THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

THE MIND REFLECTED IN THE SILENCE OF ITS OWN LIGHT

The mind reflected in the silence of its own light.

Chaos is not pacified, but your memory remains

like a work in progress, fireflies with no fear of heights

arc-welding the wounds of the suspension bridges

that use to sway in the wind over the fathomless abyss I risked

to love you more obsessively than solitude. Black candle

of the heart, you burned in me like a votive flame

in the visionary shrines of my prophetic skull, a tender madness

veiled in the shadows of a thousand extinct stars.

Your body an amphora of wine on the sea floor of Atlantis,

an hourglass full of goldfish and nocturnal mirages

of oracular starclusters, I’ve never fully shaken the hangover

of consuming entire watersheds from the sorrows in your eyes

whenever I went witching for the rootfires of your flesh

with lightning rods as urgent as the tusks of the moon.

The memories circle back on me like a solar storm

of firebirds over the tree line and though it’s getting dark now,

I can still smell the fragrance of your light lingering

like auroral apparitions of deadly nightshade, wild orchids

and black roses that smeared their eyelids in the lampblack

and mascara of total eclipses that weren’t manic enough to go punk

when your rage smashed your insights like frosted lightbulbs

in a morgue where you burned the dead in effigy

on a pyre of ice, a cremation of fireflies, dragons

in the hulls of those Viking funeral ships you liked to launch

like matchbooks with crazy stamens and anthers

even the bees couldn’t churn into honey when you

weren’t in the mood to water down your blood

by tempering the Celtic weaponry of your metalwork

in the elixirs of acid rain that scalded your eyes like wildflowers.

I loved the refreshing arrogance of your blue tattoo

and the unassuming vulnerability of the way

you never expected the steel in your heart to fail

when we used to meet secretly every night

on a burning bridge like thieves of the fire

we stole like graverobbers from our own urns.

Somehow our afterlives got mixed up with this one

and eternity crept into our love affair like autumn ivy

or sumac burning in its igneous flightfeathers

for the long, strange, heartless journey ahead

as we looked at each other like orphanages

waving good-bye to someone we’d have to get over

by closing the windows we opened up in each other

like a starmap of dark matter in mourning

for the black doves that died like sacred syllables

in the throats of the fires that roared like a larynx of stars,

o, can you hear me now, wherever you are

like the other wavelength of this lap-winged caduceus

where the grave of the wound is the cradle of the cure,

still trying to say things after all these circuitous lightyears

to you, to me, to each other in the evanescent vastness

of the darkness that came like a coroner

to our unsustainable dreams with surrealistic autopsies

that were meant to be whispered like rain

into the ears of the dead listening to it weep

like tears that either came too early or too late,

sema soma, to open their coffin lids amid

this garland of fruitless plumage and rootless flowers

like seeds of fire wired to the wayward fuses of the wind

as if love were still glowing like a night light we left on

in the ashes of those starfields we were immolated in.

Foxfire, I suspect, and fiddleheads on the first violins of the bracken.

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

TIME TO STOP DYING AND PRAISE THE SKY

Time to stop dying and praise the sky.

Time to set your eyes free from what

you’re looking for and marvel at the stars.

Time to forgo the Leggo girders of your intent,

and offer up a few sand castles to the tide,

release your mind from the petty chores

you apply it to and grow astronomical

in the way you let things come about as they will

without trying to raise a sail or attach

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

chaos astray into doing things your way,

forgetting you’re not the road, you’re

just the one who walks it like a dream figure

in the omnipresence of the rain. So many eyes,

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

from the angle you were born with.

Sylvia, uncuff your shepherd moons

from the dungeons of your bedposts.

Life is cruel. Stop blaming the swallows for it.

You ever get caught nude in a squall of fireflies before

and stay in the water long enough to feel the delicacy

of their lightning sending little shocks of ecstasy

whitewater rafting down the axons of your deltas

as if you had a chance to drown in your joy

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

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

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

fledgling, your first nightflight into the abyss.

Time to ride your own thermals, my kestrel,

like bannisters down the stairwells of the maple keys

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

and take hold of the moon in your talons.

You can do it. Turn your scales into feathers.

The low raised up high like moonrise

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

one big gulp of atmosphere to overcome

your fear of koans at these precipitous heights,

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

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

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

Get rid of all those thought chains that tie you

to your own wrist with a hood over your head

and designate your prey like an agenda with a menu.

Thinking about freedom enslaves it. Don’t try

to earn it like a gladiator longing for a wooden sword

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

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

You jumped into the black hole of chance

and trillions of stars smiled favourably upon you

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

Sylvia, dry your tears like puddles on the footpath

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

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

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

Get around like sentience in a dream for a while,

No lack of nightmares in the world to make you sleep

like a trap door spider peeking out from under your eyelids

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

you were looking into oncoming highbeams,

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

Lavish some space on yourself and take a bubble-bath

in the universe and you can tell the gargoyles

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

trying to come up with new ideas for stained glass

and you think you might be on to something

more seraphic in its zeal than fire and blood.

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

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

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

swimming for its life or a waterclock that overidentifies

with aqueducts and is convinced time runs in a straight line

only a slight gradient off true midnight well within

the margin of error between the mountains and the swamps,

between this inconceivable life and that unbelievable death.

What are you holding your breath for, it’s

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

no one’s ever wished upon before. Imagine,

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

seen your eyes you weren’t trying to hide them

like sunspots, though all those beautiful

auroral storms of yours were a dead give away

there was a star sapphire somewhere beneath

all those bruised orchids of yours you grew for lightyears

in the shadow of an outhouse in a shitty world.

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

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

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

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

Silver-tongued cousin of diamond, you still speak

less incorruptibly, an eye to the eloquence of moonlight

on the dark side of your neglected veracity.

Black is always the colour of wisdom in an aniconic abyss

that compassionately takes every wandering wavelength in,

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

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

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

little chips and lunettes of a spear point in an eclipse

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

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

in the cauldrons of our fetid starmud working its morphic magic

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

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

IN THE DARK, IN A TONGUE-TWISTER OF A WHISPER

In the dark, in a tongue-twister of a whisper

I can hear the silence has added a new voice

stuttering over the sacred syllables of my past

as, even after all these lightyears, it’s still trying

to pronounce me like the patois of a dead language

rooted like a stump in an old growth forest to the earth.

Desecration follows in the wake of anything

you try to create out of your own starmud

like an empty lifeboat drifting aimlessly

through the fog toward the ghost of an unknown voice

pleading to be rescued from its own night sea of awareness.

Or dream-figures cremating secret loveletters

in rusty oil drums burning under the overpasses

of my rebarred solitude as if an embassy

were about to be overrun by outdated passports.

Stars are the flowers in the gardens of the homeless

and a few sparks like breadcrumbs from a final analysis.

The desecrant noetics of a viciously troubled mind

seeks freedom from itself in the dark to keep

from self-destructing before its prime like wine

and supernovas. What terrorists love best about themselves

isn’t so much the explosion as it is the timing.

Can’t you hear it, the nightingales singing like cellphones?

And this is the hour of the noble word that sounds

like smut in the ears of the cynically liberated

confounded by the chaos of their ungrounded indecisions.

Sometimes it’s better just to sit by the river

and watch the light on the water dancing

with its own shadows like the music of your eyes

playing a soft lament that uplifts your spirits somehow

like the passing and approach of an undivined beginning

in every moment of silence between the whole notes

of the nightbirds answering one another like longing

in the heartwood of the rootless trees

that yearn to echo in the spring again like tree rings

and the tintinnabulum of the rain that ripples through them.

Who doesn’t wish for a taste of something gentle

and forgiving that hasn’t been conditioned

by perdition or horror, especially in this hour

of quantum foam frothing rabidly at the mouth

like frog spittle on the grass with a hydrophobic

animadversion to the waters of life. No asylum

from the madness, even the river laced with

the antidotes to our own toxins as we strike

at one another for boiling ourselves like kids

in our mother’s milk while we were still on the tit

so even the galaxies are dying like sea stars from the acids

we spit into their eyes like a snakepit of angry umbilical cords.

And God forgive the boy scouts who show up

with one eye open and nooses around their necks

as if they were mastering knots that might prove useful ahead.

In a dark time endure like fire in an ice-age

painting on the walls in the house of life

whenever the shadow of a bird crosses your mind

with a suggestion of what to paint with all the flightfeathers

that have drifted down to you over the years

like a road of ghosts that leads anywhere you want to go

because you’ve shed your last starmap like a windfall of eyes

that ripened in the light of your own seeing

without aiming your telescope like a firing squad at the stars

that shoot back from ambush if you look at them blindfolded.

Beyond understanding, the dark watersheds

these mirages in the void reflect like the fountainheads

of our flowing away from ourselves as if

one step forward were one step back in the perpetual stillness

of the here and now throbbing with the improbability

of a pulse as erratic as love buried at sea on the moon.

Even the most tender of fools bobbing for apples

in their birth sacs to amuse the giddy children

with the unforgivable delinquency of their sin of omission

will eventually be toughened up by the crazy wisdom

of forging their words like swords out of an alloy

of compassion and intelligence that doesn’t cut the cord

under their tongues because they speak left-handed

in a world that’s turned right, to find directions out

by wind-resistant indirections at the crossroads of chaos

muttering to themselves like sleepwalkers

grazing on shepherd moons that have put them out to pasture.

Lost sheep in wolf hides trying to follow the herd

like shamans afraid to embrace the absurd as if

they didn’t have any faith in their own prophetic words.

Be the first among poets to be recognized by the homeless

for the way you wander in and out of doorways

like a drunk off the street who’s sure he’s been sent

to the wrong address like a nightwatchman who

keeps on turning doorknobs nevertheless

while everyone else is asleep in their beds

thousands of thresholds away dreaming like photo-ops

of all the children that went missing from the lost and founds

of the abandoned milk cartons they were weaned from

as if some perversity of radioactive starmud in the gutter

had just pulled the plug on their camera shy haloes,

like trap door spiders peeking at butterflies out of their black holes,

undertakers of their own desecrated innocence

as if to have been them and young once were a gateway drug

to the hard stuff that didn’t get off on them

like head bangers in a moshpit of polka-rock

that smiled like an accordion at the end of every gig

as if their lives were kind and fair and intelligible.

Merd, the self-exiled anarchist sings as he drives a knife

through his art in the process of disassociating rationally

from his surrealistic sensibilities burning cold and clear

like stars shining down upon the dry ice of the broken chandeliers

weeping glaciers over the plinths in the eyes of the Pleiades

as if they were firewalking on the toxic thorns of fractured mirrors.

Apocalyptic imagery appears when ecstasy can’t find

a metaphor for itself like an equals sign between its energy

and the speed of light it’s travelling backwards through time

advancing into the abandoned dimensions of its derelict solitude

as dawn breaks like an empty on Devil’s Rock

as if you’d come to the right door, but forgot how to knock.

PATRICK WHITE

I RUE MY OWN IGNORANCE

I RUE MY OWN IGNORANCE

I rue my own ignorance trying to get somebody

to lighten up, live, blow it off, forgive, move on,

get out the snakepit or at least teach the snakes to dance.

Stop thinking about it. Start living it. What

do the stars taste like shining in your blood?

Have you forgotten we’re all innocently culpable?

Alone together with everyone in the same lifeboat,

or dogpaddling in the abyss until we’re buoyant enough

to float for ourselves again, not dying of thirst

like fish in a freshwater lake? Wish I had the herbs,

wish I had the words, the keys, the open sesame

to say to the time locks on the vaults of brighter stars

that might illuminate the hidden agendas of your dark matter,

I truly do. Pain’s not to be disregarded because, because,

and I can see you’re hurting, I can feel the agony

of being you, I can see the rage and the beauty

and the ugliness of the human ego labouring to compensate

for its devastation, whether it be ethically sanctioned or not,

you caught a mirage that’s evolved into a fever,

persecuted, betrayed, wounded, ignored, Narcissus

taking it out on all the mirrors he can’t drown in,

you plead for rescue then you pray for death.

And maybe it’s a dress rehearsal for something serious

you’ll make us all live to regret, if you don’t

enslave us first to the nose rings of our compassion,

make us the dupes of our own ideals like

the conceptual nets it’s easy enough to get caught in

like dolphins who’ve lost their sense of direction,

and most people cling to their best second guesses

like flypaper and fridge magnets, they’re not likely

to understand it on the inside the way you do.

What do you know, for example, about what

makes me cry when I’m on the nightwatch alone

singing three bells all’s well on the upper decks

of the shipwrecks deep in my own sea of awareness?

Even when I write them down, do you see

the same pictures I do, or is more left out of the translation

than even the most vehement expressionist

could possibly include base-jumping

from his precipitous solitude without a parachute,

a wing, a prayer? Maybe one day we’ll all meet

at the speed of light but it occurs to me

we have to take the training wheels off first,

ditch the crutches, stop mytho-poeticizing our alibis

into the paranoid metadata of our reversible screening myths.

There’s no starmap on the other side of the umbrellas

or the eclipses we use to keep the rain off our heads,

and even if there were, look what happened to the moon

when her subconscious watersheds froze up inside

and her ideals were no longer fed like tributaries

by her tears, in joy or disappointment, the former

younger than yesterday, and the latter, old and finished

way before its time, out of synch with its prime.

The pill punching drugstore cowboys of the mind

have ferret souls and holes in their noses and tongues.

Star-nosed moles accusing everyone else

of being blind to the light at the end of the tunnel

as if a firefly of insight were coming at them like a freight train.

Maybe so. Maybe so. Everything makes a private impact

on the familiar witness we made up to testify

to the secret lives even our eyes only aren’t cleared

to breathe a word of like picture-music

in the corneas of the rain, every drop an eye-transplant.

I’ve never met Jesus, but I’ve met ten thousand messiahs just like him

over a lifetime of trying to save myself in a wilderness

as most of the living do, living on bees and locusts,

among thorns and scorpions, and the pharmaceutical vipers

dispensing opioids like the honey of killer bees in Lotusland.

How does the Hill of Skulls in Jerusalem stack up against

the knoll of heads the Mongols piled up before the city walls

to encourage it to surrender? The distinction’s lost upon the dead.

And I hear voices like the swarming of blackflies sometimes,

and others, Salomes, mermaids and lamias singing

so intriguingly with their bodies and their minds

in this desert of mirages unveiling the stars,

it’s as if the night were using my skull as a vessel

for the black grail magic they held it out to me and said, here, drink.

You’ll never be the same after this, if you’re shameless enough.

Like so many poets, huddled in their immensities

declaiming some local muse who blew in their ears

like the ashen firepits of their embering intensities,

you’ve immunized your life and works with sacred syllables

against the very thing you’re afraid of killing you

deeper into the unknown darkness of your own shadowless eyes.

Your Mummy doesn’t love you and your Daddy’s

a stretch of the imagination, and you’re strung out

like pilot lights of vetch entwined like barbed wire

around the towers of common mullein tangled

in the strangle hold of your fishing lines snagged on the moon

hooked to the lures and the flies of the lies we tell ourselves

to explain why we shriek like a three alarm fire

in the house of life whenever someone turns on the lights,

and it’s only another false dawn flaming out

in the usual phoney sunsets of the lamp-posts and daylilies.

You task me with drawing up a starmap of the firing squad

of deranged constellations you’re standing blindfolded in front of

trying to carve a chandelier out of the one good third glass eye

you’ve got left to focus your own inner light on

until all these fallen leaves withering at your feet

like pages of your life you keep tearing out as if autumn were a threat,

break into fire again, as if a choir of arsonists had asked for an encore,

as you have said yourself, you spent the first half of your life

being loving, brilliant, and beautiful, and this is what you get for it.

So I summon the fireflies, illusory cures for illusory diseases,

though by that only the fools would think I meant something unreal,

to a seance in a hall of black mirrors in a palatial labyrinth

of cul de sacs and dead ends, black holes in the hearts of the galaxies,

and I speak to each of them like an intimate insight

into my own human nature, shadowed by what I think

like a mindscape it’s harder than a tarpit to shake:

You see this man here, he’s a friend, and he was once

loving, brilliant, and beautiful, a lantern, a lighthouse, a star

shining like a beacon on a coast of shipwrecks,

and just look at what he gets, a porchlight with insects

buzzing in the ripped spiderwebs dripping from his panicked windows.

And knowing the thieves of fire they are I’ll never be,

I ask them if they might condition a bit of a chaos

into a myth of origin for him that’s a little more of a moonrise

and a little less of that gazelle of light he’s enthroned in a wheelchair.

Cool the fever his eyes have caught, uproot the nettles, and treat him

to a sweeter dream of chaos than the ones he’s most likely to get lost in.

PATRICK WHITE

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME

IF YOU WERE TO ASK ME

If you were to ask me to sweeten your suffering

for a night or two. I could do that. If you

just wanted to pass galactically through my mind

drawing off stars in your train as you passed

as if you were picking wildflowers in waist high grass,

believe me, darkness, I could do that,

and I don’t say this lightly, given how much danger

your beauty adds to the night, but that would be ok too.

I don’t know if it’s a function of the resonance between us,

but the dust on the blue guitar in the corner

is beginning to glow like the nebula in Orion’s belt,

and strings that were boiled once too often

to renew the vibrancy of their flatlining are humming

something funky and upbeat they want me to put the lyrics to.

Been awhile since the moon flowered on these autumn boughs.

And to tell you the truth, starling, you scare me a bit

stepping out of the shadows of the power you embody

to dispel the myth of the eclipse I’ve been living by.

If you were to ask what I see in you I wouldn’t try

to seduce you with the truth because the truth

is just another kind of looking glass that reflects

whatever lies we’re trying to pull over our eyes

to keep most of us from looking at who we truly are.

Mascara and stars. Lampblack on the chandeliers.

Scars from the roses that bled us out like the kisses

we risked that close to the lips of a hot branding iron

and never forgot how fiercely they continued to burn

long after we we turned out to graze free range again.

And if you were to ask me not to ask anything of you

but a few mirages here and there, and I’m not, the desert

wouldn’t be any stranger to me than this sidereal quicksand

in an hourglass I’ve been swimming around and around in

like a sundial in an aquarium most of my life. My starmud

cracked like a cosmic egg and made its way to the sea

nocturnally, a candle of dragon fire in a relay race

against the odds of surviving death as an innate instinct

you either mastered on the run, or were dropped from a height

you couldn’t quite fathom by marine eagles trying

to teach the serpent in its claws how to fly and take a fall

like an uppercut of the earth to your chin, that’s it, that’s all.

The rest of your life spent trying to compensate

for your shabby entrance by making up for it with a grand exit.

All this before the tenderness of mammals began to show up

in a compassionate attempt to feather my scales. Ever wondered

what kind of lizard a peacock was that it has to molt its eyes

every year like the expanding starmap of a snake shedding its skin?

I don’t expect you to be more honest than you are creative

but you’d bore me if you told me lies I’m better at telling

than you. No story of myself to stick to anymore,

God’s Own Zero, my absence amplifies things. Add one nothing to one,

if I dispense with this shadow I wear like the lifemask of a persona

to pass identifiably without making a fuss, by a factor of ten

your solitude’s enhanced like a binary dancing solo

with the sun in an eclipse darker than the shadows

the fireflies cast like wired lightbulbs of insight

into the interrogation rooms of your nervous imagination

when I tell you, if you were to ask, without ratting anyone out,

I could talk about anything with you, without going overboard,

as if I were pearl diving in the dawn for new moons,

knowing the stowaways like to hide their hidden treasures

in the holds and the hearts of the deepest shipwrecks

and they’d be as safe with me as if I had gone down with you.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

YOU TAKE IT IN LIKE A BLACK HOLE

You take it in like a black hole

and you let it out on the other side,

new, white, and shining just the way

the night transforms the light of the stars

into the insights of a mind so radiantly efflorescent

even the fireflies are blinding.

Why is it the next burning bridge

you’re about to cross is the one

that’s going to give you a chance

to make a new world of it

on the other side, on the other side,

mahaprajnaparamita, gone, gone, gone,

altogether gone beyond to the other side

of this river of life that has none?

Seven come eleven in the casino of your genes

is a lot more exciting than playing the lottery

week after week like a calendar with

an astronomically expanded vocabulary

that remedially assists you in apotheosizing yourself

by cowing your friends and detractors

in the shadows of your imaginary wealth.

Go for broke. Or don’t go at all.

In a desert of windows that have clarified

the universe in a grain of sand, sometimes

even to taste an echo of water on the lips of mirage

is enough to replenish the seas with golden fish.

It’s not wisdom to mythically deflate your delusions

or underestimate your distinctions. I’m grateful

for the mistakes that made me who I am today.

This is the way, that’s the way to the abyss,

the void, the reservoir, the silo, the watershed,

the saline aquifer in the third eye of a dead sea

that knows what it’s like to burn when you cry

as if someone just threw acid in your face

like a spitting cobra with a reptilian grin

on the locket of its skull the moment it opens its mouth.

This is the intimate emptiness when all that’s left

to feel affectionate about, is friendless, boundless space.

Look for a teacher among the pupils

who never attained enlightenment

and apprentice yourself to the liberation

of your ignorance and when your aspirations

of breathing in and out for yourself

have been thoroughly defeated in their turn

like the flashflood of a waterclock that ran out

in a salt flat before it could make its way to the sea,

exalt like a master in the crazy wisdom

of the blazing failure you’ve become in the eyes

of a world it’s impossible to imagine without you.

Sooner die in a bad dream you’re the hero of

or be the princess who rescues a dragon

like a black rhino from the poachers

pimping a bestiary of sexual aids

like the horns of unicorns and black bear livers

to superstitiously impotent totemistic nerds,

than live fictitiously in the shadows of your own shining.

Even if, as I hereby do concede, when you read this,

you’re either too bright to understand me,

or you’re not dark enough to see it immediately

for what it is, a star in daylight, or the lantern

of a new moonrise guiding an eyeless eclipse

through a labyrinth of copulating wavelengths

redshifting like a sunset through a colour wheel,

the precession of the vernal equinox

through an underworld of occult zodiacs

flowering like jewels in the eyes of cosmic root fires.

Trouble begins the moment you stop taking

your life so seriously like the imagination of a child

on the moon grown so intense in the face

of its eventful immensities, she learned

to play with it in defence of its draconian innocence.

PATRICK WHITE

SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

SILENCE, THE FIFTH BORN DIMENSION OF THE WORLD

Silence, the fifth born dimension of the world,

solitude, the sixth, miasmic picture music arises

like the fragrance of a dream resonating in the night air,

out of nowhere, the ghost of a waterlily you once loved

like an earthbound angel with the soul

of a Pleiadeian sapphire embedded in starmud.

When was that? O, yes, I remember now that autumn

when the shadows of the leaves fell down the wall

and more amazing than perishing was the fact we weren’t

for the moment, at least, and moments passed

like eras back then, when love seemed to show time

how to take the focus off itself for a change

and kick back like the missing link in a chain

of dynastic waterclocks in an inevitable succession

of flashfloods and dry creek beds that ended up casting

the long shadows of hapless mirages that evaporated

like a lunar atmosphere disappearing with its waterbirds.

When has it ever not been so? Even the future memories

of the prophets can’t recall approaching a crossroads

where time hasn’t intersected the timeless

like the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic

at the vernal equinox as spring comes like a shock

to the heart that starts thriving its way toward death again.

What could it mean to the journey that the beginning

has an end that can’t be differentiated one from the other?

Or the living have a tendency to forget

they’re as often descended from ghosts as smoke is

from fire, as they are the collateral fruits of pre-natal desire.

You can enlist a whole choir of candles to weep for you

if you wish, you can wait for it to dawn on the black pearl

of a new moon that you’re an eclipse that should be taken

seriously, but love puts the darkness to better use

and that tiny little flame like a single-petalled flowering perennial

keeps on dancing at the end of the burnt-out wick

of your spinal cord as your sorrows harden like wax

into sacred pools that only fire’s magus enough to clarify.

Let the light excite the ice on your mindstream to start flowing again

as it dances to the picture music of who you’re becoming

when you look through windows of rain that aren’t gift-wrapped

in the funereal bunting of amber glaciers mourning in your wake

for who you should have been, or might have been,

or might be yet, by some fatal stroke of luck,

that uproots your shining from the starfields

and transplants it into a secret garden to bloom

in someone else’s paradise with less incentive than your own

to seek knowledge even as far as China and end up

returning from North America with Aztec starmaps.

If you’re lost, look upon it as a course correction.

If you think you know where you’re going check

the integrity of your astrolabes, get out your plumb lines

and compare the shallow draught of your moonboat

with the mountainous reefs in the depths of your watersheds

and holler gung ho back to your nervous captain pacing the deck

wondering if he should mutiny or maintain command of a shipwreck.

PATRICK WHITE