I SEE THE NEW MOON OF A BLACK PEARL

I SEE THE NEW MOON OF A BLACK PEARL

I see the new moon of a black pearl

stuck through your tongue like a sacred syllable

in a cult of one you only whisper on your knees

when you’re giving head to the false idols

of the gods you worship, the jewel in the lotus,

hoping they’ll love you back because you pleased them well.

Your eyelids smeared with bruised mascara

like the petals of a black rose, o my poor flower,

my battered teen-age friend, my heart breaks

to see how you squander your devotion on men

with feet of clay, who envy you that flesh and blood

you give away so readily like a bride of Corinth

or a beatified prostitute outside the gates of the Iseum.

I hear the faint music of the bells of the columbine

growing on a mossy rock like a hair transplant

and I want to hang earrings of rain from your lobes

like a shower of stars that wash you clean of yourself

in the light so you can see how beautiful you are

when you’re not dressed up like deadly nightshade

in fish net stockings to catch the dolphins by their fins.

I could delight in you, not just for your breasts

and your lips, or that desperate disappointment

in your occult eyes as if someone had just cut down

all your sacred groves, amputated the limbs

of your mistletoe and apple bloom with a golden sickle

of the last crescent of the moon in hypocritical reprisal

for making a human sacrifice of yourself to them

outside the Colosseum. My God, what a body rush

of mystic oblivion and carnal ecstasy would sweep

this man’s island galaxy out to sea if I were ever stung

by the toxic elixir of that weeping ruby hanging

from a blade of stargrass like a lantern in the red light district

of Scorpio. When the music’s in the flute of the snake-charmer

who wouldn’t want to be bit by a young cobra in training

that sways like a river reed in the mouth of a sleazy oboe,

or a mindstream smothered all over in the albino kisses

of nocturnal waterlilies opening like poems and loveletters

addressed anonymously to the stars that gape in astonishment

at the power of black magic rooted in the starmud of a swamp

to bring them to enlightenment by blooding their vision

of night and love that shudder through space like the wavelengths

of these human intimacies that feather snakes in the flames

of the fires of life dying on the pyres of their sky burials?

In the name of lust and love, rapture and denial, sorrow

and the panaceas of snake-oil that make liars

of all those tomorrows that disappeared like smoke and mirrors

when a real witch approaches the frauds with a longing

in her heart that subjects her like a black star

to the tinfoil luminaries of all her bad imitators.

You hear me, sweet one, even this many lightyears away,

I’m tempted to double-back on this martial discipline

that restrains my demonic soul and faster than an enzyme

can outpace the speed of thought, go retrograde on myself

to meet you like bad timing in the spring run off

of a waterclock that knows it’s not long before

it freezes up at the end of autumn like the lens

of a telescopic contact on the third eye of this

longer view of life I take like the shadow of a mountain

cast by the earth like the cursive script of a poet

flowing like a garden of underground rivers on the moon.

I’ll be your wise apple with no worm in it,

your big brother, with no emotional espionage

going on behind your back like a street camera,

a grey-haired familiar you can beat like the stump

of the green bough I used to be in orchard time,

to see what pops out of it like a sacred clown

in a jack in the box, a warm mammal or the usual reptile.

I’ll be your substitute anti-father who isn’t trying

to cultivate you like a weed in a soiled flower bed

that doesn’t feel like a grave everytime you get up from it

and try to bloom again, despite the pain, I can feel it,

boiling in you like acid rain thrown in the eyes of the stars

trying to read you like the subplot of an enigma of tears.

Forget your heavy metal father corroded like an alloy

of black mold and bubonic plague who seeded you

with the fleas of a disease he could treat like a slut

he could carry around in the medicine bag of his loins,

hexing the love you still long for like a bad drug

you seek from all these other dealers as if love

were a taboo you had to violate to get fixed up.

Or do you really think you can overcome

this hemorrhagic fever of love like an antidote

you can milk from the fangs of the venomous

unkindness of life that raped you in its underworld

like a paradigm of the power of death to make the spring bleed

like the jewels of wild columbine a grave-robber couldn’t resist?

Anybody ever made love to your mind, or have you

dumbed the gnostic gospel of your intelligence down

to make fires in the morning that smell like the ashes

of old urns for a meathead that wants his cosmic eggs

overturned without breaking the sunny disposition

of the way he flares at you like the ingrown hair

of a black dwarf with no light to shine on anyone

that doesn’t fester like ulcers in the frying pan

you jumped into like the caldera of a dead volcano

at the expense of the fires that once bloomed in you

like passionate sunsets in an archipelago of Polynesian islands?

Prudentia might have been a fit remembrance

for the lack of sex behind the pews of Thomas Aquinas

looking for a flying buttress for the cathedral

of his Summa Theologica, but I’ve got no tomes of wisdom

I can feed you like the staff of life turned like flesh

into books and bread. No carnelian dot of blood

to mark your pineal gland like a poppy catching

your third eye burning among the starwheat like Antares.

Nor can I answer you like the male principle of the world

that abandoned all standards by excising

the mysterious matrix of the female from

the headwaters of its distant source overgrown

with screening myths that give birth through

the skulls and thighs of the mutated alternatives

that amuse themselves like pseudomorphic stem cells

ravaging mortal women like bulls, swans

and showers of gold as if they were fecundating animals.

But I’ve swept up more than one new moon

in the arms of the old before as if I were dancing

on my grave with fireflies that lit me up

like the ghost of a constellation glowing in the dark.

I know the mystic terror of falling in love with a woman

like Johnny Appleseed ploughing shepherd moons

like the tree of life in a Medusan snakepit of crazy wisdom

that holds the grail of everything that ails you

up to your mouth like the breast of the dark mother

that suckles the dead like the Milky Way merciful

as an aberrant phase of Kali on a rosary of prophetic skulls.

And it still seems after all these eras of ashes

I’ve scattered like doves and crows from the aviaries

of my voice-box, to scry my own signage to see

if the stars were propitious or not for me

to open my eyelids like dawn again without fear

of being blinded by the blazing of the light

at the end of the tunnel that never fails to amaze me

like the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades glimpsed

through the leafless branches of a winter birch grove

and two illegitimate muses of memory that inspire me

to burn brighter than a lightbulb in a housewell

or a night light in a morgue, like the dark genius

of a root fire not even life with all its tears can put out.

This thief of fire wasn’t born like Prometheus

when Metis cleft Zeus’ skull with the double-headed axe

of the moon for wanting to consume his own progeny

like food in defence of the realm he’d become

accustomed to like a shoe that had wearied of the road

he was on like a cannibal eating everybody out of house and home.

If I hold these myths up to you like a starmap

can you see the dark abundance, the bright vacancy

of the darkly profound and sublimely shallow

this business of love is when it takes you more seriously

than you’ve been in the habit of listening to yourself?

Homeless as a rogue planet making pitstops at the stars

for an occasional taste of honey from the hive,

I’m not on the make as much as I used to be

when I looked for fertile crescents in the deserts

of the opposite sex that kept their oases under wraps

for the good of us all, though we shared mirages for awhile

that are harder to forget than my first sight of Orion.

I know I must sound like I’m talking like a field fire

out of a burning bush with New England asters on my breath

in the valley of Tuwa, that there’s madness

in the medicine of what I say about the short straws

of the bad magicians that have thrown the dead heartwood

of their dozy wands like vipers of bad luck in your way.

And I’m not preaching about anything I wasn’t

the spell bound victim of once myself, as if no sword

I’d ever drawn like a blade of moonlight out of the stone

could ever come between me and the women I’ve loved

more like Merlin Morgan la Fay than King Arthur, Guinevere,

but, goose-bump, I never gave all my magic away

like Prospero at the end of the mystery play

taking a step back into the cowardly world

that isn’t so new or very brave to anyone who’s been

exiled by it for not short changing Ariel at the expense of Caliban.

Life still sits at my table like a lonely autumnal equinox

in this thirteenth house of the zodiac where the angels

come to slum on the wrong side of the tracks

when the midnight sun is at the zenith of a total eclipse

or just relax like a black swan that’s given up

looking for its reflection at night in the negative space

of a white starmap that tarred and feathered it like Braille

or binary snake-eyes on the cube root of a bad throw

of the dice. No false idol of love embodied like a dung heap

covered in snow, until things start to get hot is ever

going to come down off the pedestal you put it on

and raise you up eye to eye out of this lower ditch of hell

you’re digging for yourself like a grave so deep and wide

you’re never going to fill it in with the vacuous absence

of all you abide as if the crumbs of the dreams

that fall from your table were loaves and fishes on a hillside.

Stop masticating your own heart to make it easier to feed

like a dirty pulp novel in the shadow of the Tower of Babel

to all these illiterate thugs you apotheosize in their high chairs,

spoon-feeding love like crack over a candle flame

in the middle of an ice-age shrink wrapping the larger mammals

so they don’t burn in the freezer like the body parts

they keep dismembering from you after bleeding

that hapless heart of yours in the bathtub that won’t ever

wash the stain of your snarling father clear-cutting

the orchard of your sex like Eden with a chain-saw.

Say screw it, lady, and throw gasoline on the snakepit

as you head for the exit before this snuff flick’s over.

Go ask the albino crows, nothing’s indelible not even

these oilslicks that are killing off the marine life

in the gulf of your sex in the fathomless depths

of your sea of awareness so the whole world looks polluted

through the same eye you look upon it with

at the small end of the telescope that’s stuck

its head in the sand like a field easel in a Buddhist hourglass

where the wind paints like the blowback

of the dust storm that’s grinding you down like a lens.

Try something new. Learn to be kind and compassionate

to all those voodoo dolls you keep sticking pins in

like effigies of yourself on a terminal psych ward

off its placebos like meds. And, yes, it’s hard

to respect yourself when you’ve never known how

but even so little as an atom nudged in that direction

can start a chain reaction of photons jumping orbitals

in a nuclear liberation of heat and light in the core of yourself

that changes the elemental nature of how you’re put together

whether you melt down like a candle at a black mass

of your inverted passions in insincere tears

or empower yourself to burn like a star for lightyears.

If you just stop trying to shine down on these eyeless slag heaps

trying to burnish the fool’s gold in their played out souls,

I swear there’s a habitable planet out there somewhere

waiting for your light in a dark cold abyss

with flowers in its eyes, o yes, chicory and cinque-foil,

wild poppies, enamel buttercups, marsh orchids

and white sweet clover in its voice when it rises to greet you

when you enter the room at dawn, and it’s not false,

and all your clothes are on like apple bloom that knows

when to take them off like a nebula on a summer night in the starfields

and shine, sweetheart, shine like fruit on the bough

of the evening star in the gardens of the Hesperides.

PATRICK WHITE

VOICES IN THE LABYRINTH

VOICES IN THE LABYRINTH

Voices in the labyrinth at the end of this heartless space

I seem to have wandered into, weary of sorrow, numbed

like a sand-blasted hourglass to the passage of time

not going anywhere it hasn’t been before, each day

greeted like the potato of an old lover with the charms

of a rose, though I can say no less of me, as we stop

to dogpaddle in each other’s mundane mysteries

without being drowned like dolphins caught in fishing nets.

No more wise sententiae please that slam my fingers

in the door, no more trying to squeeze mystic wine

from the blisters on my winged heels trying to shake

the pebble of the world like an avalanche off the road

between the mountains and the Skeena River from Terrace

to Prince Rupert, knowing it’s not safe to stop for long

without being buried in an asteroid belt. The harder

people try to be happy, the more miserable everything gets.

Happiness is more like luck than a premonition of things to come

if you’re flawless and patient enough to labour at it

like a nightshift in a coal mine praying for diamonds

that taste like the waters of life on the blackened lips

of a thirsty man in a desert of stars swimming toward

a lifeboat on the horizon of a delirium of mirages

like an aviary of dead canaries at the end of a long, dark tunnel.

Every insight into the nature of what I’m doing here,

my awareness arrayed before me like a well-soiled world

or a tree full of crows that know their way around

like undertakers of the occult in broad daylight

being chased off by smaller birds like pickpockets

seems like a seed of light embedded in the starmud

of a whole new world I won’t have time to explore on my own

like wildflowers in the starfields of what will bloom after me

and come to fruit on its own, by which, it’s been rightly said

a man is known, though he lie like a windfall of habitable planets

under his own bough, ripe, sweet, fulfilled, dead.

Thousands upon thousands of poems I’ve shed

like oracular eclipses written on the skin of snakes

like the fingerprints of emission spectra on the wavelengths

of first magnitude stars redshifting into old age

like apples on the low-hanging branches of the tree of life

more tempting than the bitter innocence of knowledge

that devastates itself like junkie hooked on his own amazement.

Not how I’m here, though that’s surrealistically

intriguing enough, but that I’m here at all in this dream

with these disembodied dream figures passing in and out

of awareness like swallows flashing by the windows,

gone by the time you turn the light around to look them in the eyes.

Constellations of fireflies exacerbating your astrolabe

like a shapeshifting model that won’t sit still long enough

to have her portrait done like the myth of someone’s origin

somewhere in the universe the stars aren’t fixed like a corrupt casino.

PATRICK WHITE

ASKED WHAT I WANTED TO BE I'LL SAY

ASKED WHAT I WANTED TO BE I’LL SAY

Asked what I wanted to be I’ll say

this is my achievement just as it is,

what I am, counterintuitively second-guessing

whatever this is. What else can a river say

winding its way across the moon

seeking fulfilment in an abyss it’s trying

to fill like a heart-stopping waterclock

that knows it will never catch up

to its own emptiness, but what the hell,

at least you can die knowing you tried

the impossible, you failed at something crucial?

The lovely green-blonde willows are leaning

like a rain storm out over Stewart Lake

and there’s a galactic rush of creation

in the small rapids of the Tay River

coming at me on this hard park bench

as if God were revelling in squandering her talents

just to empower the glee of knowing she can

transcend herself like the one returning to the many

through a million suns dancing on the wavelengths of her eyes.

God’s her own worst heretic and the last

I’d entrust a secret to given how she hides things

out in the open where everybody could see them

if they only stopped searching long enough to look.

Feel free to fill in your own pseudomorphic image

or colour outside of the lines as you wish, tattoo

a starmap on your eyes or howl like a moondog

or a tree ring there’s no green bough in your heart

for a red-winged black bird to perch on anymore

and startle you with the beauty of how

long you’ve forgotten how well it can sing.

When you’re sitting in the sunshine and you don’t want

to be an ignorant eclipse and punch a black hole

like a pupil in the evanescent radiance of the scene,

as the wild irises yearn for the colour of your eyes,

open your fist and try to live like a flower does

not knowing what brought you to bloom

but shining back at the stars nevertheless.

People, dogs, and lovers on the Little Rainbow Bridge,

and I don’t know if I’m dreaming this or not

or if some occult imagination anticipated me

before I happened like a sign of the continuous forthcoming

of the waters of life that have metaphorized me like a mindstream

as my vaporous sensibilities wander off into oblivion

beyond the boundary stones of my prophetic skulls

popping up overnight like mushrooms and moonrises

from the death valley of stars I buried them in

to temper the white lightning of my self-annihilating insights

into the heartwood of a rootless tree like a firefly

in a miasmic cloud of incorrigible unknowing

waiting to see what incomprehensively appears all by itself.

That’s a rush, I know, but if you don’t say it fast

you begin to lie. My space-time continuum’s

deranged at the speed of thought but that doesn’t mean

the shore-huggers see more than those

who flow along with the stream do whether

they’re overturned in the whitewater of their tears

or liferafting down the spring run off of the Milky Way,

what did Dogen Zenji write about how much

we can know about human life---no more

than the reflection in a water droplet on a heron’s beak?

It’s doubtful we’ll ever be able to speak to each other

in the same voice we’re listening to in the solitude

of the silence within, but ask yourself in the slang

of your own indecipherable mother-tongue, because

everyone’s caught in the same crossfire of life

ricocheting off the waters like a quantumly entangled multiverse

of noetic dark matter looking for the light,

in your own inner voice so the furthest galaxy

can hear you like a gamma ray burst of fierce insight,

in this spiritual lost and found, do you still seek solace

from the dumb-founded echoes of your own voice

or have you given up, assented to the silence, and begun to rejoice?

PATRICK WHITE

I UNBURDEN MY HEART AND MIND TO THE RIVER AND THE NIGHT

I UNBURDEN MY HEART AND MIND TO THE RIVER AND THE NIGHT

I unburden my heart and mind to the river and the night.

Stars in the spring run off of the urgent waters

breaking like a rush of passion over the skulls of the rocks

that have felt all this before like a recurring prophecy,

young watersnakes hunting juvenile frogs along the shore,

colonies of unknown waterbugs sprawling across

the thin skinned surface of a black mirror as the water

glints off their backs in the moonlight like tiny jewels

lost without a setting to embed themselves in

except for the occasional corona of light a wave

crowns them in only for a moment in passing their way.

I keep the stars close. Immensity near at hand

like a kind of back up wisdom when mine’s too narrowed

by some local concern and I forget how oceanic

awareness is once it’s disentangled from the nets

and the starmaps, the flypaper and the spider webs,

the separatist ego drapes it in like the bling of a pimp.

Sometimes I walk the rounds of the whole zodiac

like a nightwatchman holding his hokey lantern up

like a heart to look into their eyes through a dark window

into my own soul and see as deeply as I can

whether their bemused regality is sitting on

the lower terraces of this Colosseum I often feel

closing in around me like a slow garotte,

witness to this blood sport of human being

against human being, the savagery of our elaborate sentience.

And I can feel the febrile contagion of my own vehemence

arising within me like a volcanic vent

at the bottom of the lunar sea of my subconscious

trying to thrive in the depths of myself like a species

that’s never been touched by the light

and I need the vastness, I need the herbs

of the silence and awe of the illimitable vastness

to cool the ferocity of the nuclear wounds

that burn like white phosphorus marrowed

in the pipe bombs of my bones. I look beyond the stars

into the huge impersonality of an eyeless abyss

and its indifference is morphine and heavy water

to the meltdown in my heart that’s boiling me alive

in my mother’s milk like the kids by Capella in Auriga

or another blackhole in the Via Galactica.

I stop hemorrhaging like a lifeboat in a bad dream.

I fill in the black hole in my heart like an avalanche

on the spade of a gravedigger patting down the earth

with the ironwork of a few words to help

the medicinal enormity of the mountainous void

I’m buried in settle into the grave of its own dark valley

like these hills into the long barrows and bone-boxes

of the broken birch groves toppled like the masts

of a ghost fleet caught sleeping in Cadiz while still in port

like a ruinous victory snatched from the defeat

of everything it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever believe in again,

though, of course, I’ll endorse the probable concourse

of good second guesses it’s necessary to live your way through

into a solitude you have no doubt has abandoned you

to your own inner resources as my mother would say.

I looked for beauty in suffering and I’ve seen it

clear enough through my tears and the tears of others

like fireflies breaking through the night fog

after the storm has passed, haphazard miracles of light

no one could have anticipated on the darkest night

of their soul spitting lightning on the ground

like the downed power-line of a severed spinal cord

writhing like a wounded snake unravelling itself

like a Celtic knot in agony not knowing what to strike at.

I’ve seen the hand of a dying man reach up

and rest an open palm against the shoulder of a friend

leaning over him, desperately trying to staunch

the stars and the roses and their emergency ladder of thorns

from bleeding out of him like music from a funeral bell

as if this last human gesture of farewell said it all

more eloquently than the ageless silence that followed

his hand sliding down the slope of his friend’s arm

like the last caress of the companionable dead

toward the unassuageable dread of the living

gaping well beyond sorrow into an emptiness

that’s never been disturbed by a whisper of eternity or time.

It means what it means. It is what it is. Fair enough,

as far as it goes, but when does suffering become a blessing,

how is life exonerated from the pain it inflicts

upon itself in the name of keeping the show on the road,

eating its young and old, its best and worst in the same breath,

death, death, death, death, death, the erosive pain

of everyday’s little bit less, little bit less, until we’re

so used to the pervasiveness of what’s lacking

it seldom occurs to us we’re even hurt, or anything

is missing though we mourn the more obvious atrocities

it’s living with a sorrow so unfathomable, the lachrymae rerum

the tears deep down things like housewells

of the wounded watersheds where our spirits

are blunted like swords we lay down like light

upon our own mindstreams in tribute and surrender

to why it has to be this way at all, we can’t explain,

and why, if I can imagine a world without pain,

awareness without an error of perception, without damage,

where we progress from bliss to bliss without

the intervening abyss that shadows us like sorrow,

where hunger and eating don’t exist because

they’re neither self-sustainable nor functional,

because there’s nothing malicious about chaos,

could not life have evolved so there was no alternative,

no indispensable right and wrong path to the proliferant joy

that revels like a starling in the fountains and the willows

of just being alive with no notion of mortality

but the ongoing mystery that perennially

roots and blooms in us like an unknown wildflower

we keep coming up with names for according

to the way it changes, interdependently emanating

out of the same awareness by which we see it

like that star through the burgundy branches of the willows

so much closer to me than my eyes are,

it’s rising like a firefly on a wind like seeing,

like being, that has no within or without, no gap

between the wonder of its creation and mine,

as we arc into existence simultaneously

in the context of this prophetic medium of mind

that remembers yesterday like a future it never leaves behind.

PATRICK WHITE

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I SEE YOU IN THE EYES OF THE RAIN

I see you in the eyes of the rain

and in the broken aspirations of the swallow

that hit the windowpane dead on.

Fire that no longer burns.

Water that no longer drowns.

Earth that no longer receives.

A gust of air that no one breathes.

I see you in the tender, green tendrils

of the wild grapevines clinging to life

like the last plank of a shipwrecked lifeboat

washed up on the shore of the moon.

The most bitter farewells are those

compelled by understanding

to cry a little in the open doorway

and leave as if there were nothing more to say.

Words lightyears beyond communication.

Metaphors like burning bridges

that never quite make it to the other side.

And o how gentle an eclipse comes

to a lover’s coltish eyes

when it’s time to say good-bye

and if you’re a bad man, it’s revenge,

and if you’re good, it’s a sacrifice.

Good-bye, get out, be gone,

I’ll live on in my palace of lonely windows

like a man with class in an hourglass

and I’ll write faceless songs

to the passage of time as autumn approaches.

Leave me now to the pain

I must wrestle with alone

like an angel in my way

that knows I don’t have what it takes

to pull up stakes like a heretic

before I burn for the mistakes I made

on your invigilated test of love.

Once I feel like a loser again

I know I’m at home with myself

and I can feel the clouds laughing in tears

as I get around like rain.

I loved your body like a wishing well.

You loved my brain like an occult spell.

Three afterlives of a star, once you left me

holding the medicine bag of your absence,

I named a desolate street after you

like some kind of municipal gift

to the run down ghetto of a sub-prime heart.

My pain is consoled by my art

like a weather vane is comforted by the weather.

I ghost write the lyrics of the storm.

I incite riots against the norm.

I blood my poems like spearheads

in a wound that never scars the moon.

I shall be the nightwatchman

who makes the rounds of the zodiac

inspecting doors and windows

that are steadfastly closed to him

like lilies in the festering gene pools

of the idle rich in their bridal tents

spawning into money like goldfish.

I shall be an eagle at the extremity

of my wingspan and soar over the smoke

of burning cities like a cinder of freedom

in the eye of a failed revolution

and I will not lament my own extinction

when my starmud settles like a constellation

into the hearsay of bloodshot mirrors.

I will linger in precipitous heights

then shriek like the paper airplane of a poem

down on some bumptious homing pigeon

that was promised a comfortable flight

from here to there, until it was

snatched from the air like a pillow fight.

I will do this because I can feel the glee

of my talons sinking into hypocrisy

like the three crescents of the moon

with an eyrie full of skeletal snakes

that look like a pit full of twisted combs

without any meat on their bones.

Liars convince. Communicators convey.

It isn’t what I say. It’s the way I say it

that makes all the difference to the meaning

that tones me like a moody chameleon

resonating with a tuning fork of colour

that flickers like a photo-op of lightning

trying to get a glimpse of itself in the mirror.

And then I’m an illiterate divinity student

with a heart as big as an orphanage

full of baffled pilgrims that have lost their way

crutching through the labyrinths of the divine

on a cross that walks them to the end of the line

like the rapture of an apocalyptic anti-climax.

I talk to God about you and she talks back

like a comprehensive alibi for the way things are.

She’s got a scar as big as the smile

on the dark side of her face she keeps

turned away from me like an embarassed moon

she doesn’t want to reveal to anyone.

But I can see it in the rear view mirror

of my infernal lucidity leading me away from her

like an atomic Sufi reversing my spin

in the charged particle field of my happy sin.

I walk on the wild side in cowboy boots

in a truce with the shadows of Zen

that says a great general may establish peace

but that doesn’t mean he gets to enjoy it.

And I’m resigned to the sternness of my discipline

like salt to the earth, like a sail to the wind,

like a ferocious heart to a gentle mind.

PATRICK WHITE

UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE