IT'S BEEN TRIED BEFORE, EVIL COME TO THE DOOR

IT’S BEEN TRIED BEFORE, EVIL COME TO THE DOOR

It’s been tried before, evil come to the door

to school me out of my muscular optimism,

my seven times down eight times up approach

to not throwing the fight, the agon of life, until I’m dead.

And even then, even then I’ll probably end up wrestling

with the angel in the way, strategically growing stronger

with every honest defeat. I weld my wounded heart,

the crack in my skull cup into a deeper bond

with these challenges in life that flatter me

with the quality of the enemies I’m known by

just as much as my friends. A medicine man

is only as strong as the wounds he’s called upon to heal.

Physician, rise from death. The dragon’s real.

Though the princess is fictitious and the knight’s

overdressed for combat, what difference between

the slayer and the slain when they’re both quantumly entangled

in the same ghost dance of the sun and the moon for renewal,

the bull and its matador with seven cloaked eyebeams

driven into its back like serpent fire as it kneels

in the garland of its own blood like a rose

releasing its dark abundance from the sweet meat

in the mouth of its wound. Horns and thorns,

the moon gored on its own sword to pour starwheat

into the empty siloes of mammals, crustaceans and reptiles.

Defeat as a sacrificial act of love that shames its victories

into more self-abnegating modes of power that flex

their generosity without knowing where the gifts come from

or who they’re meant for, but uphold the rhythm of giving

like a waterclock determined to make it through the rapids ahead

like a thread through the third eye of a needle

trying to stitch up the rift between the discontinuity of chaos

and the narrative theme of the space-time continuum

that keeps unfolding like the manifest destiny of a bad guess.

If you don’t feel stupid and foolish and empty a lot of the time

trying to attain the unattainable you’re not much of a wise man

or a woman in her craft. The genius and jester

of your own crazy wisdom, enlightenment comes

every spring to the locust tree like unlikely blossoms and honey-bees,

to teach you to respect the unpredictable absurdity of returning to joy

like a dead garden on the moon looking for its way back to life

suddenly breaking into light like a starmap of dandelions.

The destroyers hate the irrepressibility of life

and they’ll come with the Tetragrammaton around their necks,

undertakers with eyes like available sky burials to the dawn

chanting elegaic aubades over the afterbirth of the stillborn

like black laughter at life’s irredeemable inconvenience.

Even the little fires can’t empathize with their trained indifference

to burning in the name of anything the stars aspire to

but an urn of ashes like the fortune-cookie of a crematorium

that begins where it ends like an adolescent geriatric.

You can carve a guitar out of rotten heartwood

and teach it a few chords and a sense of timing

like two minutes with a hook at amateur hour

but that doesn’t make you a singer with a gnostic turtle shell

for a lyre. The destroyers are endlessly tuning

their eye-puncturing guitar strings like spiders

mending fishing nets for the big catch

their nasty boy selves riding Apollonian dolphins

are going to sheepdog toward shore like pitbulls

as if Rubick’s cubes and Moebius strips of feigned emotion

were the necromantic tricks of arcane magicians

they never got out of their own nets to see how vast the ocean is.

Any poet worth their stars has always intuited

a bridge is the third bank on the river of life

and kept reaching out for their opposite extremes

like the wingspan of a waterbird in oxymoronic unions

of disparate elements, hammering the slag out of their words

and tempering their fire like the swords of the vows

they made to the mindstreams of life like an unbreakable alloy

held in trust and tribute until the night they drown

like a reflection of fireflies in the eyes of the stars

sitting lightly like the laurels of Corona Borealis

on the crowns of the black walnut trees that oversaw the fledglings

fly from the nests of their leftover begging bowls

as if the earthbound were holding out its arms

to offer the gift of a gift to the sky from the bottom

of the watersheds it’s rooted in like black swans

among the counter-intuitive waterlilies anchored in our starmud.

No other way to say it or hear it without contamination

except to express it faster than you can think about it,

before your shadow can get a leg up on the light,

or the past starts writing epilogues for a future

that spends its life longing to happen

as if something were always missing

like the truth of a man lingering on a bridge

watching the waters of life pass beneath him

like the picture-music of a sacred verb in a dream,

waiting to encounter himself coming the other way

like the faces of everyone who’s ever crossed to the other side.

The destroyers will always try to live like legends

of something that’s already been tragically achieved

and off-handedly left conspicuously behind them like a rootless tree

so the screening myth goes, walking casually away

from its fruitless windfall like Elvis leaving the building.

They hate the infinite creative potential of stem cells

with no identity of their own so they can live on call

like organ donors with a healthy respect

for the heartfelt failures in life who don’t know why

they tried, but did. And in so doing, fell toward paradise,

feathered by the light, riding their thermals

like inspirations of the earth and the air toward nightfall.

Solitary hawks as clear-eyed as the stars they’re dancing around

like the fires of Cygnus and Aquila in the east

and the burning Lyre we’re heading toward at

18 kilometers a second as the Great Winged Horse

springs from the severed neck of Medusa wishing

happy contrails to the underwhelming grandson of Sisyphus.

PATRICK WHITE

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

HOWEVER WE EMBRACE IT INTIMATELY TO HUMANIZE IT

However we embrace it intimately to humanize it

and make it ours, ingratiate it into our hearts and minds,

to understand it, and through understanding befriend it,

suffering remains impersonal, oblivious to tenderness,

faceless, a dragon without compassion for our appeals.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

they kill us for their sport. Shakespeare. But suffering

is not what we think about it, not the way we feel,

or the little human why of the fact that it exists at all

we shriek into the unlistening abyss, or keep to ourselves

and cry behind whatever lifemasks we care to put on it

as if it were happening to someone else we didn’t recognize.

These are my eyes and they’re weeping blood.

This is my mouth but the tongue’s been torn out

like the flame of a black candle at a mass for the mute.

And the holy men say suffering purifies. The poet

makes something transformatively creative out of it

as if he had a reptile for a muse that can shapeshift

all around him like a caduceus but doesn’t cure his ills

however he try to dull the pain with an anodyne of symbols.

Two women electrocuted in a pool of water running

to rescue a woman in a car on fire that’s just

brought down a powerline like a cobra from a branch.

The noisy bliss of a school bus smashed at a train crossing

like a beer can in a drunken fist that spares no one,

regardless of age, innocence, karma or the satin in the coffins

to prove that heaven’s a better place than this one

where all we ever see is bloodstains on favourite cotton dresses

little girls with ribbons in their hair are killed in every day.

I’ve opened myself up to the suffering of others

and I’ve seen the waterlilies of compassion

gaping at the stars as if waiting for an explanation

that would make it all beautiful and sane again.

I’ve seen friends go methodically mad trying

to gnaw through the glass lenses of the telescopic eyes

they feel they’re caged in like a spider mount

or a live rat in an aquarium with an exotic trophy snake

blunting the bullet of its head off the walls

until one of the ricochets strikes its exhausted mark.

One man’s agony is the way another makes up for

a personality deficiency by enjoying the kill.

Thirty dead wolves in a pick-up truck culled

by two redneck goofs with egos like guns

to protect the cattle on their way to the abattoir.

And when I drove cab, every morning from six

until noon when even the shadows had to turn away,

I was amazed at how many sick and injured people,

young and old, I drove to the hospital as if there were a war

going on somewhere not far from here,

but the only way you could tell was by

the number of wounded and refugees being carried

back from the front lines to the War Memorial Hospital in Perth.

I was the mobile stretcher bearer for the pilgrims

of the Canterbury Tales seeking salvation from pain

in a secular shrine of excruciating cures.

And I grew angry at a god I don’t believe in

that so many, if not all, were born to suffer

in this way at the whim of a psychopath at play.

And for what? To refine a bit of character

like a nugget of wisdom out of a ton of dark ore?

To attribute a loving cause to a tragic effect?

Clinging to desire in a passing world

might explain a lot and get you by for awhile

in the specious present of mirroring thought-moments

but when you realize you’re just dogpaddling in space

off your leash, and that attachment too is a Buddha activity,

who would dare sit at the bedside of a dead child

and void bound in its absence, quote desire

as the cause of nine cancer treatments

that didn’t send suffering into remission?

War, genocide, disease, poverty, ignorance, perishing,

lock-step ideological synchronicities of power-mongers

murdering whatever they set out to govern

that uphold the very principles their power base

was founded upon by the opinions of their inferiors.

And lovers on either side of the river, their hearts arcing

like bridges Running Bear and Little White Dove

will later jump off of. Pain as transcendent as oxygen.

Mice nibbling through the insulation of the wiring

between the walls like the nervous system of an arsonist

shorting out like a chemical fuse to burn

this hovel of a fire trap in ashes to the ground

and rise from annihilation like a culpable mystic in hell.

Maybe I wasn’t raised to be a good bell, a fire-alarm,

or even an air raid siren hoarse with warning,

and my voice is as useless as a lighthouse on the moon,

and I don’t know enough about any gods

to spiritually gossip behind their backs about

who’s on the nightshift of the terminal wards

and who’s shining like a night light in the morgue

and who’s walking in soft shoes as if

the whole world were a hospital that could attend upon

but not mend a heart that’s ticking like a time bomb

walking through a minefield covered in snow

pushing an electric chair to the edge of futile despair

intent on giving suffering some of its own medicine

like a lethal injection of what we’ve been compelled

to live through with smiles on our deathmasks most of our lives.

I want to see the horror in its eyes, I want it to become

the empath I have, I want it to taste its own tears

pacing a widow walk on its hand and knees

waiting for the sea to give up the drowned.

I want to wound reality for making the pain the rule

and the joy of life a school that doesn’t maintain a teacher

to ask a guru how to dance again without fear

its happiness is going to be shackled to a spider

by a dancing master on the other side of the mirror.

PATRICK WHITE  

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