LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

LOOKING FOR A STAIRWELL OF STARS

Looking for a stairwell of stars in a labyrinth

of fire escapes I can slide down the bannisters of

like a childhood planet in an aberrant orbit

as if I’d wandered off somewhere like an unattended kite

or the black sheep of a shepherd moon

into the same vast spaces where the stars

graze like dragons on the ashes of themselves

and all along the river, fleets of waterlilies

break into light as if they were hauling their sails up

into the wind like the flightfeathers the moon sheds

like a waterbird lending its plumage to the waves

so they can soar in the depths of a borrowed wingspan

or swim through the stars on the oarpower of their own fins.

I’m parasailing in the Pleiades like a dandelion seed

that’s about to ignite into a big yellow sun

with planets all around it coming into consciousness

like life losing its innocence by becoming

aware of itself like a secret it shares with a stranger.

I’ve freed my dreams from the tyranny of mirrors.

My windows into the soul are breeding

with my mirages in a happy connubium

of appearances with the way things are

deep down underneath the rock you turn over

like your heart for the pale, yellow worm

of a meaning to life once you’ve come to mistrust

your senses into making better spies than friends.

I take as much delight these days in the way

things end, as I ever did in the way they began.

I rejoice in my impurities like sunspotted beauty marks

on the coronas of my crazy wisdom

and the alluvial laughlines at the deltas of my eyes

flowing like some soft-spoken waterclock into the abyss.

I sink and rise like the tides of a bell on a shipwreck,

despite myself, and sing out like a pearldiver

that drowned on the moon trying to open its shell,

all’s well, not, hell, maybe heaven, but only for awhile.

I beat myself up like a pinata of the heart

to be a righteous gift at a poor kid’s birthday party,

but I always feel deluded by the sacrifices I have to make

to transform the dupe of my morals into the sacred clowns

of the high ideals that have been making a fool of me

most of my life. Nobody trusts anyone anymore

if they can’t discern a reason for why you’re good to them.

Sad embassies on the moon waiting for a terrorist attack.

Whether you pour an ocean of compassion

into a teacup with a crack in it that’s as seismic

as the one in your crystal skull, or measure it out

drop by drop like some kind of Chinese water-torture,

even if your right hand gets caught spying on

what you’re doing with the left, things ebb and neap

like tidal shadows in the Sea of Tranquillity

where emptiness is always full, and maybe,

we’ll prove most useful when we’re not even here.

Not indifference square in the middle of things,

ignorant of its embittered self satisfaction

trivializing the aesthetics of its own solitude

by carrying the angry placard of a wallflower

in a protest parade that reads, I don’t care,

though it’s never true. When you most expect it to be.

Like a silent majority looking into their cellphones

like the third eye of God making collective decisions

for the mob that’s itching like the internet to flex its authority.

You can say you’re committed to a cause

you’re life’s been a long preparation to die for,

but the greater discipline is enduring the agony

of living it as if it were something beautiful

forever passing away. Like night on the face

of someone you love when you’re not trying to possess it

like a starmap on the black market to happiness.

Or the solitude that binds your quantumly entangled vines

to the wine in the eyes of an opposite,

blood of your blood, bone of your bone,

flesh of your flesh like the shadow you cast

in the form of the other as if it were a mask

with the eyes missing to see deeply

into the dark waters of the mystery of life

that sight is the kind of love that includes

the absence of itself like an old moon

that once knew what it was like to hold

and let go of the new moon in its arms.

PATRICK WHITE

MY LIFE AND WORK

MY LIFE AND WORK

My life and work as much the oeuvre

of all the poems I didn’t write as those

that made an impression upon my voice

like the Burgess Shales, a firefly

flowering on the wind from a seed,

the lapwing of a gate on one hinge

someone left open years ago for me

to walk through now into the high fields

between the lyrical vetch in the grass

and the picture-music of the stars.

Myriads of simple things I never

laboured at nor mastered like how

to treat my heartwood like a real craftsman

instead of rooting it in a long line of beginnings

on a clear cut slope of a mountain like a tree

or a nightstream that just got on with me

like a leaf drifting on my own mind

as if the point of every wavelength of the journey

were the going and the going were the destination

I arrived and departed from every instant of my life.

If I’ve had to live at times like a black hole

in absolute stillness like the pupil of an eye

or a trap door spider that locked itself out,

how else could I have come to understand

that isolation and darkness are two jewels

of an underworld where the dead are full of surprises

like the urns of angels with a message of ashes

that heralds the demonic like an aniconic oracle

of the new moon that resides in each of us

like the tooth of a dragon we’ve sown at first crescent?

Never felt the need to make a dolmen out of it

and hang it around my neck like a talisman

I could shapeshift with my fingers when I was

scared and alone in a house of life that was built

from the ceiling down with somebody else’s hands.

A tent’s always seemed a more habitable planet to me

than cement. The deportable thresholds of the homeless

more a passport to the promise land,

than the forged documents of a denatured citizen

who alienates his own humanity to belong

to the effluvial detritus of whatever’s left

as if an atlas were anymore real than a colouring book.

Getting mad. No. Not Now. Won’t do. Won’t do.

This is one of my more abstruse meditative moods.

I want to stay clear, peaceful. Like a mud puddle

enraptured by the serenity of the stars that bloom

like waterlilies in the eyes of fractured mirrors

without getting lost in the distances between us

like a lifeboat too far from the hill in the fog

to hear anyone calling as if they were desperately praying

are you there, are you there, were you ever there

or are you just another hidden secret that wanted

to be known, and you were, and drowned in your own despair

at the thought of something that couldn’t be undone?

The shadows are getting longer than the things

they represent but never embodied and it makes me

so sad so much has to die unfulfilled because

it never stood up to the light within it

as if there were nothing to be afraid of

or the sunflowers wouldn’t raise their heads

to make eye-contact with the face behind their masks

we all wear as if it were mystically tailored for us.

In the expanding space of an abyss as big as the universe

and yet, somehow, seems dwarfed by the human heart

throwing cornflowers and roses into a grave

because they say better than we do, what must remain

unsayable to us though it’s well understood

what a flashbulb our time is here on earth

standing on the red carpet of the bloodstream

that’s been rolled out for us like a poppy in a dream,

what strange music arises out of the heart

when it learns to cherish the things that life

no less than death, is indifferent to. As long

as there’s a space for one drop of compassion

in your art, even a genius far greater by comparison

will seem like a fool beside you as the entire universe

fits you like a skin it’s growing out of like an eye

about to break into tears when you’re mourning

for the world like a homesick farewell. And autumn comes.

The thief leaves the moon in the window

as he usually does, and love, hang on to love

as long as you can, and when it’s gone

so deep inside you like a waterbird disappearing

into the twilight, try to remember we’re

a vaporous kind of sentience, evanescently aware

we’re pilgrims of fire on a long road of smoke

to the shrines of the stars to perfect our solitude.

Don’t try to climb your burning ladders

like a snake of scarlet runners up to heaven

just stretch your wings out and try to ride

the thermals of serpent fire at the base of your spine

like the cinder of a red-tailed hawk in the third eye

of the sun, or a dragon, if you want to have some real fun.

Don’t try to turn back the helical lifespans

of the waterclocks. The shadows of time

are softened by the patina of the moon on our eyelids.

The peaks and the valleys of anyone’s life

eventually fall into each other’s empty arms

like quantumly entangled annihilations of place and time,

bright vacancy, dark abundance, the two become one

and the one, well, you’ve got eyes, see for yourself.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I SHOULD LIE IN THE SUN AND MELT INTO THE GRASS

I should lie in the sun and melt into the grass.

I listen to the bikers throttling up like chain-saws.

I sit here urgently trying not to pollute time.

A poem’s got one foot on shore and one in the boat.

Let Atlantis rise or sink as it will. I can wait.

Even when it’s calm, my heart is an idling storm

and every third thought is a voodoo doll

as it sees itself on the inside

behind the eyelid of a visionary eclipse.

Nothing to worry about. I’m not going to put

the eyes of the telescope out for looking at Lady Godiva.

Look at me tracking myself all over this paper,

mouse and bird letters in the snow at the base of a juniper.

How human it is to forgo yourself for a future that doesn’t exist.

God, I wish there were more fireflies in my life than street signs.

Do you see the lack of meaning in how things are understood?

Thought will get you as far as a frog on a lily pad

but once you get there it’s easy to see it’s the lily that shines

in a whole other realm of language

that everyone understands but no one can speak.

I watch the honeysuckle burn the gate I came through.

I note the blue eye shadow of the damselfly

applying herself like a cosmetic pencil to the heavy petals

of the wild roses tangled in the fallen birch.

What a shock it would be if I were to take off my lifemask

and you were to discover me infinitely closer to you

like a dimension you hadn’t detected in your awareness

than the light is to what you see when

you’re sitting up in bed alone in the dark at three in the morning.

What a world, hey? What do you make of it?

The marvel and the horror and the mystery

and the way destiny manifestly unrolls like a lottery

for every living thing on a planet that occasionally plays

Russian roulette with the asteroids, and our tiny part in it all,

this mere speck of nothingness that can embody

in its formless spaces within, the superclustering of galaxies?

And the pain and the anger and the sorrow and the fear

and the way things change and disappear

as you look for the forms of your expectations everywhere

and everything’s either an approximation or consolation

of what you can see so clearly, it burns the air?

I should lie down in the sun and melt into the grass,

but forgotten among buildings here, I am unbound

and not even the dead are as free as I am right now.

The whole universe is one big solid insight

where inanimate things are just another mode of motion

sitting in the room like Latin, dogpaddling in space and time,

and I’m tucked under your eyelids like a loveletter

you weren’t expecting in a language that could read you

like any one of the seventy-two scholars of the Septuagint.

I’ve been listening to you for lightyears like leaves

listen for the wind and the rain and the moonlight

and what you have felt about being alive

to say hello and sing farewell, has been my feeling,

and when you have wept at the intransigence of angels

and the generosity of their expansive interventions,

I have been humbled by the eyes of my own exaltations.

And my feet swept out from under me

like an undertow of shadows on the moon.

Sister Lunacy, who can stand in the light

of these intensities and immensities for long

this vertigo of stars and skulls, bells and scars

without reeling in the delirium of simply being here

to witness them as if they somehow depended on us

to embody them in our hearts and minds and voids

as if they were no different from us than we were,

all waves of awareness the wind blows up on the ocean.

The imagination transforms everything in to us.

The stars reek of the eyes that have gazed up at them

like pyres and telescopes and censers, it’s

in the hair of a comet like the smell of a lover,

it’s what makes the meteorites as kissable

as the head of a snake to the lips of a gentle enemy.

Sister Lunacy, my heartfelt muse, my dark-side dakini,

what have you been dancing for all these years?

Have you been pearldiving among the castanets

for a moonrise in the mouth of a seashell

that could sing to you like the ocean you’re lost upon?

You’re the station every seeker gets to

on a pilgrimage he doesn’t know he’s taking

where he damns the consequences and blessings alike

and enters into the spiritual life as a rebel of compassion

as he addresses himself to what’s arrayed before him

as if there were only one voice between himself and another

like a bridge that flows, like a star

that doesn’t drown in your eye like a firefly.

And if there were anything I could ever say I was

it would have to be this just as it is, this

endlessness I keep being poured out into

as if my heart were the only waterclock I could live by

and disembodied space the only medium

that could accommodate my shapeshifting adaptations

like goldfish coming to the surface to feed on the stars.

Sister Lunacy, the moon reaches down to the roots of the river reeds

and the catfish thrive among the wild rice in the shallows,

and eyes in the darkness high overhead, as if

someone shattered a mirror into a billion bits of awareness

see you standing on your barren precipice

and long to know what it is you’re thinking.

In order to understand you must become the thing itself.

You must abdicate your own presence to be

remotely at peace with the world, it’s a strawdog anyway,

and it burns too fast to be much of a lighthouse.

And o my darkness, there are so many skins you have yet to shed

like the moon trying on a wardrobe of water

laying her gown across the lake like an early frost of sequins.

I shall come to you at first as a premonition

as lightly as a cloud touches the mountain, an aberrant insight,

a synchronistic intuition of our simultaneity,

and in your breath my breath shall be an atmosphere

and in your eye my eye shall lavish the most intimate of stars,

and in your blood my blood shall be the poppy and the rose.

Sister Lunacy, even after the house has burnt to the ground

my passion stands like a blackened doorway in the rain

and though I look at you through a broken window,

the moon is whole, and the sky is not torn or bruised.

PATRICK WHITE

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

NIGHT. A WHISPER OF RAIN.

Night. A whisper of rain. Peace in my heart.

A penny on the third eye of the hurricane

I’ve been trying to ride out all day without

having it throw me off like a big cat on its back.

Farewell, turmoil. I retract my claws

like quotation marks and crescent moons

around the silence of your name.

The fallen pine boughs of your broken wings.

Inspiration doesn’t trample on things

like flowers and stars. No more. No more

of those feelings that were meant to be as famous

as a Trojan horse to a poet grazing on the plains of war.

Eyes running down the windowpane in tears

as if they were teaching it to cry. Listen to the rain

deepen the silence like the roots of silly flowers

when you fire the voice coach

and teach them to paint watercolours.

It’s sad. But I add that poignancy to the light

like a fragrance of the moon to an apple orchard

and let it dream like wine in the dark

until I taste it again in the windfalls of late September

and in the retreating rosaries of grace leaving like birds.

For the moment I am the inclusive intimacy

of a passion that doesn’t scorn the fruit of its outcome.

I kiss my skull the same way I kiss the blossom.

Come life, come death. Two feet on the same path.

I don’t split hairs like the wishbone of the road I’m on

and not expect to lose my way back home

wherever that is now the astrolabe is blind and starless

and I drift like a paper lifeboat in a truce with the sea.

I should raise naval flags like spring flowers

to signal the relative victory of a few short hours

but the candles have already sent the message in flames

and the shadows have answered: message received.

No need of tomorrow and much less of yesterday

let the moment tend to the affairs of its own will

I’m an apostate event unbound from the stake

of the irreligious history of the world trying

to burnish lead into gold in the wrath of a volcano god

someone met on the way to the promised land

and asked to join the caravan at the wells in Median

to compound the absurdity of visionary matchbooks

that rained manna and vipers from the opposite eyes

of the mirage of an hourglass skinny-dipping in the desert

to renew the virginity of time like a sundial on the moon.

Rare revelation to the changelings of lust

released on the river like prophetic decoys in a false dawn

to lure the waterbirds into friendly fields of fire

as if to say you can come this far, no higher.

There’s never been a star named after a human

except for Cor Caroli, the heart of Charles the Second,

dimly under Alcor and Mizar, the horse and the rider,

under the handle of the Big Dipper I raise to the lips

of a mermaid in the desert like real water

to a true believer in the midst of delusion

just to hear her sing again on the rocks of longing

like a waterclock on a windowpane in the rain.

And I don’t want to tie her to the bowsprit of a shipwreck

that went down at the end of her song,

the whole town on board this leaking ark

and she’s the only one that’s crying into a lifeboat

like a woman with her face in her hands at the news.

Forty nights and forty days of rain in the spring,

the earth’s a hydrocephalic with water on the brain.

And the roads are cobbled with sloppy frogs,

and the darkness is dense with a wardrobe of sorrows

that hangs in the air like an era of hesitation

above the crystal slipper dancing shoes and rubber boots

in the pungent closets of the watershed

that waltzes them like rain on the Tay River

under chandeliers of light-footed starmud

in the abandoned ballrooms of the willows dancing

like gusts of air to the heritage harps

that shine like constellations in their high-strung hair.

A train howls like a wounded animal in the distance,

an iron horse. The nightwatchmen have gone out

like fireflies, but not the streetlamps that have stayed on

like starmaps in the rain to walk the drunks home

arm in arm, crying in their cups like watered down wine.

Nothing divine, earthly or infernal, the eye of time

no more vernal in the east where the moon rises

than eternal in the west where the sun sets,

I’m not playing solitaire in the rain with old regrets,

I’m at peace with the stars that are caught like civilians

between storm fronts, as their seeds get washed away

like flower bombs in a flashflood of shell-shocked rivulets

someone stepped on by mistake. And I’d rather keep

the worst of my war-stories to myself, than swap them

with the vets being strafed by the rain of ricochets

in the Legion’s parking lot where things are fought all over again

as their wives usher them to the passenger side of their cars.

Just the rain and me. As if we were born a moment ago.

And neither of us had anything to fight about.

And I was the bud of a wound that hadn’t started bleeding yet,

like a shrieking poppy or a stoic rose, and it

wasn’t the cure that washed all the blood off

like a paint rag of a sail in a Pacific sunset hemorrhaging at sea.

Just the rain and me. Doing what we both do best.

And all our labour effortless as tears in the eyes of the night.

PATRICK WHITE

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