MY SOLITUDE A HOUSEWELL OR TWO DEEPER THAN LOVE

MY SOLITUDE A HOUSEWELL OR TWO DEEPER THAN LOVE

My solitude a housewell or two deeper than love,

even at noon when the shadows sheathe their daggers,

I can see the stars and fireflies dancing like eyes

down here together to the riverine music of watersnakes.

And I don’t feel confined to my own heart, anymore

than my mind does by the nightsky, or the light

to the fountainhead of the star it emanates from.

Because I loved you as the embodiment

of my own creative freedom, I’ve never had to gnaw

at my chains like obedience on a short umbilical cord

wishing it had asked for wings from love

instead of a kite. And on clear nights that remind me of you

I rise like a fish to the lure of the moon

when I’m just ruddering among my river reeds

to keep my place in the mindstream like a bookmark

at a purple passage that could never read me the same way twice,

and when I let you catch me as if I just jumped

into your lifeboat out of the blue, what I loved most

about you back then, and still do, is that you always

threw me back into the depths of myself

and each time I found myself swimming

in a deeper abyss than the one you just pulled me out of

like a waterclock, I could feel the ripple

of a mermaid flow through the heartwood

I carved myself out of to be the figurehead

at the bow of your ghost ship as we ploughed

the moon together like a mirage in a fog

sowing the waters of life with stars and fireflies.

When my feelings get too big to say anything

to my intimate other, I’ve always found it wise

to rely on the light in the moonlit window

as a silver-tongued interpreter of the silence.

Even after all these lightyears we’ve been disappearing

into the aerial blue of each other’s distances,

I see you out of the corner of my third eye sometimes

as you were when you were the flightfeather of poetry itself,

the burning dove, the arrow of the raven

that struck me in the heart like the bull’s-eye

of an eclipse that never failed to hit the mark.

And out of the starmuck of human confusion

and obsessive lovelessness, something beautiful

blooms in the dark like the fragrance of an occult rose

at a seance of the heart that summons me

out of my solitude like a weary spirit back to the many roads

I’ve walked down alone at night like a pilgrim

that’s lost sight of the shrines he left behind him

like the prophetic skulls of the roadkill the ants trivialize

by trying to punctuate the emptiness in the sockets of their eyes.

You don’t live it. You can’t see it. You can

visualize all you want, turn yourself into

a retinal circus, but when it gets right down to oracles

you’re visionarily blind if you don’t blood

the hungry ghosts of your abstractions.

Beyond solid, you were evanescently real

and the only kind of bond that could exist

between us was an open palm of space and time

as if every meeting were a penumbral farewell.

Time thinks it’s getting the better of me,

and there are days I don’t doubt it, but

more often than not when I light a cigarette up

with a starmap on the corner of me and the universe

at the crosswalk of shadows and thresholds up ahead

knowing I’ll probably jay walk further down the road,

or find a short cut faster than the speed of thought,

you appear apparitionally out of nowhere

like the gnosis of some lost gospel of the night

about the heart and the body and the mind

and the light and the light and the light of love

that shines in the eyes of the dragons of desire

like black diamonds flowing in the heat

of their own fires with the intensity of shadowless mirrors

that may have seemed cold as glaciers on the outside,

frozen waterclocks and housewells, but inside,

like these facets of you, and this is how I know

I’m dying like diamonds, I’m ageing like jewels.

Fire and water. Tears and flames. Here in my heartwood

I’m still burning like the candelabra of a rootless tree

that fell in love with an ice-storm once that turned the tears

that fell like rain from the eyes of my crystal skull

into a chandelier of stars and fireflies waltzing like a dragon

in the moonlight with you, at the full, ever since.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A STAR WHEN YOU WRITE

LIKE A STAR WHEN YOU WRITE

Like a star when you write, you never

really know what happens to the light,

how it gets bent by somebody else’s

gravitational eye, or if, somewhere

on a nearby planet flowers open like loveletters

from an anonymous admirer. Maybe

there’s a mother in the summer of life

teaching her daughter to make a wish upon you

and keep it like a secret to herself, or

fireflies in a valley after a thunderstorm

aspiring to the heights you shine down from,

knowing there’s no up or down in the space

you emanate out of in all directions at once

like arrows on the circular Sufi bow of light

that embraced Muhammad in the cave of Hira

when he was told by Allah to recite

and he didn’t know how. Sometimes

there’s a nightbird caught in your throat

like a canary in a mine and the gold

just comes pouring out like honey from a hive.

Like the dawn no one ever knows until they open

the aviary of their mouth whether they’re releasing

doves or crows, great blue herons, or wrens, or a comet

streaking across the sky like a shrieking phoenix,

whether you’re attending a seance of dead friends

or an exorcism of yourself. Poetry isn’t

morality, politics, prayer, social altruism,

a raffle ticket in the genius lottery run

by corruptions of the original text, therapy,

the cure for a broken heart, or the meaning

of life. Not a curse, or a blessing you’d wish

upon your children. Not a mirror for magistrates

or shapeshifters, nor yet a reflection of nature

in the bloodless abstraction of a blank stare

trying to fix things in place like a thumb tack

on a starmap of seastars guiding the drowned

to ground like an island universe they can be

washed up on by an ocean that doesn’t hold a grudge.

You get the point? Poetry’s more of a wavelength

than a god-particle, a dangerous river, not

a highway that’s had the hazards conditioned

out of it by the well-meaning who deplore

the road kill all along it like the collateral damage

of a will intent on making things better and better

by ignoring the extreme chaos of their refinements,

handing out parachutes to eagles and crosswalks

to frogs and turtles. Hymns to the dragonflies

who died in the balleen grills and bumpers of cars

the sparrows will pick clean in shopping mall parking lots.

If you’re a poet, when you write, you’re always

whistling in the dark to a star in the corner

of your eye that’s been following you for miles

down a long dirt road that ascends to the moment

like a hill you can walk right off into the nightsky

ahead of you like a moonrise confiding in its own shadows.

And don’t get fooled into thinking

you’re the undertaker of a dying art

embalming your vital organs in Canopic jars

like alabaster wombs doomed to go

gummy and post mature in the dark

without ever breaking like water into

an afterlife of literary immortality

that can’t breathe on its own without

artificial life support, here, or at

the stargates of Orion, you may be

read forever but you only get to sing it once

acapella and that on the fly, like a grave robber

or a thief of fire that’s burning with life

to put the dead to better use than just

leaving them where they lie in their toyboxes.

Embalmed in the mummy cloth of the dying fall

of your dactylics, what could you be but the echo

of an afterlife that’s always a step or two behind you

like the shadow of a star that can’t catch up to itself?

Your poems will die right along with you

if you insist upon it, like slender cup-bearers

who used to serve you wine like willow-trees

down by the river when everything poured

out of itself like stars and fireflies from your long hair

and Ophelias of waterflowers tried so hard

to please you well. They’ll drink the poison

and lie down at your feet without dreaming

anything anymore. In the dark. In the silence.

In the stillness of all those lifeless images

that keep their secrets to themselves because

you stopped the waterclock on an empty bucket

as if you knew what hour it was on the nightwatch

and you struck the bell like the skull of time

that prophesied soon you would have been fulfilled

like a new moon if you’d only opened your eyes

a crack in the dark, left the door ajar, come

with a crowbar to let the light in and out like a pulsar.

Wasn’t it Keats who said that of all God’s creatures

a poet is the one with no identity so as to know

the whole of existence as intimately as

that little white square of emptiness centred in the heart

with no one standing there that wasn’t

a stranger from the start? Little wonder then,

nothing but the forged passports of our poems for papers

to show the border guards in the doorway

of our homecomings that we’re who we say we are,

we clamour to be recognized like the names

of flowers and stars, metaphors with inky fingerprints,

the labyrinthine shadows of ghosts that have been here before us.

Fame’s a trap. More poets have been killed

by the adoration of a pitcher plant than by

the neglect of waterlilies in a festering swamp.

Poets can bloom like wild orchids

in the shadows of outhouses, or crack concrete

like the jackhammers of the dandelions

you can read in between the lines of the sidewalks.

There are lyrical mystics weaving bamboo pots

and sandles in the back alleys of black markets

from the ganas of Calcutta, the ghazals

of the Ruknabad, the haiku of Tokugawa Japan,

the sagas of Iceland, to the approximate sonnets

of Denver, Colorado, on out to the blue

picture-music of the Pleiades backcombing their hair

into nebular rhapsodies of inspired hydrogen.

What’s a good review compared to the depth

of the silence that follows the song of the nightbird

even the hills are moved to echo among themselves

like a voice they overheard with a longing like their own

to dignify what’s most unanswerable about life

by dancing with desire to the music of their own solitude?

Arpeggios of rain on the petals of the unseen flower

playing variations of thorns and vines like Scarlatti

alone at the harpsichord for an hour out of mind

as if someone had left the gate to the culture garden open

and the music had spread on its own like the rootfires

of purple loosestrife and wild columbine.

If I write about you while I’m alive

will you write about me after I’m dead

as if one gravestone a lifetime weren’t enough,

and every autopsy open-endedly ambiguous

in the teaching hospitals of the literati

hovering over the persona of your cadaver

naked in the surgical theatres of their dress rehearsals

flower-arranging their scalpels like bleeding hearts

in an abattoir of featherless roses turning

cyanotically blue from a lack of oxygen at those heights?

Better to befriend a dog, than literary immortality, if you want

your corpse dug up to the quality of the starmud

you’re interred in like tar sands on their way

to a refinery to be dumped like petrocoke and soot

on someone else’s funereal dreams of a best-selling book.

Better to chip all the cartouches of your regal name

like the scars of old wounds off the pillars you

rededicated to the one sun god you were the embodiment of

and wander off like an apostate poet

who preferred the desert to the promised land

because none of the stars out there were

ever compelled to wear yellow armbands

and nobody counted the plinths on an abacus of shining

because there were more needles than there were

haystacks to hide them in an infinite number of directions.

Back to eyebeams. You create the star you see,

the star you want to be, out of your own light.

The way you shine upon things is what

gets reflected back to you like a karmic message

in glass bottle bobbing along your mindstream

like the prophetic skulls of previous dismemberments

to please wake yourself up from the dream you’re having

of yourself like the thematically connected scheme

of a waterclock of purple passages on your way

to turn the water into wine at a wedding of flesh and spirit.

Sooner or later everybody gets married to the world,

and you can’t nullify that anymore than you can

seek a divorce from yourself as if you wrote nothing

but decree absolutes published in a book of bans.

You can’t unshadow the world as if you were

taking a saddle off a winged horse that had had enough

of the bit and the spurs and the burrs under the saddle

and threw you off for not knowing how to ride

your inspiration bareback. Just say to yourself

if you’re brave enough to take your own advice,

o well, there’s more poetry in walking to the stars

than there is in hitch-hiking, and give the matter a rest.

Just sing to yourself in the enormity of your solitude

and listen to the rumours of silence in the dark

that answer you in a million voices like the moon

on the undulant eyelids of a lake in deep rem sleep,

yes, we’re here, too, with you in this abyss

overhearing ourselves like hidden secrets in the bushes

gesturally expressing a wish to be known

not so much for what we say or the way we say it

for our eyes only, but as a kind of sign language,

a universal dream grammar among night birds

conversing alone with the Alone, from one conversation

to the next, without taking each other out of context

like the sacred syllables of the waterbirds disappearing

like words of farewell on the wind as we take

our leave of each other at the silver-tongued forks in our wake.

PATRICK WHITE

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

TENDERLY THE EVENING DESCENDS INTO A DARK BLISS

Tenderly the evening descends into a dark bliss

and lays its poultice like a cool leaf against my forehead

and draws the fever of the day out of the night.

I ease back on my elbows like an easel down by the river.

When I’m burnt, I make a blister

and cushion myself with water,

a more useful approach to tears.

The mosquitoes swarm like insistent circumstances

that thin my blood, but a soft wind

is blowing them away from Pearl Harbour.

The long blue grass yields as easily to a man as a deer.

I want the stars near enough to overhear what they’re whispering.

Still amazing to me I can embrace all of them with a thought

as if they were my idea in the first place

and feel humbled and exalted at the same time

by the sublimity of their radiance and the strangeness of my own.

The river sustains its clarity by wandering.

Single male in the autumn of life, I’ve let go of so much

the only thing left to let go of is the letting go itself.

I’ve forgone the commotion of inducing myself into creation.

Things will fall out by themselves. Playfulness

return to surrealistic perversity

to explain the shape of the universe

and fools like me counter-intuit the crazy wisdom

of squandering their lives on voices in the distance

leading them on deeper into the subtleties of a poetic narcosis

that haunts them like the face

of a beautiful woman they once knew.

Don’t we all belong to a nobility of longing, even though

we don’t live up to it, and start to grasp and scratch

like dead branches screeching across

an intransigent windowpane on a stormy night

that let’s us look at the fire, but doesn’t let us in?

Where do you go with your serious spirit

when you’ve been rejected by your solitude?

Do you know the secret art of being enhanced

by the qualities of anything you’re not attached to,

without killing off the desire for what you’re missing?

Live with gratitude for the abyss in your heart

it’s impossible to fill like a grave

that took more out of you than it put back in.

You can be adorned by your failures.

You can be humiliated by your victories.

Coming and going, your path can be strewn

with roses or thorns. You could be walking on stars.

You could be lying down beside a river at night like I am

savouring a sorrow you like the poetic taste of,

because it includes everything within it

like the skin of the dew and the moon as the source of life.

Even sweeter than a rainbow body of light

or an atmosphere with ocean to match,

this last touch of clinging before you evaporate

into the mystery of everything you’re leaving behind.

No more than you can pour water out of the universe

through a black hole, can your mindstream be poured by time

into the uncomprehending darkness of the black mirror

you’re looking for an image in tonight

in the eyes of all these stars shining down upon us,

knowing our starmud is just as old as their light

and we’re not wandering orphans lost in their shadows.

We’re firewalking on water like stars in the shapes

of self-immolating swans, two parts flammable

from the start, and one of oxygen like a toxin

we depend upon for life like an alien export we adapted to.

Same with death. Until you include it in the nucleus,

inviting your enemy in to feast behind the gates

that laboured like water to keep life in the seas,

you’re vulnerable to the delusion of your own exclusion

like the face of an exile in your mirroring awareness.

Don’t underestimate the creative potential

of the dark genius of death to come up

with new paradigms of seeing and being

that make us feel we lived our whole lives

confined and blind in the coffin of a seed

that stored a harvest of what we’ve reaped in a silo.

Out of the dead ore of the moon

pours the white gold of wheat

like metal from a stone in a starfield

that yields more life than can be lost

in the living of it. Without a sword. Without a ploughshare.

Isn’t it in the nature of our evanescence to move

like light and water and wind from urn to urn

of one sky burial to the next at sea and then the earth

like a water clock that runs so urgently

from full to an emptiness that has to keep expanding

like the human heart just to contain it

so when the cup’s broken like a skull

you can drink the whole of the sea and the sky

in every single drop of your mindstream

and the stars will still be climbing your roots

up to the flowers within that bloom every year

like a deepening insight at zenith into

the dark generosity of becoming something

even beyond the scope of death to imagine extinct?

PATRICK WHITE

TIME TO MYSELF

TIME TO MYSELF

Time to myself.

The first half hour feels

as if I’m sitting at a bus-stop

waiting for something that’s never going to come.

Thoughts like stray threads of hair on my shoulder.

Old love affairs that have gone grey in my absence.

After the last flashflood I scuttled the ark of my heart

on the moon, like a dog far enough into the country

it couldn’t find its way home again.

Love’s always a mystically unique reality

but the cosmic urgencies of the pain

I endured demonically in the name

of things that were too feeble to believe in,

eventually came to hum like white noise

in the background of a boring curse

where all you could do was dogpaddle

in the flotsam and jetsam of incredible trivia

that floats up to the surface of a shipwreck on the bottom

waiting for the next lifeboat.

No one locks their doors in the country

unless they’re living a field away

from a hobby-farm, hillbilly crackhouse

that’s been handed down like the story

of a body in a lost housewell somewhere on the property,

so if someone were to step in out of the night,

I wouldn’t stand my ground like a ten point, white-tailed buck

on a hill that’s been posted against hunting

with grenades, and feel too sure of myself,

but just the same, I’d watch from a distance for awhile.

Like a wolf made shy by intelligence,

I wouldn’t come down from the timberline

until I was convinced by the probable concourse of events

there was no bounty on my head

and no judas-goat was pleading in a leg-hold trap.

Sounds brutal when I say it, but not to those

who’ve been shot at by shepherd moons

trying to cull the pack like asteroids into extinction

whenever it tried to snatch the golden calf by the throat

and bleed it like a rose of transubstantiation in the snow.

The most insane things I’ve ever done

in a world that specializes in absurdity

I’ve done for the beauty of the madness

that overtook me like the acids of a Venus fly-trap.

Sometimes love can be a lighthouse on the moon

with no one to give a warning to, it may be a mermaid

but it’s been singing the same old song on the rocks too long

and I’m poet enough to go down with the ship

but not as a creature of habit. The scratched guitar

with a warped neck in the corner

that made a benign hobby out of a way of life

that was once the death call of the music

that only endangered species could hear and dance to.

Love needs a wide screen to feature

the wingspans of its emotions so any sky

you might find yourself flying in fits you like skin.

But me? I can see a masterpiece in the paint rag of a parrot.

And there are worlds within worlds within worlds

so unanimously unconcerned with us

they have to read ancient history just to prove

that we exist as an unexplained anomaly

of the cosmic background hiss of radiant annihilation

deconstructing into the echoes of its original inspiration

like birds crying in the throat of a valley

that holds its notes too long

to keep time with the pace and passage of life.

Love’s a melodic state of mind with a percussive heartbeat

and no one’s ever really missing from the band

on the road like religious icons of democracy,

even when they get homesick for their girlfriends

and the drummer is moved in his heart of hearts

more by paranoia and lust than he is love and music

to end his calling in a bus station with a broken phone,

trying to make sure his girlfriend’s there

when he gets home at two in the morning.

Not especially bitter, and only occasionally longing,

but I remember the happy day my Greek chef friend announced

he no longer worshipped at the feet of the great goddess sex,

and died of cancer five months later, and how

even Mahatma Gandhi couldn’t pacify the hydra

of his sexual desires by lighting little fires

all around him when he slept on a pyre of women.

Worse than celibacy is abstracting the flesh into a hungry ghost.

To damn the body with the faint praise

of a sin of omission that denigrates its earthly excellence

as an instrument of God in the hands of rank amateurs

trying to weave flying carpets on the loom of a guitar

to add their wavelength of lament to the disappointed stars.

Where the bullet comes to rest

in a cosmic game of Russian roulette

is forensically irrelevant. Who

got it through the heart and who

got it through their head can go on arguing forever

who suffered the deepest death

when the daffodils began behaving like periscopes

intent on torpedoing the love boat

zigzaging through the sealanes of a wolfpack.

Open-armed as the bay of a seaworthy sailor,

I embrace love these days lightly with a kiss

like a ticket in a lottery I’m not expecting to win

but revel in like a Zen poet dancing with the moon

as if he were water, and it was taking its sail down

over the treetops, to stay awhile on his enchanted island

where delusion is not an obstruction to bliss,

and enlightenment isn’t anymore of a seer

than the scars of the star that strip mined your eyes are.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU, MY HOUSE OF BURNING THRESHOLDS

You, my house of burning thresholds, come

to me written on the breath of urgent windows,

and the palms of the walls that want their fortunes read, come

with palettes and kittens and your blue notebook of poems

that grows through ages of skin and mushroom kisses

on the forest floors of your flesh, the bracken spume

of the fountain that pebbles its tears in the light,

and the thoughtful rocks with moss-covered shoulders.

Come like a spoon that sips from the heart

and your blood a riot of sea roses, pink and green,

and the black ashes of the eyes of your secrets

and the locks on the loveletters you wrote on the wind

and I will bury my boat in the waves of your mind,

and be your ghost forever, and live as if I were blind.

There are poppies in your paintbrushes, cherries, wine,

earlobes of blue, and the tongues of mute tattoos

that have pierced your body with sad revelations

of the lives that you leave behind, all the simple journeys

that unravel the keys of the mystery in the dark inks

of another face, another crime, dead trains in the tunnels

caught like words in the throat of a mountain

that forgot what it meant to say, the long, mourning sentences

that carry you away from life to life in the arms of today,

and the bells and the lanterns that swing like fruit

in the lonely midnight stations flowering under their names.

Bring me your love, your art, your wounded past,

your wardrobe of rainbows and scars, and the chaste rings

that chain your body like a planet with mutable orbits

to the vast freedoms of stars in the rain, all the comets

you could never explain to the skies you riddled from blue,

and all the men you’ve married under the fallen bridges

of final farewells. Come in the hour of thieves, in darkness

with your windows open, and the ladders we’ll never climb down,

from our islands in the clouds that call like whales across the moon.

And there are laments we can only say in echoes, in valleys,

in the loose threads of the stream, huge shadowing sorrows

that walk like clocks through our dreams, looking again

for faces in the window that passed their orchards in pain;

looking for tomorrows in the way they came in the night

to a doorway at the top of the stairs, that once was theirs.

There are reasons in the blood that we loose like gloves

and seasons and departures, exits and arrivals

that brave the coming and the going with maps and graves

that lead us each like bees to the heart’s destinations.

Let love guide you through the labyrinths and maze

and putting on wings feathered from the fires of sad silvers

that fall away like water and stars from the herons of our rising,

fly from the old reflections of the mirrors at your feet

out of your face of lilies and fish into a deeper darkness

that waits like a man on a bus with a vase, beside an empty seat.

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