HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

HITCH HIKING OUT TO RICHARDSON FOR DISCOUNT CIGARETTES

Hitch hiking out to Richardson for discount cigarettes.

A hundred and fifty cars go past, someone counting sheep

in a dream that’s got nothing to do with me.

I may look like a pauper but my vehicular inferiority

is more than compensated for by what I can see

close up and intimately in the grass, and the sun

on the brawn of my arms protruding from a tank top

like the Bronze Age. I’m a Mycenean setting sail

on the surge of the wind in the gladiatorial reeds

of the oceanic cattails at peace with the rage of the world.

The dusty white clay of the road chalks my runners

like blackboards of starmud in the Burgess Shale.

Six miles and I can already feel my femurs

starting to take on the air of fluted pillars

as my muscles stretch around the block

like hemophiliacs at a bloodbank gasping for oxygen.

I stick out my thumb like a spectator in the Colosseum,

neither up nor down, not the first nor the last crescent

of the trigger of the moon, one road in a yellow road

as if I had no opinion on whether the defeated

should live or die and I stare straight into the eyes

of the windshields like the Pythian oracles of Delphi

with no life left in them as they whizz by without breaking stride.

Nice try. Let them live. Empathy for the hell of it.

Swathes of grass the road crews cut. Rags

of chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace have learned to duck.

Mandalic starclusters, doilies of brocade

in an ageing house of life, have you ever noticed

how they fold their spokes up after they’re flowerless

like inverted umbrellas into the most elegant nests

as if they’ve been tooled like Faberge egg cups?

I look across the open fields to the albino scars

of the birch in the border bush rows of a Euclidean theorem

about where to plant the cocker-spanieled ears of corn.

I see neolithic villages in the spikes of the wheat

as I have in the bleached hair of the blondes

I’ve gone out with wondering if it’s the ergot on the stalk

that engenders the little tree of the magic mushroom

that walks you through the stations of the Eleusinian mysteries

so you’re never the same after that, and why

in Islam the staff of life is considered forbidden fruit

if it isn’t at least as hallucinogenic as the gods

growing paranoid about how much we may and may not know.

Candelabra of purple loosestrife, vetch and clover,

and the evening primrose that reminds me

of all those sunsets I spent cooling off in paradise

with a woman more earthbound than Lilith or Eve

who believed in the way I painted the petals

of English ox-eyed daisies the wind had dishevelled

like matchbooks some boy had pryed open

like people and steeples before they were ready to bloom.

Black rimless shades. Do I look like a serial killer?

I feel like a mendicant Zen poet on my way to Eido

in Tokugawa Japan, minus the hossu and the fan.

Life overgrows itself, a niche-dweller, in the culvert,

the fence post, the asteroid belt of gravel I’m walking on,

no occasion for flourishing overlooked, its stillness

in a hurry as I am not, the milkweed nursing

its Monarch butterflies, the pampas grass

preening its plumes like the quills of hieroglyphs,

what a riot of overstatement it takes to makes its point

as if there was a point to it all in the first place.

A yellow Mustang muscles its middle-aged paint job by

polished like an enamel buttercup, but it’s not

going to stop as it sucks the dragonflies up like krill

through its grill, cruising for sulphur butterflies

that gives it that jaundiced colour as if Van Gogh

had been eating his chrome yellow again. Avaunt ye,

knave, I’m the errant dragon knight that isn’t

going to save you from the damsel as she says

soft shoulders go slow before she drives you off the road.

Part of looping like an eternal recurrence

through time I guess. But, yellow, man, yellow.

That’s a bad guess. Don’t you remember what

Henry Ford said. I don’t care what colour you paint them

as long as they’re black? How wide does

that racing stripe of yellow down your back

need to be before you realize you look like the lines

of a passing lane? Not cruel, brother, just got to

vent a little at your sin of omission. Where do you

park your horse, cowboy, at the drugstore?

You ride on like the Lone Ranger. Tonto’d rather walk.

A raccoon’s severed paw at my feet, the catatonic full moon

of an empty Tim Horton’s cup trying to civilize

pagan Germania in the Teutoburg Forest, brown paper bag

from the liquor-store, I’m in the middle of a modern midden

that runs like a country highway through a landfill.

Who needs the NSA when you can take on the identity

of what you throw away? Don’t underestimate

the power of the earth to remember and redress.

Wherever you keep your garbage. That’s where your home is.

Two miles more and my lungs are alien atmospheres

trying to cling to a habitable planet like an aura of air

laced with diesel fuel, hot asphalt, carbon monoxide.

The Taliban of the wild parsnip throws acid in my face.

A thousand yards of silence punctuated by birdsong

flooding the woods after the roar of the long thought trains

passing bumper to bumper like Bactrian camels

on the Silk Road behind a driver asserting his will

by mean-heartedly doing the speed limit to live forever

like an accident waiting to happen to a self-righteous caterpillar.

The road grows long. I’m doing my time standing up

like a red blood cell on a pilgrimage to the shrine

of the goddess of nicotine at the eastern doors

of the burial hut of Smokin’ Eagles, until my bones are dust,

and my spirit’s gone south with the Canada geese.

Whenever I make a truce with the world

I stuff my peace pipe with tobacco and pass it around.

In another life I think I might have been a hookah.

I’d rather be killed by the thing I love than something

I didn’t have any feelings for. You can live

three lifetimes more a moment when you’re happier

than you can when you’re doing it by a book

you didn’t write. Still think its dangerously debilitating

to be too wholesome like the smell of bread in a denatured bakery

that reeks of frustrated capitalism. The angels

only know one side of things. They’re cyclopic.

The demons have two eyes like we do. They’re stereoscopic.

Who knows? Maybe I’m dropping ashes on the Buddha?

As an SUV pulls over to the side of the road behind me

with the smile of a friendly New Brunswicker

who’s been living in Innisville for the last thirty years

and he immediately puts me at my ease because

I can tell he’s the real thing, a decent human being,

and I start talking cheerful normalese to prove

I’m definitely not a serial killer. Peace, brother,

beauty, love, the sixties fifty years later just got

into your car and to judge by that light show in your eyes

you were there, as an unspoken vision of life

binds us to this road we’ll travel down awhile together

like two passing strangers as the night approaches

the simple kindness and sincere gratitude of the encounter.

All part of the spiritual evolution of two retrograde revolutionaries

looping back on themselves like the second innocence

of the return journey, better than the first,

like green wine from wild grapes that’s had a chance

to age the dream awhile like coopers in our heartwood.

And too close to death to lie, still wonder what

it was all about. Did it do any good? Have we lived it well

over all these intervening light years we’ve been

holding it together like god particles without sacrificing

the creative freedom that comes with being vast

and spaced out. Did the effortless meaninglessness

of our evanescence ever make a difference to anything?

A chaos of fireflies or a cosmic array of stars in the sky,

one thing for sure, we’ll be long gone by the time

the light gets to where it’s going so the circle,

even squared with the way things seem, remains unbroken.

PATRICK WHITE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

It took me light years to trust my voice

to say things my thoughts had to catch up to

like the unrehearsed understudies of hidden harmonies

making their presence manifest in the way

their dark matter bent space and made the words move

into place like water finding its own equilibrium.

The discipline, then, was not to interfere,

but listen when the wind turns the Byzantine green

of the Russian olives silver in the turmoil of its passage.

To pour yourself out of the mirror like the tear

of a weeping telescope when the Milky Way

gets in your eyes like the smoke of a hundred billion stars.

Or the ghost of a summer radiance

summoned to a seance of mediumistic fireflies

trying to fill in the gaps on their spiritual starmaps.

Last night’s full moon has sliced off

part of its waning earlobe shrinking

as it ascends from cantaloupe orange

to a pitted plum of cadmium yellow value eight.

I’m standing in a gravel driveway outside a storage shed

in the industrial part of town, my back turned

to a floodlight in a riot of insights that act like

frenzied insects, and I’m looking for stars

through the feathered ribs and scales of clouds,

toned by a copper moon rise in a cool acetylene sky.

The moon is rising over the roofs of a parking lot

full of transport trucks, and the contrast

makes the view even more surrealistically poignant.

Intensely so when I spot Arcturus burning

solely on its own in an immensity of peacock blue sky

turning Prussian blue and indigo

over a garishly lit garage that specializes in transmissions

and smells like an abattoir of oily orchids

sacrificed like sacred bulls in garlands

on the altar of a pneumatic car lift

where eternity intersects time as history.

Twenty feet from the driveway

to the perfectly latticed wire fence

sequestered on a reservation of useless land,

a pharmacopeia of every weed that grows wild

in southern Ontario, huddled on the crest

of a bull-dozed hill fort in self-defence.

And in one quick swathe of the bush-hog,

stunted runt versions of the same plants

blooming like symbols of underground resistance,

common mullein, tansy, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch,

viper’s bugloss gone out like pilot lights on a gas stove,

and the sabre cuts and slashes of the tall grasses

waving green banners from their slender masts

and unbroken aerials as fragile as a heron’s legs.

Beauty and utility in a coincidence of contradictories

where abstractions haven’t been multiplied

beyond necessity. The earth turns as it always has

and the moon and Arcturus move accordingly

as the Summer Triangle emerges from the cloud-cover

like the brain child of a birdwatcher

with a taste for myth and mathematics.

Perennializing events in a trivial frame of reference.

And just as the bugs have their communal rapture

in the light, I stand here alone gazing at the stars

trying to see my way into other worlds

by closing the distance with the intensity

of my overwhelming wonder and longing to know

if there might be some poet out there tonight like me

watching the moon rise over bucolic machines

and the space needed to sustain them

at the expense of the trees and weeds and wildflowers

as he’s mystically weirded out by the relative parity

of disparate elements in an impersonally unified field.

And he like me, Arcturus, the trucks, the weeds

and the moon among them, living the ambivalent beauty

of an eternity that breaks its truce with time

once and awhile, to adorn what’s been defiled,

and let unity come forth by itself to forsake the difference

in a voice of its own the storage units trust

like the sacred syllable of a lock on mundane things

alloyed like haloes and horseshoes of stardust and rust.

PATRICK WHITE

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

MY THIRD EYE OPENING OCEANICALLY OF ITS OWN ACCORD

My third eye opening oceanically of its own accord.

The wingspans of the flowers bloom omnidirectionally.

The blue sky lays a balmy smile upon my flightfeathers.

Blood hums to the blissful resonance of being alive.

Even the glowing concrete seems benign. The gates

with their rusting guns triggered like locks, the fences

holding the occupying gardens with their placard poppies

back like riot cops. Time without haste. Consumed

by a moment as perennial as summer on earth.

Nothing urgent in the fulfilment of small destinies

in the grass, no antecedents necessary to know

how to live this, no event trivial or especially significant,

I’m as open-minded as the wind on a shoreless afternoon

that tastes of the stars gusting in the dust at my feet.

Wild parsnip, Queen Ann’s Lace, mullein, goldenrod,

purple loosetrife and cattails in the ditches along the roads,

Lichens of the moon on the staves of the cedar rails

where the red-winged blackbirds sit

to paint their picture-music on the unprimed air

like the musical notes of a cadmium red and yellow song

with overriding tones of nocturnes to come.

Sweetness of life when it takes its mind off of everything

and requires nothing of the living but attendance.

Just to be here like a vagrant wavelength of awareness

among things as they are without trying

to gouge your eyes out like bluejays at the sunflowers

to get at the roots of the flowering mind deep in the heart

of the hidden harmonies basking on the surface

they’re joy riding like the elegant riffs

of the dolphins and flying fish that leap out of the shadows

into the enraptured atmosphere of their own auras

like blue damselflies and green tree frogs and old guitars

working their necks like weavers, or fleet-footed spiders

walking on water like heavy metal on a Ouija board,

like thorns in the eye of a bubble, hoping it doesn’t

wash them out like tears in the eyes of a voodoo doll

looking through the keyhole of a needle it couldn’t find

like paradise on the other side of its blind blessing.

Not for long or far, I’m still walking a habitable planet

full of wonders. Though the road keeps getting shorter

like a fuse behind me the further I travel down it,

and the asteroids keep making newsbreaking fly-bys,

and there are rosaries of bubbling methane rising

from under the shrinking skull caps of the poles,

and people are still trying to keep each other’s attention

by stabbing one another in the eye, but for a moment

that isn’t concerned about whether anything lasts or not,

there are no omens stuck in the throats of the rocks,

or blood of children splashed on the hollyhocks. A re-run

of provisional innocence in a few hundred acres of woodland

swept under the rugs of abandoned farms as not worth the trouble.

Lapwing gates hanging by a hinge to distract

the wild grapevines away from her empty nest

as if it still cherished its emptiness out of a force of habit.

I look upon the Tay River at sunset, the reflection

of the darkening hill quivering in the cooling breeze

like the more mercurial downside of itself,

and the sky opening the blue-green eyes of the peacocks

like stars with too much make-up on, and a handful

of charred crows flying through the roots of the trees,

trying to make sense of themselves like a burnt manuscript.

And what can you say to the stars that are beginning

to look for themselves in the approaching night

except this too is the world where even the lost,

in attempting to return to themselves through

the unattainability of the past, shed light all along the way?

Nightfall and the silence intensifies the conversation

with bioluminous insights of the radiance

blazing out of the darkness of a white coma

as if it depended upon the contrast oxymoronically

just to be noticed like waterlilies in the shallows

of the conscious mind anchored by a spinal cord

to the reptilian epodes of its own illustrious starmud

as every thought moment is, like kelp and kites

and river reeds swaying like synchronized swimmers

to the currents and wavelengths, the turns

and counterturns of thematic waters with a musical motif

that plays to its own depths from the bridge

of a burning violin dancing like fire on the water

with no fear of ever being drowned out by the moon.

PATRICK WHITE  

FOUR A.M. A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

FOUR A.M, A FRAUDULENT SILENCE FALLS OVER THE TOWN

Four a.m, a fraudulent silence falls over the town

like the night ward of a hospital, things going on

after the felonious ecstasy of people getting away

with Friday night, underground, healing the damage

by appealing to a new affliction more threatening

than the last just to keep some danger in their lives,

some occasion for the irrational, some implausible rapture

of sex or violence to break the spell of the credibly predictable.

Look at that. Eight lines of abstractions

and not one of my sacred syllables bleeding

like a rose in an abattoir, a thorn in my third eye.

I suspect myself of subterfuge behind this death mask

of ash and shadow. I’ve given my heart up so many times

I’ve lost track of the gods I’ve been sacrificed to.

Did it ever matter we’re estranged by everything we love

in time? The question summons old ghosts

and the moon smears a snailtrack of light

down upon the waters of life I’m not willing

to follow anymore like a star stuck to flypaper.

Let the ghosts fall like chalkdust from the blackboard.

Blood and bonemeal from the zoo of the past.

Those rootfires blazed awhile and went out

like a burnt oak writhing on the crest of a hill

like Pompey caught in the act at the moment of death

a long time ago when Pliny still taught the orators

the memory of deranged pictures is stronger

than the aniconic memory of words. Since then

all my myths of origin are apprenticed to a dream grammar

that has vowed like a copulative verb that means

what it says never to orphan me in a house of mirages

ever again. Never to root the cracks in the mirrors

of the insane in my starmud silvered by flakes of pain

peeling off the windowsills of the moon like petals of paint.

The sinner might care less, but when grief

starts to insist it’s in danger of becoming a saint

that’s far worse than the sybaritic beatitudes of Friday night,

drinking the gods under the table until all you can see

when you look straight in their eyes for the rest of the week

are the stupefied revelations in the lees of the light.

PATRICK WHITE

IT ISN'T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

IT ISN’T THE ILLUSION THAT BINDS YOU

It isn’t the illusion that binds you to yourself like skin.

It isn’t not finding the missing link in the fossils

of the chains you used to wear like dna. You’re still

in a dichotomous world if you’re giving your illusions

bad spin, enslaved by enlightenment. Is the play improved

by shaving the heads of the lightbulbs in the billboard?

Are you living alone in an isolation cell of bedrock?

Are you proofreading mirages in a desert of stars

that took things too far to remember where you

started from? Hydrogen and helium. Are you still nebular? Do

you really believe it’s the gathering clouds that get in the way

of your shining? Still trying to liberate the abyss

from its own emptiness, the mystery of life from the lips

of a one-finger vow of silence when it’s your mouth

that’s keeping it a secret? Let the dreamers sleep awhile

like flowers in bud, let the thorns of the locust trees

add to the poignancy of its blossoms. Admit it

all the fixed addresses you’ve handed out

to your peers like identity thefts still leave you

wondering who you are long after you’ve been accepted,

crossed the border, the bar, the threshold

as if there were always another country beyond

the one you just broke into that doesn’t recognize you either.

A garden of light, yes, but why uproot the shadows

that work behind the scenes without applause?

So many things in the world going wrong all at once,

flawed, defective, deranged, all your old starmaps

going up in flames in a state of flux like a phoenix

as if you were the Library of Alexandria and you’re

the arsonist in the crowd watching your pyre burn out.

By the discolouration of your feet, I see you’ve

walked through a lot of educated ashes

like a signpost looking for a road of smoke

in the vatic urns of your heart trying to press

the issue into a grey wine that isn’t perishable enough

to avoid publishing. When you die, do you want

your starmud interred in the sky, or would you prefer

the poppies and butterflies of chthonic goddesses

in a dream time that works the roots of the flowers

like puppet masters and umbrellas at a funeral?

Would you throw that inkpot at the wall

if Lucifer rose up before you like the morning star

or would the earth shake with a new Buddha

who’d lost his identity in the pre-dawn light

where the fresh water meets the salt when you see

the fools you’ve made of your own eyes

by trying to clarify them like stained-glass windows

blooding your eyelids when you look at the sun

so you can see right through them like a nasty spell

of aniconic Protestantism. What next? Rainbows,

moondogs, the chromatic aberration on the prisms

of oilslicks and houseflies? You are the picture-music

listening to itself when you’re lost like a voice in the woods.

Who else is whispering the stars into your ear

as if you were the key to the language they’ve

been speaking to you in for billions of light years?

PATRICK WHITE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

BEGIN NOW. THE LIGHT WILL CHANGE

Begin now. The light will change. Get the rain started.

Let a few tears fall. Open the aviary of your heart

and let the doves and the nightbirds out, and if

liberation isn’t enough to sing about, celebrate

the next best thing, escape. Get out of here.

Isn’t there enough open space within

to include worlds within worlds begetting worlds?

Or has your mind become the slumlord

of a run-down tenement you converted

from that ark you built like a lifeboat for everyone

in the flood myth of a lava flow on the moon

before you bled out like a wounded fish

in the Sea of Tranquillity and decided

like a feeding frenzy it was a shark eat shark world,

everyone for themselves? Nature red in tooth and claw.

Every star in the sky aspires to shine like a starfish

washed up on the sentient shores of a pre-dawn awareness

like pilot lights of life navigating by the starmaps

of the fireflies. The sea has its constellations, too.

Drown if you must in the unanswerable sorrows

of the accidentally innocent fate of love in the world,

or go up in flames in Vietnam or an Arab souk

as if someone had just confiscated your cash register

like an officious autumn in the Adirondaks. Or a tax

on your eyes, how much you can see in the course of a life

from the bottom of the mountain up like a haiku,

or the dangerous lyric of a northern river with muscle and mind,

making its way to the sea like a savage waterclock

that knows it’s never going to turn out of time.

Paralysed by atrocity, our sensibilities trashed

like polluted loveletters of junkmail advertising

toxic food as the soul of joy and satisfaction,

indulgence, the suicidal compassion of despair,

desecration, the alternative aesthetic to no one

ever being there to show you how to empassion

your wonder into an insight humbled by awe

at the mystery and magnificence being here at all.

Madmen punching holes in the ozone

like the only lifeboat heading for an ice floe

calved by global warming like a glacier in the North Atlantic.

Paradigms the abstract ghosts of fossilized metaphors.

Logos instead of symbols that resonate like a seance

among the living and through perception

change the spin of atoms and rearrange galactic seastars

like the seeds of sunflowers opening like the eyelids

of a total eclipse. No one needs a prophetic skull

to see how horrifically surrealistic it all is. Even

the sacred clowns aren’t laughing like Zen masters anymore.

Ryokan gets home to his hut in the shedding woods

and this time the thief did steal the moon from his window.

What now? You fold your poems into paper airplanes

and let them blunt their noses like sparrows

on the false dawns in the windows of your stem cells?

You live in a crack in the wall, you excavate

a grave in the caldera of an inactive volcano

and hope the poppies and wheat that are left

of the crumbs of your dreaming grow better

where you’re buried like the Burgess Shale that’s come

of your starmud avalanching down like the asteroids

of a rockslide of headstones in a vandalized cemetery?

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE