BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

BASKING IN THE SILENCE OF THE COOLING DAY

Basking in the silence of the cooling day,

sunset in the blood of a snake on a rock,

coiled into its own thermal like the hawk

in the twilight eye of a peacock past its prime,

I go out of my way, by the railroad tracks,

where the adolescents lay their lives on the line,

to accord it the dignity we all hope for in time.

The acrobatic swallows have finished

their aerial attack on the cults of the gnats

and now the nightshift relinquishes the sky

to the dog fighting gypsy moths

and the stealthy dive-bombing bats.

Every evening, the same, their finest hour,

shooting each other down in flames,

and the stars and heritage lamp posts looking on

as if they couldn’t be any less concerned.

Crackheads in khaki shorts pass me,

caps askew, and smile nervously at my earring,

though they’re baffled by the cowboy boots,

but it’s got nothing to do with me

whether they can read the memes right or not.

I just want to mesmerize the ocean

of lunar commotion in my brain

by the rhythm of walking as if my body

held sway over the tides for awhile.

Rage, sorrow, love, my judicious attention

to being fastidiously kind especially

if I suspect I don’t really like the person,

just to keep the record clean with myself

and outwit my pettiness just because I can.

Goes with being a poet trying to live generously

among thieves who’ve never heard

of magnanimous humans weakening themselves

like the chiefs of the Potlatch as a sign

of power leap frogging itself to the top of the totem

by giving it all away with an expansive hand.

Not really sure I understand it myself,

but I live a life of isolation in between

trying to make things mean way more

than they deserve to or not just to hear

the scarecrows mocking my absurdity

like straw dogs on the pyres of existentialism.

Voices like scalpels in my head,

chainsaws in my heart, razor blades

nicking my starmud like cuneiform

into a library of Assyrian incisions

made by Ashurbanipal to cook the books.

Living in the twenty-first century

has taught me to mistrust all the others.

Double back to the health food store,

up the road to Sunset Boulevard

that taught me how to paint moonrises,

five miles to Glen Tay and back again.

And if I’m lucky there shouldn’t be anything

left of my brain by then but a reflexive flunky.

Someone’s addiction is following me

like a rat in the shadows of my ancestors.

My rotten father maybe, his rubber cheques,

that deaths head of brutal alcoholics

with the insolvent grin on its face

that said I have nothing to give you

but violence and heart benching wretchedness?

Or my saintly mother the day she turned on me

for nailing Michael Jones square in the third eye

with a stone David would have been proud

to have thrown with such authority and finesse?

And I still am for the way he transgressed my fort

by throwing dirt at it like the Taj Mahal.

My legs are growing heavy and numb

and I’m running a gauntlet of road kill

through an ordeal of toads and turkey-vultures

unravelling the complexities of the dead

thread by thread until the loom is dismantled

that wove the big picture of the details

into a prayer rug of sectarian wavelengths.

Man of my age, or son of an old adage,

someone once said I was born a hundred years

too late, though late for what is lost upon me,

if I’m already a century ahead of my time.

The lucky day is when you discover it’s all one day.

This specious thought moment of the mind.

It’s all emanating out of the same radiant

simultaneously. Nothing gets left behind.

Haven’t you seen how the mountains

synchronize their spontaneity to the birth

of butterflies like waterclocks of being-time?

There’s no hour of doom for every era of redemption.

My ends aren’t shorter than the beginnings were long.

Eternity’s the rule of thumb and time’s the exemption.

Ten miles just shy of two hours whether you

measure it in tame avalanches or rogue asteroids.

Coming back the way I went as if I’d gone nowhere at all,

blueweed in the ditches, and loosestrife

in the moonrise of the river through the drowned trees.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

SOMEONE LINGERS IN YOUR ABSENCE LIKE AN ICON

Someone lingers in your absence like an icon, a gate

to an open field where the white horse

that stood in the tall grass, grazing on its solitude

like a phase of the moon come to earth

is gone. A bird, a purple martin with so much

distance and disappearance in it wings

and the open vastness of the skies it was absorbed by

I can barely hear you singing from here

over the raving of an unkempt wind on a crazy night

when the ghosts are rioting in their graves

like old leaves without attachments at the feet of the new

and gravity receives the grave goods of the tree

as do I these strange epiphanies of you

that haunt me retroactively like apple-bloom.

And the depth of the emptiness that informs

the substance of my imaginings, devastates me

like an eclipse slowly swallowing my heart

like a black cataract of snake skin I keep

trying to shake like a cosmic egg without much luck.

As if I were bleeding out like a rose after

the green thorns have hardened into fangs

that are killing and curing me at the same time.

Some nights I just want to join my emptiness to yours

and be done with it, no more of this, no more.

No more of watching the beauty of the world

burn out into a dark radiance that makes me

want to gouge my eyes out so I can see it without wincing.

Without feeling so wounded by the abundance of the rose

that blooms and disappears like the auroral apparitions

of a widow in veils of spider webs and black lightning,

thinking it might be you under there somewhere I can’t go

without losing you again. Check-mate. Pain.

And it isn’t anything either of us can do anything about.

It just goes down that way. The absence of your shining,

small nonrenewable gestures of your heart and hands

vividly recalled like modest butterfly volumes of poetry

blowing down an abandoned street at night in the rain, you

sewing a patch on my heart with the delicacy of a needle

mending a flying carpet grounded like a wavelength of light.

As I am now that you’ve become that rip in my heart

all the stars are pouring out of like a puncture wound

I let go right through me like needles and gamma rays

piercing the heart of a voodoo doll of dark matter

that makes me feel like wooden puppet of light

carved out of one of these black walnut trees.

Endure. Participate. See. Wonder.

Praise. Celebrate. Mourn. Do the next best thing.

And when you’re hurting your worst, sing.

And even when I’m soldiering my way through stone

like a flying fish in the wrong medium,

or walking alone with the Alone through the woods,

just to meet you where you ask me to when you call

and I come like a burning bridge down to the river,

wondering if I might have lived here once in another lifetime,

I do say these things to myself like medicinal chants

and preventative medicine, healing totems with benign effect

hung in the medicine bag slung around my neck.

Sweet grass and a pinch of sacred earth, just in case

I forget how to dance on my own grave

with grace and flare and style and an enigmatic smile

that really means it if it really means anything at all.

Or not succumb to this ice-age of a bell

my tongue is stuck to like a child’s to a wire fence,

or this black diamond nightbird

that cuts my darkness to the quick

because it’s got nothing to sing about

that can answer the call of the living for someone

on a foggy hill to come to the rescue of the empty lifeboat

drifting like the corpse of a dead swan downriver,

except the dead air of this strange place

where space is indelibly bruised by the passing

of the beauty it once contained like stars in a Mason jar.

Like a candle in the lantern of a skull

I’ve carried before me like a nightwatchman

on the edge of a dangerous precipice for lightyears

until I lost my footing and fell in one night,

as I once did into love, and learned to see in the dark

I was growing wings where I had none before

and looking up from the bottom of an empty wishing well

noticed the dead still blooming like stars

in the white shadows of the sun at midnight.

And out of the corners of my eyes

when what I can’t see what need to know about being alive

comes looking for me like the sacred syllable

on the lips of a pearl diver on the moon in total eclipse

like a kiss out of nowhere, comes like the singing bird

to the dead branch in my heart

that’s having trouble remembering how to blossom

after a long winter, as if you’d summoned me to the trees

like a purple passage in the Book of the Dead,

to teach me how to take the pain

and through the alchemy of the grief

that flows through my heartwood like light and rain

turn it into life again, as if every leaf

were a new loveletter from the dead

I’ve been saving for years like expurgated starmaps

illustrated by exiled constellations in Braille

to a spiritual lost and found at my fingertips

where they know who you are, and they’ve seen you

like a soft moonrise glowing through the willows

down by the river that weeps like a black mirror

for the stars and waterbirds in passing

that appear and disappear each in its time

and you wait for me like the longing of the dead

to make some kind of sign, however simple and austere,

the withered star of a wild rose without a flower,

that let’s me know you’re near, you’re here

rooted in me on earth where we’ve both come

to renew our shining from the bottom up to the blossom.

PATRICK WHITE

COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

COUNTING THE BRICKS IN THE WALL ACROSS THE STREET

Counting the bricks in the wall across the street.

Full sunlight. Noon. Blue sky. Bikers

revving their throttles like angry sheets

snapping in the wind on a clothesline

as if they had their hands on the throats

of their ex-girlfriends. No gender bias intended.

I can’t hear the pigeons cooing under the eaves

over the snarl of old men on fourstrokes.

I’m just sitting here like the flagging waterlily

of a collapsed parachute that doesn’t want

to jump up anymore like a dandelion seed

at the least gust of wind. For the moment, at least,

no more descending toward paradise

like a counter-intuitive guess at which way is up.

I’m tied like a hooded hawk to the arm of a swamp.

Icarus is not all that unhappy with where

he crash-landed in a farmer’s field. Could

have been a kite in a powerline, a bat

velcroed to the burdock in a porchlight

that messed up its flyby. Here is there everywhere

if you’ve got enough imagination to lose yourself

in the extraordinary ordinariness of things

close to your heart. The eery patina of time

is always as young as once and once only

and like eternity, gone in the flash of an eye,

casting its shadow of now or never over everything

with the urgency of a fire hydrant

that thinks of itself as a heart transplant.

Lightyears left to go in my winged heels

without a flightplan to deliver the messenger,

but it isn’t the journey, today, it’s my shoes, my shoes

that are wearing me out where the rubber

hits the road like a poem late at night on

a hot asphalt highway reeking of dead frogs

like popcorn in the cinematic highbeams of a joy ride.

My feet sore as if I’d been firewalking on asteroids

down some long dirt road that would sweep

a biker right off his wheels if he cornered too sharply.

An intensely temperate day. The great sea

of awareness is not displeased with its own weather,

though I can hear the rootfires of dragons

growing underground like the cosmic eggs

of island galaxies about to hatch out

from the crude ore that’s being refined

like the psychodynamics of a sacred volcano

in my subconscious, I’m more curious than perturbed.

I’m going to stretch out here in the grass

at the side of this road. Let the ants worry

about how to get me back to the colony piecemeal.

Only the dog on a short foodchain wants to get away.

I’m going to dump this heavy load I’ve amassed

like a god-particle backpacking along the trail

like an alloy of a red wolf and a coyote weary

of keeping the shepherd moons around here on their toes

without meaning to in the struggle to survive.

I’m not even going to bother to lick my wounds

like a herbalist among the wild roses and the words

that sting like the antiseptics in my mouth

and the thorns I usually staple them up with

without leaving too much of a scar on the moon.

Physician heal thyself. Either way, let the roses bloom

or bleed out like red skies in the morning

that burn like iodine, or put lipstick on the clouds

at twilight to the delight of lovesick sailors.

Just want to lie here like the figure head of a fallen tree

or a shipwreck in port with a cargo of failures for awhile.

What I must be only a fool would try to do

anything about. The rain falls and the housewells

are full. I raise my crystal skull to the stars

like hidden secrets veiled by the light and I drink it

down to the lees of an emptiness that tastes

like the cast off afterbirth of wine on my tongue.

PATRICK WHITE  

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