THE LILACS ARE NOT BLIGHTED BY RUST

THE LILACS ARE NOT BLIGHTED BY RUST

The lilacs are not blighted by rust,

the sky isn’t soiled by a storm.

The stars don’t despair in the darkness

they’re alone, and the swallows

are not deterred by death. Ever hear

the wind complain of the load it bears

or the earth weary of being the footstool

of mountains? Water serves unreservedly

the efforts of the irises along its banks.

Hard and indifferent as it is sometimes

to be here, living is a blessing and a boon

that never asks for thanks, like oxygen,

the table’s been set in the absence of a host

but that doesn’t keep everyone from feeling

like a guest. Praise to the capability

of all those things I can take for granted

like a heart beating without intervening

instructions from the supervisory mind.

Eras of Cambrian seabeds within me

shale loveletters inked in the flesh and blood

of my starmud like fossilized cuneiform

teaching me the abc’s of this elaborate alphabet

I’ve evolved into trying to read my chromosomes

like the plot of a lost epic with a future

that holds us all in suspense as if the outcome

were anything but assured. Though

the hunter in me yearns homelessly

for the migratory nights I spent around a fire

following the herds of the stars

to the lower slopes of the echoless valleys

their shadows lingered in a while to drink

from their own reflections like sacred paintings

drawing blood from stone, praise be

to the stationary freedom that allows things

to grow on their own like wheat and poems

in the starfields of Virgo when I grasp the horns

of the plough of the moon to till the Fertile Crescent.

The sea is too immaculate for seeds,

but the wind is a libertine and the earth is a slut

that doesn’t discriminate between the waterlilies

in their nunneries or the brothels

of the wild orchids rooted in muck.

Praise be to the dark abundance

of her open-minded desire to receive

whatever windfalls might come of her generosity.

The sea lets all things run down into it,

but the earth builds them up again after

their will to live has been torn down.

Not a man alive hasn’t known a woman like that,

the sage and the clown, the braggart and the penitent,

whether he’s overcome his desires or not

doesn’t owe big time for the planet that laid

the foundation stone of the lordly towers in the clouds

that bend like the sky toward earth

in an awkward bow to the scarlet letter

of everything that followed in its wake

like paid mourners and plumed horses on parade

behind a dead lifeboat in a hearse with

windowless waves that couldn’t find anybody to save

who wasn’t any less worse than they were.

Isn’t it weird how men as tough as peacocks

do all the flowering like mirrors with built-in eyes,

but woman burns in the oracular coils

of her own serpent fire like the power

that dreams sidereally in the roots of the larkspur

climbing up its burning ladder of stars like heroes

to a mysterious window in their vision of life

they’re not deep enough to reach even if

they’ve got the balls of bathyspheres or spy satellites.

A downpour of applause, please, for

the unconditional freedom to delight in the earth

more like a Zen courtesan arranging flowers

than a midwife in a documentary about birth.

All that moonlight squandered on star-nosed moles

in the tunnels of love, blind to the source

of the shining like profligate insects having sex.

Even the heaviest of bells are roped to the wind

like the copulating wavelengths of a double helix

that seperates from what it hungers for the most

to bind the dove to the mercurial axis of a caduceus

seducing Medusa into releasing her healing powers.

From Kingu and Tiamat to quantum theory

celebrate the mythic dimensions of the delusions

you follow into deserts like a legendary mirage

of yourself that humbles the rain to bring into bloom.

Celebrate the errors of perception that bent space

down pathways the flowers along the roadside

have never had to make way like intimidated refugees

for passing vehicles in a hurry to get somewhere.

You’re not the worst astronaut who ever

walked on the moon without a starmap of spurs on

his barefeet, when his heels sprouted wings

though so many myopically use them

like feather dusters of cedar to cover their tracks

than fly like waterbirds that leave no trace

of themselves whatever medium they’re swimming in.

Minnows in the mindstreams of early spring,

or albatrosses crucified in the yardarms

of the nautical trees of Vancouver Island,

it’s never too early not to worry though I wish

I’d taken my own advice long before this.

Give your hallucinations a break. It’s not easy

keeping you amused when your mind eats

everything in sight like a wild boar at a feast of eyes.

There will be many to come that will be

just as wrong after you as there were

before we born to illuminate our ignorance

by holding our shadows up against the light

in order to see the invisible made manifest.

You abuse your spiritual experience of life

when you use it to empower your impotence

to make right at the expense of everything

that’s been creatively wrong about you

from the very beginnings of your infallible innocence.

Plead indefensibly human before the jury

or the choir, call asylums to testify out of the box

as character witnesses to your upstanding madness,

then count your blessings like prophetic skulls

on an abacus of calendrical rosary beads

darker than the promises new shepherd moons

that vow to guide like snakeoil through the valleys of death,

though, at the time, it’s not unusual to feel

as if you were in total eclipse, keep your eyes open,

for any sign of a chance in this house of life

to praise the earth for the fireflies you set

your bearings by like a tall ship with a crow’s nest

and a sacred grove of Douglas firs to roost in

like the moon’s bird through the long lunar voyage ahead.

PATRICK WHITE

YES, THERE ARE PALE GARDENS

YES, THERE ARE PALE GARDENS

Yes, there are pale gardens, wings ribbed

like the eyelashes of butterflies, and roses

of flaking blood rooted like something

that was said between the lines of lovers

in a book of fossils in the Burgess Shale.

Even the silence that binds the sacred

to the mundane when the margins of beauty

are feathered by the eyes of peacocks

in the apple green dusk bleeding into mystic blue,

as if one weren’t enough to anticipate

the stars emerging like a gentle rain,

the breath of your lover on the hairs of your arm,

as if the dark were crying through tears of light

from the clouds of unknowing, from

the fathomless watersheds of life and death,

even these tender precipitates of the light

that come on like porches and fireflies

and lamp-posts in this breathless interim

where we neither let things go nor take them in,

nothing born yet of its native waters

and no corpse to wash for burial, neither

prelude to the night, nor epilogue of the day,

even the silence, unliving, undead, unborn, unperishing,

can sometimes seem as dessicated and stale

as the bread and the salt we laid out

on the kitchen table as a feast

to welcome our ghosts back as if they

were the guests for a change, and we

their absent hosts only a threshold away

from revealing the mirage of our own origins

to those who have dismissed us like the wisdom

of old wives’ tales vaguely remembering

the distant legends of our own mythic past

that animated us once like dragons in the dawn

that vowed never to be false to its own beginnings.

So I have not forgotten you like the tattoo

of a starmap inked indelibly on this

paper-thin skin of water like a gravemarker

of the oceans of the moon that have dried up

since the heart has stopped flowing into them

like a waterclock of shadows trying to top off

the overturned hourglasses of better times.

No other place the past has ever lived

but in the specious present, in the same

house of life it was born into and you

have gone on morphing where sacred rivers join

at the meeting place of tribal fires

that have grown brighter over the lightyears

than ghost dancers inspired by the shadows

of things to come out of these penumbral sketches

as I have always done and do like quick studies

of your face since I met you like someone

I would keep on encountering for the rest of my life

in the charcoal and ashes of first magnitude dragons

that still burn like candles beside the beds

we lay down in where we couldn’t tell

if we drowned in the oceans of the rose

like the waves of the vast night sea

that overwhelmed the bodies of our lifeboats

in rogue sunamis, or the flames of desire we were

cremated in prophetically like butterflies

that burned like furnaces in the infernoes

of our mouths as we drifted off like satisfied fire hydrants

into the mindstreams that flowed like rose petals

strewn in the happy gutters of dreams that didn’t

long for anything more than what our arms could hold

of blood and hair and eyelids, lips and breasts,

and the mystic defaults we fell back upon

like the feather pillows of our dishevelled humanity.

No urns, but the kilns have remained hot

as the Pleiades, and the vases we turned

like our bodies back then are still arranging

the constellations like wildflowers that haven’t

shape-shifted into kitchen pots and garden plots

where lovers scatter their ashes on the roots of roses

mummified in bark and burlap, hoping

they’ll make it through another long winter

that drags on like the extinction of spring

in a homely afterlife awaiting the return of everything.

PATRICK WHITE

A WOMAN'S VOICE SEEPING OUT OF THE WINDOWS LIKE A FRAGRANCE

A WOMAN’S VOICE SEEPING OUT OF THE WINDOWS LIKE A FRAGRANCE

A woman’s voice seeping out of the windows like a fragrance

of melodic fire in the rain, her song wavering in and out

of earshot over the hissing of cars, the percussive water.

But one heart resonates with another like echoes

in a big room trying not to make a grand entrance

on a stage designed for petty exits. The sorrow true,

the joy in life unanticipated, and the mystery

of being human to suffer and rejoice in the awareness

of both, an alloy of the worst and the best made stronger

by the oxymoron than either alone, or a bridge

between opposites like a nose in the middle of your eyes.

The lyrics might be blurred like watercolours

smudged by weeping, but the hues of the sound are clear,

and dusk is sitting in the front row of the dawn

with a backstage pass to the apartment across the street,

practising for a Thursday night gig at O’Reilly’s

among the clinking of beer bottles and the clatter of spoons

where the orchids dress up to cheat on the dandelions.

Still, it’s the solitude of the music that will touch

their wounds tenderly as if she were putting a finger

softly to their lips and saying hush now for a moment

and listen to the beauty of your own silence

taking compassion on what hurts you the most,

as if the ghost that was summoned by her music

had come to you privately with a cure for an absentee heart

in harmony with the perfect timing of the rain.

The medium is not the message and the word for it

isn’t experience, though you can’t separate the moon

from its lacustrian reflection on the broad waters of life.

The distinction is as valid as a keyhole in an open door.

A gate that doesn’t even shut out those who won’t walk

through it to see that even their fear of shadows

is rooted in their own starmud like the eyes of strange jewels

that shine in the dark like shy nightbirds in the audience.

The stars whisper offstage to your eyes not to be afraid

of your own radiance, or the chromatic range

of your rainbow refractions unlocking your voice

like an aviary that just let all the bats and butterflies

peacocks, crows, hermit thrushes, nightingales and doves out,

o and the great blue herons, the Canada geese, the killdeer

and quail, and the threnodies of the waterbirds I don’t know

the names of but only have to listen to know they mourn

like fire on the water to judge from the wild asters

of the autumn in her voice that burns like fireflies

in the eyes of the rain, then smoulders like wet cedar

before breaking into stars like sparks in the hay

of the scarecrow dancing with a phoenix in the flames

of a torch singer bound like a heretic of joy to the stake

of a microphone in the high fields she’s setting afire

with her voice, then putting them out in the tears

of the music in her heart like soft chandeliers of rain.

The words we put to our sorrows are as wayward as joy

or the hidden nightcreeks following their own melody lines

like the distant whispers of ghosts through the woods

that will return them to their graves like the mists of the morning

when the sun comes out, soon enough, soon enough

like the glare of the lights after last call as the singers

pack their black coffins like scratched guitars

with scars on their voices even the stars can’t lip synch

without their reflections burning like bridges

in the lyrics of life waterclocking like windows in the rain

you can hear singing all the way down the block

as the music blooms like waterlilies in the gutters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

PRETTY BONES FELL FROM THE SCAFFOLDING OF HER OWN RIBS

Pretty Bones fell from the scaffolding of her own ribs

like the rungs of burning ladders she’s spiritualized into serpent fire

that climbs up her spinal cord like the pilot lights

of the scarlet runners to paint paradise in earth colours

with invisible highlights of the hotspots in a candle flame

anybody would hold their right hand of power over

just to talk to her for an era or two as if she were

Van Gogh’s unmarried cousin. The kind of beauty

that makes everyone in whatever room of the palace

of recycled chandliers she steps into like an ice storm

feel cold and lonely and longing as they’re drawn to her

like Celtic bards burning their poems in the fires

she jumps through naked as a witch that inspires them

like an heretical muse to take greater and greater subjective risks.

Pretty Bones hands you a begging bowl full of thorns

and tells you not to mistake the decrescent crown

of the moon even when it’s neaping on the wane

for a nest of inspiration it would be folly to hope

the same blue herons are going to return to

as they did last year and the year before that

like a recurring dream that nothing’s gone, it will all

come back like symbols of dusk to the limbs

of the dead trees washing their corpses in the waters of life

by the glow and the gloaming of the apple-green irises

in the eyes of a peacock spreading its feathers out

across the sky like a starmap to enlightenment

tinged by the sad colours of cool bliss in the background

as if she had an aerial perspective on time

and could turn the hour hands around like the petals

of the wildflowers leaping back into spring

without advancing forward into the auras of autumn.

Pretty Bones maintains she’s still vernal even here

in the tarpits of hell where the white swans

drown in their own darkness like vows they made

to the occult promise of a new moon to open their eyelids

as if they were giving birth to the light out of

the dark abundance of their own innate potential for radiance

like waterlilies shining as if their eyes were shy peers of the stars

saddened by some deep secret of life they enigmatically

keet to themselves like the silence of the nightbirds

that falls like a veil of longing and wonder over the distant hills

buried like sacred gravegoods in the same afterlife

they stole from like the vernal equinox from the bone-box

she carved out of her own heartwood like a place

she could rest her prophetic skull with no fear of being snake bit.

Pretty Bones is never any less fictitious than you want her to be.

She accommodates the freaks and the ghouls,

and the demonic zombies that are trying too hard

to have their mummified leathers patched by

the ghosts of dead outlaws with the rockers of their own gravestones

as a testament of their unthinking loyalty unto death.

Her compassion is alluvial as the flesh of the Nile

and even the crocodiles who eat carrion are too beguiled

to open their jaws like satin coffins to unwary gazelles.

Pretty Bones can see windows within windows like the light

in everyone as if she were passing by on the street at night

on her way to some hectic rendezvous with her anti-self

to paint the town red in scarlet letters as if

she were just learning how to spell the alpha

of a new beginning in elaborate labyrinths of magic kells

that say it all iconically in elaborate fractals of random spontaneity

singing like crows and angels in the sacred groves

of trees abandoned to their own fate like spray bombs and chainsaws.

PATRICK WHITE

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

ALL THE GOOD REASONS THAT GET IN THE WAY OF WRITING

All the good reasons that get in the way of writing,

baby needs new shoes, and you’re conscientious and diligent,

will kill you faster than the bad ones

that brought you to the edge of your mindstream in the first place

to dip your skull like the cup of the moon

in the wellsprings of your own imagination

instead of always sipping spit from other men’s mouths.

I’m not saying don’t do what you must do

to be a decent human being, or as close as you can get,

but when you’re creatively underwhelmed

by the rising Rockies of Circumstance

losing their footing like an avalanche of cornerstones

coming down on you like a barrage of asteroids,

you better find a mountain gear deep within yourself

to power you out of the way of your own collapsing mindscape.

Don’t come to a reasonable truce with the ashen exigencies

of the underwhelming reality love married you to,

or pontificate like a hollow urn on the tragic absence

of even so much as an echo of yourself to make a comeback

or tell me you squandered it all like apple bloom

when everything I’ve read of what you haven’t written

smells like smoke from a distant pyre on the wind.

Remember the fire. Even if you have to burn underground

through the occult roots of the cedars, or bury yourself

powdered in red ochre under the hearthstones

of your prophetic forebears erasing your picture-music

from the cave walls like graffiti under a bridge

between this world as it never is when you look too closely,

and the one that’s working on you like spiritual water on limestone.

Remember the fire. Remember the discipline

of disobedience that tempted you to steal it in the first place

like a Spartan boy with a hot fox, as it

eats you from the outside in without you saying a word

lest you get caught ratting your deepest secret out in agony.

Or regenerative Prometheus chained to a rock like a salamander

born in the fire of his own afterbirth. Know this.

Lightning doesn’t strike the roosters of fire

that crow like weathervanes pinned

like a medal from an old campaign to the axis of the wind

as if the dawn were some kind of triumph over the night.

Cradle that fire in your hands like a bird that’s fallen to earth,

or a lamp of holy oil in a niche of unanswered longings,

a candle in a hurricane of boarded up windows,

the light of your own mind, casting shadows of time

like a sundial with a wilder imagination

than its usefulness might at first glance suggest.

Nor will it do to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket,

or pour gold down your throat like the Parthians did Crassus

and expect to shine like a lighthouse in a diamond mine

with the voice of an oracular canary in a cage.

You’ve got to live inexhaustibly

what you’re going to write about first

if you want to burn down the Library of Alexandria

in a gamma ray burst of creative annihilation

because you can only master as much life

as you’ve surrendered to like a heretic at the stake

or a pine cone germinating the seeds of enlightenment

like a zen hermit in a forest fire. Don’t take

all the beautiful green swords flaming like wild irises

whose beauty you fall upon like an honourable death

and abuse them like the palings of a gate or a fence around paradise.

Even if you’ve only got a firefly of talent

left in the caldera of an extinct volcano,

a spark in the firepit of a burnt out dragon,

a smouldering ember from last night’s fire in the stove

on a cold morning when the windows are blazing with ice,

you must be crazy and wise enough oxymoronically

to be the benign tyrant of your own Golden Age

like Pericles of Athens, with a politically incorrect

lover for a muse you look upon like the Parthenon

as if she were a phase of the moon. Even if

you love the swaying silver of the wind

over the heavy-grained harvest breaking water

like a bell under a redundant blue moon,

don’t shrink from threshing it if you want to

share it like bread with people as hungry as you are

to eat the heart of the king of the waxing year,

like Wodin made a sacrifice of himself to himself,

or life thrives on itself like a soccer team

that crashed landed on a mountaintop,

or the cosmic eggs of turtles feeds a manger of seagulls,

and the grass eats the grazer, and the grazer eats the grass.

Or if you’re too sensitive to compassionately take life

in order to give it, sharpen the edge of your golden sickle

on the whetstone of the moon, and express your mercy

as Muhammad suggested, with a quick kill

you can hold love responsible for like a spiritual alibi

if you’ve got genius enough to heal it like a inspired liar.

You have to be part salmon. A battering ram

swimming upstream against the flow of circumstance

like the gate of a water castle you’re besieging

to lay your blunted sword down in tribute

among the sacred pools of life that gave it to you

at the beginning of your song, like fire from their eyes

to wage a holy war of one on their behalf

you’re doomed to lose like a conflict that progresses

from one defeat to the next against ever stronger adversaries,

angels in the way, shaitans obstructing the path for your own good,

who realize, too late, with every encounter,

you’re growing stronger than the best reasons

could have anticipated strategically.

Be a good apple tree, lyrically seasoned and epically strong

as Lao Tzu and the Druid aptly described you

like the sacred syllable in the heartwood of the letter Q,

and express yourself completely without intending

the betterment of anything, though all do,

from wasps and birds to bears and humans

with the beauty of your blossoms, the wisdom of your leaves,

and the generosity of the sacrifice that laid you out

like a windfall of dice enshrining the eyes that can see

like seeds in the sibylline books of the apple

the risk they’ll need to take tomorrow like a fire swallower

of the sun and the moon to keep their planets shining

from the inside out in the Goldilocks zone

of a light that’s been sweetened immanentally

by a dangerously habitable life holding up

a lantern in the dark that disappointment, defeat and struggle

could no more put out than a volunteer fire brigade of waterclocks

for the best of reasons could put out the stars in an arsonist’s heart.

Set the world afire like a flame that writes on the wind,

poppies flaring uncontrollably across your field of vision.

Burn like a two-eyed passion for everything

you can see and be on the earth that consumes you

in the equinoctial fires of your vernal immolations,

not a magnifying glass that intensifies the sun into

the capricious focus of an idle boy on a cruel afternoon

shepherding ants like prophetic semi-colons into a furnace.

PATRICK WHITE

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