespassing sign at all the crossroads of life

where the Sufis whirl like galaxies into rapturous extinction

and Allah sends no more rasuls like prophets with books

and forgoes the words for the grammar of natural things

as signs of the Friend within and without

and everything’s a metaphor of the tauhid and unity

of the worlds within worlds in light upon light.

Work is as much a form of worship when you see it right

as the Hindus do, as love is. So when you’re feeding the cats

or putting out oats for the horses, this is the mysticism of action

beyond the contemplative, actualizing the abstract

in an act of devotion such that for every roofing nail

a carpenter drives into a rafter, a temple is built in the heart,

and hundreds of loveletters are released for free

like doves and flamingoes or sidereal swans and eagles,

Japanese plum blossoms into the sky that writes back like the moon.

And, yes, there are times when I go mad in my isolation cell

and fling my inkpot at the wall like Luther at the Devil,

and want to get out of here so badly I set my desk afire

and let it drift like a Viking funeral ship all the way to the bottom

and the next thing you know coral’s trying to grow

a Gothic cathedral out of it, complete with angels and gargoyles,

virgins and saints, and grief turned fluid once more

is flowing like a river of stone back to the sky again

as all the masons and their families that laid the heritage field stones

dance around it like fish in the Great Barrier Reef

as the cardinals stand around in their bifurcated, goose-necked,

bi-valved barnacle hats astonished by what metaphors can achieve

polyp by polyp, drop by drop in a limestone cave, star by star

in an expanding universe, or cell by cell in the body of a human

when imagination is free to work in tandem with the random

like genetic mutations on helical stairwells of dna

sliding down the bannisters as if even evolution

were a game of spiral snakes and ladders with oxymoronic rungs

and if you’re lucid and want make things clear as starmud

you have to resort to speaking in tongues.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU LOOK UPON A PUDDLE OF STARMUD AS A DEGENERATE THIRD EYE

IF YOU LOOK UPON A PUDDLE OF STARMUD AS A DEGENERATE THIRD EYE

If you look upon a puddle of starmud as a degenerate third eye

you’re a retinally detached fascistic mystic that runs

enlightenment into the ground the way Round-Up cowboys weeds.

Your nervous system hasn’t rooted very deeply

in your spiritual topsoil and that’s a heavy bell of a blossom

to bear on your back as long as you have

without coming to fruition like the moon on a dead branch.

By the lack of their fruits we shall know them as well.

Five petals open. One flower blooms that was raised

like a loveletter in a slum, not a green intellect with gripe

the sugars of life never ripen into compassion like light and water

ageing the root fires of desire into windfalls of dark abundance

quantumly entangled like black matter in your bright vacancy.

I’ve walked up and down your hall of mirrors

and never once recognized myself in your dismissive laughter,

tree rings don’t ripple through your heartwood

and I can tell by the way the wild irises burn their eyes

in your acid rain, they’re just paint rags of that masterpiece

of a mirage you keep trying to wash the face of the moon off

as if it were a stain on your void bound clarity

and everywhere you labour like a glassblower on the nightshift

to reweld the scars of the crystal skulls you keep

smashing on the ground in case of an eclipse then

walking on the splinters like the thorns of frangible stars

as if your enlightenment path were some kind of painful short cut.

Little vehicle, I’d rather be a busker on the stairs

with an empty guitar case and a crutch midway between the entrance

to the inner sanctum of the temple and the mob on the midway

than be the kind of barker you are like a spiritual junkyard dog

guarding the spare parts of all the carcasses

of the golden chariots you used to cruise through Sunday slums

like a pimp trying to get people to look out of their windows

while thieves of fire stole the wheels off Ezekiel’s ride.

You want to redefine the nature of light with the brilliance

of the blazing that blinds you, but the wavelengths

aren’t co-operating with the spectroscopic analysis

of your chromatically aberrated chameleons, are they now?

I don’t want to make a moral issue out of it, it’s not.

It’s just this is the floating world and the bubbles

in your misperception have no buoyancy,

your shipwrecked swim bladder isn’t much of a lifeboat

for people drowning further out than you are

to haul themselves into out of a greater depth

than you’ve ever been over your head in before.

Fathomless the emptiness of compassion

that leaves enough room for everyone to find a space in it

without throwing anyone’s homeless corpse overboard as dead weight.

At 11:11 you’ve got fifteen minutes before they close the doors

on the motherships of the elect come to gather

its imprinted chromosomes up like memory cards

from pre-recorded cellphones hacking into a cosmic database

before the dakinis delete the bag ladies like viruses

on the faulty downloads of a spiritually fictional movie house

that hasn’t seen its name in enough mystic insights

to start a zodiac in a desert of stars of its own like Las Vegas

without blessing criminal money in a Vatican bank

bleaching out the bloodstains of Caesar’s scarlet robes.

Compassion is a lack of standards that never gives offense

to anyone in the way it loves flesh and blood unconditionally

knowing there’s only so much time to be wrong or right

and then there’s forever, and forever might not be long enough

to make up for all your oversights here among the indefensibly human

because you want to meditate on jewels without illuminating

the ore of the ugly mandalas they sweated them out of their suffering

like evergreens weeping through their pores for a better life

than the face-value you keep placing on theirs like unwanted poster children.

There’s a drunk slumped in the doorway of enlightenment

you can linger in for ten thousand lightyears like a koan

you can’t step over like a threshold until you see other drunks

no less inebriated with their love hate relationship with life

looking over him to make sure he doesn’t choke on his own vomit and you,

finally waking up like a chandelier from your spiritual crystallography,

you take your inestimable masterpiece of spiritual conceptualism

and use it tenderly like a paint rag to wipe the Buddha’s mouth.

PATRICK WHITE

I'D RATHER LEARN TO SING FROM THE RIVER AND THE WIND

I’D RATHER LEARN TO SING FROM THE RIVER AND THE WIND

I’d rather learn to sing from the river and the wind

than second guess what some conceptualist is elaborating

like a busy fractal in a labyrinth taking his mystagoguery

way too literally to be lyrically credible to the nightbirds.

Crutches might be the skeletal structure of lapwings

like model airplanes we used to build as kids

as we jumped from cliffs and ran down hills

to get a lift out of our Icarian descents, to be swept

if only a little way before the inevitable crash

up into the air, this sack of flesh hanging like a doorknocker

in space, and freedom, do you remember it, tasted

so deliriously exhilarating only the fledglings

of the returning swallows could understand what we meant

when we said daring said feathers and falling took flight,

but a flying buttress can’t teach a cathedral to soar.

I used to take a telescope, a cat, and a journal of poems

up to the rocks of Heartbreak Hill late at night

when most of the dangerous drunks were crashed out

on carseats upstairs in the triplex next door

and sit alone for hours staring at the stars

intoxicated by Keats pressing joy’s grape against his palette

bleeding to believe that beauty was truth

though the truth I knew wasn’t always beautiful.

The silence, the solitude, the unattainability

of a young man’s aspirations to say the stars

deeper than they’ve ever been said before

in Arabic, Greek or Latin, as I wrote down the sacred syllables

they whispered to me in tongues you could only hear with your eyes

have sustained the exquisite beginning

of everything I’ve cherished over the lightyears

I’ve spent exploring the abyss ever since.

I drink to the lees this full measure of an hourglass

as if time were a housewell in a desert of stars,

a bottomless bucket that sips from the watersheds of the muses

and then pours a third back toward itself as a sign of respect

I learned from Dogen Zenji who wasn’t aware

he was being observed by someone eight hundred years after him.

Not a studied charm, but a great grace of gestural significance

that teaches you how to think with your heart

without believing your mind’s gone slumming

because there’s so much emotion in the inspiration

of your insight, there’s no distinction between

the diamond and the coal in a snowman’s eyes.

My spirit’s still a beginning that never grows old.

I’m a dangerous child playing by myself on the moon

many days of my life in red-shifting moods

arrayed like the rainbow body of a tantric chameleon

blowing moondogs like smoke rings in the night.

Stars, stars, stars, and the fireflies I’ve included

in their ranks of equal magnitude in the shapeshifting zodiac

of any starmap eschatological enough to conceive of ends and origins.

I’ve never been wounded by a senile childhood

with a career plan for its voodoo dolls. Cursed retroactively

or beatified anyone whose compassion wasn’t heretical,

whose wisdom wasn’t crazy enough to transcend itself

like a reason for dying, whose hidden secret didn’t burn

like the return of the one to the many. I refuse

to throw a wreath of roses on anyone’s coffin lid

or good heartwood on the pyres of the Ganges of their ashes

if they weren’t blooded by the thorns of their unimaginable beauty first.

I’ve listened to lies that were far more beautiful than the truth.

I’ve wept the stars out of my eyes at the death

of a delusion I mourned like the passing of a mirage

my root fires mistook for the approach of a sudden downpour.

It’s takes more genius to make a brilliant failure of life

than it does to desecrate it with a mediocre success.

To the death! To the life! To the intensity

that transmutates the stars in the crucibles

of the human imagination soulfully intrigued

by the black magic of its wonder cloaking its radiance

in robes to turn down the light enough to see in the dark.

Paradoxes, oxymorons, ambiguities, doubts, nuances

that pour poison in your ear like sinister love potions,

lightning flickering like a snake over the rose-garden

abusing its fangs like a choker of thorns so death never forgets

it’s never very far from beauty, not the labyrinth

of counter intuition that’s fallen into habitual conceptualism

or the despair of a man who hasn’t realized yet

that if he’s singing it isn’t a false dawn, not

the flypaper lacquered with sticky sentiments

as if it shared the same chromosomes with Venus,

not the ferocious blackholes that make farcical absurdities

of following the light over our event horizons

to go pearl diving for singular moonrises

you can’t bring to the surface to show anybody,

despite the mental lampblack and creosote of wet fires,

looking at the world through a glass darkly,

the inexhaustibility of that early beginning

has never grown weary or disappointed with me

though the person who purports to be me often has.

There’s a voice. It speaks in a language of things.

A hidden secret that wanted to be known so chaos

created a universe to communicate like a mother tongue

the atoms share with the atmans. Stars with the dark

and the silence. You hear it once and you’re

singing it for life the long way home knowing

the light doesn’t need to take short-cuts. That

it’s touched you with a vastness that annihilates measure.

You’re nothing. You’re everything. You’re so

creatively free to express the mystery of this awareness

after sleeping on it like wine for awhile, you begin

to feel grateful when you wake that you’re meaningless.

PATRICK WHITE

I WAS THINKING ABOUT ABSURDITY, THE UNNAMED MUSE

I WAS THINKING ABOUT ABSURDITY, THE UNNAMED MUSE

I was thinking about absurdity, the unnamed muse

of nine in the fifth place in the Book of Changes

when the daughter of black matter came to my door again

wired and crying as she tried to smile

like tiny serrated edges of pain as she said

she couldn’t find a bar tender or dope dealer

that wanted to talk to her as if there wasn’t a black hole

in the middle of the third eye of the Medusa.

I could tell right away by the way she was swaying

like a suspension bridge hanging by a last thread

out over the abyss like a torn spider web, she had dark fears,

unenlightened shadows with no mystic noon

on her indelible sundials to draw their fangs in like the moon.

I was thinking about absurdity as if that wasn’t absurd enough

in and of itself, but she’s not the first mermaid

to sing an ode of alluring laurels derived from her sorrows

like wild columbine sitting like a hair transplant

on the rock of my skull as if I were an exemplary habitable planet

more water than granite in my attitude toward humans.

I’ve been here before. I’ve put pomade on the frayed ends

of her snakes coming out of hibernation now that spring’s here

and she’s starting to groom her image in the mirror

from the first bud of lipstick on the mouth of the rose

to the last pout of the downcast shedding of a black defoliant.

And she’s insecure about what God sees when she imagines

what He sees she’s done to his creation like a doll of herself

she took things out on instead of talking straight about it

with a spiritual weathervane to get the lightning she harboured

out of the heartwood that was always being ripped

and set aflame by a drug-induced revelation. I was

thinking about absurdity for once without feeling as if

I were going to my own execution and seeing how much easier

it would have been to have been demonized as an heretical saint

than try to bless a sinner with stained-glass paint

so her eyes aren’t boiled away like hot tears into space

in the death valleys where her mirages are immensely proportional

to the intensities of the shadows they’re casting on the new moon

she hopes to make of herself like a total eclipse in rehab.

Don’t get me wrong. I love her dearly. She’s a fashionista

on the catwalks of backalleys when the moon howls

like a vicious feline in heat with crescents she hooks in your eyes

as if she were fly fishing. Back in the day, lightyears ago,

she could reel Moby Dick into her lifeboat with her longing,

she was so dangerously endowed with a talent for innocence

but now when she calls her fan club of sailors to the rocks

the silver spoon jumps over the moon and runs away with the cow.

Someone scorched the grapevine. The wine tastes burnt.

Watered down with blisters to age the bouquet.

Who needs to think about tomorrow when you’ve got yesterday?

It doesn’t matter what we talk about. She listens to me

the way a snake listens to music like a spare guitar string

and resonates metaphorically like the tines of a tuning fork

and I tell her about a man who fixes the wings

of owls, osprey and red-tailed falcons up around Westport

then sets them free again, and she says he must be

a good man to care about birds like that but I can tell

someone shut the cage door on the false dawn of the aviary

she’s been singing in like an encore into karaoke at a nightclub

where all the side men want to be front men

and all the front men want to go home and damage their voices

while the echoes pursue their fifteen minutes of fame,

number one with a bullet that ricochets around the room

so every one gets a turn to burn like their very own starmap.

I was thinking about absurdity, sublimely,

when my light on in the window summoned a muse

out of the dark like a black mass to the candle of a Luna Moth

that singed her antennae like lightning rods on an analogue tv

still playing reruns of the way things were supposed to be.

I was trying to take myself seriously like a sacred clown

at a ghost dance of one in face paint appealing to the stars

to return me to a solitude that didn’t make me old as a child.

Everything written on my forehead I wanted them to see

through my eyes, at the other end of the telescope

where it’s impossible not to receive more than you give.

Not out of ingratitude. But more in the way of deepening

the mutuality of our estranged visions of one another.

When the one without metaphor returns to the many

some have blood, some have fertile crescents of starmud

under their fingernails, others, moonrise on their thumbs,

but hers sparkled like small town fireworks at a festival of fireflies.

Time had stopped sowing seeds on the wind to fall anywhere

and put down roots in the vernal equinox in her eyes

and you could get an occasional glimpse of wood violet

under the duff of her eyelids as if every exile needed

a home address to cover her tracks in long-sleeved zodiacs.

PATRICK WHITE

OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unageing mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE