I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I WOULD SPEAK TO YOU IN MY NIGHT VOICE

I would speak to you in my night voice

if you were still here. If you were even as near

as the stars commingled in my breath,

I’d thaw my secret zodiac of crystal skulls

and let my mindstream run wild at your feet

like a flashflood waking the dry creekbed up

from its long dream of making the desert bloom

with real flowers in a mirage of metaphors.

I would ignite the pilot lights of a thousand stars

to blaze in an honour guard of mythic starmaps

waiting for you to bless their colours,

because wonder’s never been known to start a war

with a world it’s amazed by in every mesmerizing detail

without annihilating itself first, bursting

its own bubble in an efflorescent multiverse.

I’m a surrealistic mystic to give it a funny name,

and you’ve seen my hidden housewells, sacred pools

receiving the moonlight on the water like the blades

of ceremonial swords that tasted my blood first

like a rose bleeds on its own thorns, now let me

show you my watersheds, the fathomless voids

of dark abundance and bright vacancy

where my eyes swim like the Circlet Of The Western Fish

that never swim out of themselves

or the oceanic awareness they’re luminously

immersed in up to their gills in the clear light

of the emptiness shining back at them like a distant mind.

Under the icy eyelids of methane seas on shepherd moons

I can feel life stirring like the muse of itself

and though it’s too early in evolution to see yet

I’ve jumped ahead of myself like the light of the Pleiades

and gathered up a herd of wild telescopes

grazing on the stars like big-eyed, thin-legged antelopes

waiting for you to make an appearance on opening night

and watch how they’d dance and leap for you

like grasshoppers in the Bolshoi Ballet

who didn’t give a damn that autumn was on its way

to throw cold water on the fire because in this universe

imagination is the physics of the place, and the ants

might busy themselves gathering butterfly wings

like the covers of slender chapbooks of poetry,

but I’m drunk on these lyrical elixirs of the mind

that I take as a sign that you are near in the night

and who has to worry about snow,

when they can live in your light on an occult planet

where myriad seasons can pass in a moment of spontaneity

and the fruits of life invariably fall toward the sky?

Are we both not rooted in the ancient fires overhead?

Nervous systems of black matter, scaffolding the mind

climbs up to paint the origin of worlds before their grand openings,

dark palettes of our third eye, skeletons of pictographic bones

beneath these scriptures of flesh we can read with our fingertips

like holy books and X rays written in the boustrophic signs

of the last time we ploughed the dark side of the moon together

and filled the siloes of the stars with galaxies

that spun like Tibetan prayerwheels, or Moroccan Sufis

or dust devils at the heels of winged messengers

conducting us like the flightfeathers of the dark arcana

we can read in each other’s eyes like loveletters

written in the cursive dream grammar the heart sings to itself in

when it’s a lonely nightbird, and you’re there like the stars.

PATRICK WHITE  

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

NO MYSTERY IN THE STIGMA OF THE MISERY

No mystery in the stigma of the misery, regret rebounds

as cynicism and disgust, the way it is with us,

every emotion a life study in a death mask,

every thought the pose of a moment that eludes us,

and the stars hair-braided into the tresses of the willows,

and the bridges we burned like the Milky Way so

no one could cross after us into the abyss,

the prodigal homelessness of our return address,

as our tracks are swept away on the Road of Ghosts,

actions of strategic gestures of peace with ourselves,

a truce, at best, with the dangerous stranger within

that plays host to the dead as if he were one of the guests,

as the ideals we die for demonically bless the means.

The labyrinth lost in us, looking for an exit sign,

the planets spinning their wheels in our starmud,

intractable kings of the hill waiting for the equinox

to light up our bones like kindling in our barrow tombs.

She’s not at peace with herself because she remembers

nothing she hasn’t repeated to her friends like an ally

that doesn’t know who or what she’s fighting against,

seldom for, anymore, that nothing makes any sense

and her life’s spread out like a Tarot pack on the floor,

pondering the destiny of sex with the ex of an old lover.

Nobility among the humble trivialized into the whim

of an action hero trying to live up to the movie

made of him like a two minute trailer

in a Bronze Age scarred by copper and tin.

He’s a voice coach in a choir of echoes

half a note off the ghosts of the nightbirds

that used to send a cold chill through the woods

before the agony of their unadulterated longing,

the infallible sorrow in the depths of the hunger for love

went extinct as yesterday’s moonrise.

His eyes are always busy as a security camera

but see nothing that’s unusual about him

except for the way his ego is always mistaking

his reflection for someone who might be sexting him.

Window-dressing and mannequins of expendable democracy

looted by the firelight of rioting thieves

demanding the same private rights as the key

to the executive washroom the slumlords

and feudal bankers hold over the heads of the peasants

like a watercloset over a common moat.

There in the red emergency exit light,

crumpled like a potato sack up against the door

that only opens one way, would you believe

that junkie used to sing as if she were having

a heart attack on stage like a sparrow hawk

shrieking into a microphone at the top of her lungs

as she went after every note like unsuspecting prey?

What do you say? It’s plagued me most of my life

as if my heart were insufficient, and compassion paled

in comparison with the damage done, irrevocably real,

as the mind takes account of successive images

and mouths some idiotic abstract mantra

about the collateral damage of the tragic element

in a comedy of errors in the eye of the beholder

looking upon the aesthetic desecration of idols

in the modern era like fourth century Christians

gone heresy hunting in the name of the Lord.

Maybe it’s time to upgrade my pagan superstitions

into benign cosmic theories about quantum foam

as if the universe were frothing at the mouth in a fit

of hydrophobia adrift on the waters of life.

Eye-witness to the suffering of others there’s

so little I can do anything, nor have the right, about

love beyond desire has its will bent

by its own redoubtable impotence as its first line

of self-accusatory defence. How many times

have I simply wanted to reach out and touch

the despairing silence in someone’s eyes

with a image of beauty, indelibly undisguised

without its deathmask on and no sign of perishing

from one breath to the next that might reveal

the hidden jewels in the slag of the ore they’re

buried in like exiles in a darkness far from home?

Cults of shadows dance around the lanterns

of the nightwatchman slowly being ground down

like a lens that gives him something to focus on

that’s more starlike than mere reflections

in a window no one looks out of anymore.

Every intention has its effect, but the effect

seems drastically out of touch with the ailment

it was meant to cure and the good deed elaborates

into superficial paradigms of the sacrificially complex.

You end up speaking like a hex of God

upon the freeborn waters of life at an altar with a knife

you don’t know whether to gut yourself with

or drive through someone’s heart like a righteous kill

as you ask out of a lingering sense of feasible compassion

that anyone’s will, other than your own, be done

as it isn’t right now with heaven’s hand

over the mouth of hell like an enculturated cellphone

meming the iconic oracles of the last prophetic skull

we listened to as if our lives together depended on it

like a happier estrangement than anything

our imaginations could have fervently wished for.

PATRICK WHITE

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

FOXFIRE BLOOMING IN THE AFTERBIRTH OF THE ASHES

Foxfire blooming in the afterbirth of the ashes

that engendered it, green violins of unaged bracken,

the timeless lyrics of life reviving an old songbook

grown hoarse as paddlewheels and swans

making their way upriver by the lights

left on in the ghost towns of familiar ports of call

where breathless singers busked by the wharves

and watergates of the straightforward stairwells

anyone with sea legs ascended like a special form of a curve,

the uncarved block of the ten thousand things

the womb of an unborn guitar attached by its strings

to the abyss in the heartwood of a song that will

never be heard like the wind whistling

through the umbilical cords of a suspension bridge

swaying like an empty cradle in a forgotten lullaby

as if life burns its bridges, not just after, but as often,

before it crosses them to the other side of nowhere.

The words run off track, scuttle on the sandbanks,

dodge the light like fish along the shore, lose

their bearings in a gust of starmud from the bottom

up to the abandoned crow’s nests listing to the left

of the angel fleets like the masts of old growth forests

that put to sea like the skull and crossbones

buried in a piratical cemetery like the teeth of dragons

sown among nautical gravestones keeping one eye open

on the lighthouses waiting for salvage

to wash up on the beach in the red sky

of a false dawn in the morning that gave

sound warning to sailors in the know to pass by.

I say what I mean but the meaning’s drowned out

by the uproar of words with a voice of their own

that pass like carrier pigeons with a message

for their ears alone, the medium, an ink-soaked scribe,

blue as the glyphs of Picts, taking the minutes

at a seance I’m never asked to participate in

regardless of how I tattoo the inside of my eyelids

with the Etruscan zodiacs of the dreamscapes

and shapeshifters gathering at the transmorphic bend

where the river turns like the mindstream

toward the deepest watersheds of its collective unknowing.

The wind behind them, how many have set out

like beautiful schooners in full bloom to be

abused by their lives like garbage scows

after their sails were taken down like shark fins?

Set out to chart the stillness on the dark side

of the moonrise and run aground on the mountainous reefs

of lunar corals like sundials and astrolabes

taking the measure of their own shadows

in the shallows of the floodplains scabbing

for the lack of any volcanic depth to the pre-eminence

of their immanental extinctions. If the head

of the fish is rotten the tail will follow

like a thought wave in the wake that encompasses it all

in a heartbreaking farewell from the deck

of a shipwreck to the last lifeboat to leave the island.

Sooner or late the fire will run out of heretics

and no fat to keep them burning, the lanterns

the orthodox hold up like candles to the sun

to see in the dark will grow thin, dim, and lean

as the lights of the city of God disappearing

over the horizon of a black hole with no regrets.

Gravity the tugboat of the tides our lifelines

are anchored to like barnacles on a rock

we buried at sea, tears we shed at Gravesend,

all hands aboard, moonset to the west

of the unthinkable, sinking nevertheless.

Her pillow is soaked with snot and tears.

Her nose is running like a garden snail

that smears her stiff upper lip. Not the agony

in the garden, but still, a bitter cup to drink from.

He quotes his duty as a cover story

for following the psychological profile

of his desire into the misunderstood bedroom.

Garlands on the altars of love and disdain,

and everyone’s partially wrong enough

to be wholly right, and blame it on the zeitgeist

of the witching hour that has come upon them.

I walk by the Tay River like the grave of an old lover

some nights when the stars are blazing overhead

in the country dark, the infra red aura of the town

glowing infernally on the indifference of the clouds

as if it were putting lipstick on the mouth

of a drunk clown in a coma as a puerile joke

to mock him into laughing insincerely at himself

when he wakes up to wipe the smile off his face.

I’m isolated by the surrealistic absurdity I feel

in the mass appeal of the inexplicably funny

when the joke’s on anyone but this black farce

of common humanity like a punch-line in a morgue.

No epitaphs, but a gesture of living at its best,

Graffiti on the box-cars of our coffins laid to rest

after a few hollow laughs at the corpse’s expense,

the last call and curfew to top up our emptiness

as we steal the Buddha’s purse to buy the Buddha’s horse.

Those are the Buddha’s words. Mine have run their course

like a rootfire in the tunnels of star-nosed moles

digging like archaeologists for a future in the ruins

of their solitudinous starmud baked and glazed

into bricks of lapis lazuli left in the sun at midnight

they can aspire to like the past tense of the light

flashflooding like time and the Pleiades

through the circuitous labyrinths of their black holes.

PATRICK WHITE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

ESTRANGEMENT YOKED TO THE INCOMPATIBLE

Estrangement yoked to the incompatible, is it

some kind of heartless joke? Surrealistic, surely,

don’t average out the crucials and tell me

it’s a compromised oxymoron. I’m twisted enough

to see further than that. My imagination

can remember things that haven’t happened yet,

and equally forget the past wasn’t possible.

A labyrinth of wormholes in the hull of a shipwrecked moon.

A snakepit of incisive perceptions. A unified field theory

knotted out of stray wavelengths into the flying carpet

of a cosmic hymen that makes a big bang

beating on the membrane of a drum of water,

jazzy butterflies practising rimshots with their antennae

on the third eye of another bubble floating in hyperspace

that feels like a kiss on your forehead from your daughter

for something you haven’t got the slightest notion of

except there’s something quantumly entangled about love.

Since I was sixteen, in a first year astronomy class,

I’ve always thought you had to add a factor for mind

to Einstein’s energy, mass, light equation if you want

to see the whole of the big picture, not just the postage stamp

field of view of a careerist visionary writing haiku

he hopes to get published in a journal of cherry blossoms,

but the Bayeux Tapestry, Monet’s waterlilies in the Tuileries,

thinking if life and death can open their eyes that wide,

how long would it take a comet of thought to cross

the abyss of the nightsky of the mind before I’m

expansive enough to accommodate the many in the one

like a dimension of intelligent awareness beyond

the other eleven, for the moment, we’re circumscribed by.

Where’s the element for mind in the periodic table?

Am I just a shadow of my own constituents,

or did someone spike the waters of life with a star

on the sly to lead me into believing that mind

was more luminous than mere light and I wasn’t

just glassblowing the hash pipe of an alternative universe

in the land of the cosmological lotus-eaters

dreaming like Cambridge brahmins in deep sleep

that I’m the quantum aura of a dream figure

that got sucked down the black hole of a trap door spider

waiting like the singularity of a predator inside

to weave me into the flatlining mandala

of a new cosmic web that drips like silk

and embalming fluid from its hourglass abdomen.

My body a bag of water with nine holes in it

I’m always paying tribute like a feudal river

on its way back to the sea like an imperial bloodstream

with spoils of oxygen and protein led in chains

like the dna of slavemeat by the triumphant legions

behind the throne of the empire that’s risen like Rome

from the pagan dead within me like a lion

reborn in the blood of the lamb on an altar in the Forum.

I may be mad, quantum foam frothing like the sea

with hydrophobia of the mouth, contrails

of white phosphorus like jellyfish in a cloud chamber

but I’d rather be included in the picture-music

of a nightbird with a communal sense of solitude

than be excluded like the retinal circus

of a cameraman circling the earth like a telescope

he never turns on himself as if it were his head, not mine

under the shutter of the guillotine every time I blink

and a new world issues from the void in my absence.

PATRICK WHITE

SISTER LUNACY

SISTER LUNACY

Shall we dance, shall we spin and wheel, hesitate, advance,

stall and recover, whirl like maple keys, and blow

the ashes of the starmaps we burned like passports

out of the palms of our hands to shine like dandelions

on an eye to eye level with the light they bloom in?

Sister Lunacy, I watch you uprooting your garden usefully

and shaking the stars out of the clumps of grass

as if you caught Medusa smuggling diamonds in her hair,

and I say such is woman when she forgets to be aware of herself,

and the goddess comes down to earth with dirty fingernails,

a gazelle in rubber boots. And no flower of the field,

no planet in the sunset, no eyelash of the moon over a barn

quite adorns the twilight the way her lucidity does.

And I want to take her by the hand like a binary star system

and circle one another like two hawks in the sky

until the night cools and the loons pack up their keyboards

and the stars work the graveshift on into the early hours

of the forthcoming dawn as if the end of all their labour

were extinction in a deluge of light

that doesn’t recognize any of them by name. Shall we dance,

shall we let the picture-music carry us away

like a word that hasn’t hurt us in a long time,

shall we gather wild rice in the holds of our birch bark canoes

as if we were threshing jewels on the shallow end of the lake,

or do you just want to walk the Road of Ghosts with me awhile

and see what blooms along the way, sunflowers and waterlilies

opening up like observatories and prophetic skulls

with a penchant for looking at things the same way?

Sister Lunacy, be kind to the mandalas and paradigms

I bring you like dreamcatchers woven of spinal cords

like tree rings of heartwood, ripples of rain, the net of Indra

where you mark one jewel and they’re all marked.

Or as Jesus said, insomuch as you do it unto one of these,

you do it unto me, and everyone thought he was special.

As if he owned gravity and everyone had shares.

It’s a radical act to come like a sweetness to ripen

the heart of a human that’s stayed green too long.

Just as you and I know madness is the quickest way

of never getting it wrong and if you’re going to argue

do it in song, don’t exorcise the answer

out of the person who possesses it and bid it be gone.

You can’t post a bond against a ghost.

Myriad guests of the mind, but seldom a host to speak of.

And Sister Lunacy you speak as if you were letting

a thousand voices all at the same time use you

as if they had no other mother tongue of their own,

and somehow it comes across as what you had to say.

So I’m asking you now. Do you want to dance,

do you want to bend space the way a body moves,

reshape the universe in its own image, abberate

a few wavelengths into falling out of synch like damp hair licks?

And I’d remember to remember that only horses sweat

and read your aura by the glow of the hot dew on your face.

After the last lifemask comes off, nothing but space.

Nothing but imaginative room to move as if there were nowhere

we needed to go and we didn’t feel bad about it.

We just went off into the ongoing like everything else

that’s looping and coiling its way through time,

a fragility of the air, caterpillars swaying in the wind

at the end of a fishing line tied to the allure of a butterfly.

Don’t be fooled by the vertebrae, everyone’s flying kites

at the end of a long spine when the air revs up.

You can see them tangled in the powerlines of their ancestors.

Sky burials without altars. Road kill. Cheap cremations.

The whole panoply of the tragically absurd.

But here, sister, here volcanoes still strew

islands in their wake and the birds keep arriving with seeds

and coconuts still wash ashore like prophetic skulls

you’re free to believe or not, and the air tastes like emeralds.

Here you could mentor the stars in their myths of origin

as you made them up to honour some quirk in your character

and they began to speak of you as their dark mother.

And nobody need know what you mean when you spoke to me

about those things that encroached on your silence inside.

I know how to listen for dissonant sounds in the night.

I can hear the falling of a single eyelash of light

when the moon goes out, the footfall of a spider on the stairs.

Sister Lunacy, should I take your hand, shall we dance

to the picture-music that overtakes us unawares,

you with your dark tears, and mine so far in arrears?

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

LOOKING FOR SILENCE LIKE THE OTHER WING

Looking for silence like the other wing

of what I’ve got to say, landscaping with meteors,

or the planet having a face lift, some of the words

have echoes and some of them proper names,

and a few still homesick for their prison cells,

I keep painting on the white noise of the world.

I keep writing like a wolf in the fleece

of a shepherd moon with a secret life of water.

Scofflaw, a poet, driven into the wilderness

to listen to the voices of disembodied messiahs,

kings of the waxing year, flesh stripped from their bones

like desert shipwrecks waiting for

the providential tide of their tears to return.

God particles that got in their eyes like sand.

I hear them gnawing on their bones like calendars at night.

And I’ve said it in a flash of demonic indifference

trying to pretend they were listening immaculately

and I was compassionate, as soon as you give

your fulsome assent to a few simple things

you turn into a test of what you refuse to let go of,

as if you were always faith-wrestling with rattlesnakes

you establish a church of denial that will stone you to death.

You save your soul but you render your flesh expendable.

This for That. Betelgeuse for Aldebaran.

How to read a starmap like the Wall Street Journal.

The optical illusion of a bifurcated consciousness,

loss and gain, but the viper can swim across quicksand

as if it were all one wavelength, the Egyptian glyph

for intelligence that hasn’t been wounded by the heart

and spiritually materialized into a path to follow.

Do as the wind does with your mind and eyes. Let go.

Blow the stars off your windowsills, treat all holy books

as if they were trees and let go of their leaves in the fall.

There’s always a few jewels of insight in a gossip column

but most of it’s rut, rant, and judgement, dream gossip

and slaughter, history with an expiry date.

There’s always going to be some demi-god somewhere

asking you for your fingerprints like a paranoid magician.

Kick the skulls off your stairs like last Halloween’s pumpkins

and start acting like you’re in the world and of it.

Break the neck of the hourglass of heaven and hell

and let time pour out of your cells like exorcised mirages.

Illusions are like rats and seagulls and insects. They thrive.

No more than the night, is life a reward. Water

doesn’t live its whole life fearing the indelible

like a wavelength of its own immutable mindstream.

There’s no big sky blueprint behind why you’re alive.

No circus tent covers your foolishness.

And you’re not here to answer for everything else.

PATRICK WHITE  

LEAVE OFF LIKE THE WIND

LEAVE OFF LIKE THE WIND

Leave off like the wind and it’s the beginning

of someone else you never meant to be

as the stars go round with their firefly lanterns

burning their hearts out on nightwatch

as if there were always something to raise an alarm about,

and the willows come down to the water

to drink from the wild irises and there’s---

can you hear the wind howling from here?---

an unspoken story that glows like eyes

in the shadows of the surgical birch groves

trying on prosthetic limbs, peeling back

the binding of a book like a plaster cast

they’ve worn too long like a ghost amputee.

Let’s say it’s not too late to feel the wind

shimmering the silk of the wild rice in the moonlight

as if it were breathing like summer on someone’s skin

and you feel love might perish but the moment’s indelible

as how humanly foolish it is to long to make things last,

the forbidden beauty of the secret life you’ve hidden

under your eyelids like a love note in a dovecote

you’ve been dying to release into the imageless abyss

of the emptiness you’re counting on to fulfil you in the end

like some kind of counter-intuitive prophecy

that kept the faith of an undertaker in the sub-culture

it was born into like a mirage of the sixties

pulsing like a lightshow to the backbeat of an osmotic amoeba

as if the Burgess Shale were still experimenting

with psychedelic forms of life that might lead

back to us if it were possible, and it isn’t, to step

into the same river twice if you remember your Heracleitus.

Foolish to want to corduroy the road you broke like trail

to get here with the corpses of the dynastic horses

you had to saddle like a universe with a will of its own

that didn’t leave you many alternatives as the earth

died out from under you like the smoke of a deathsong

in a native cemetery you didn’t realize at the time

you were walking through like the moon in its sleep

dreaming it’s following a starmap of fireflies falling toward paradise.

Let’s say you don’t feel like a antiquated license plate

nailed to the door of a castrated gas station

in a desert pit stop, the curtains fishing for flies

at the broken window of a sky with a grimy third eye

reflecting the spirituality of a hermit who abandoned

the solitude of his afterlife too late to do him any good.

The hydra-headed deception of the perennial paradigm.

Listen to the screen door flapping like a lapwing

that doesn’t have anything to protect anymore

like the wounded encore of a showgirl in a ghost town

from the meathooks that used to keep the scorpions out.

Auroral evanescence of oleaginous covenants

on the wings of demonic flies with star cluster eyes

wintering like an eclipse between the epidermal plaster

of the punctured lungs behind the ribs of the unmended walls.

Bleak enough for any existentialist who wandered

off highway looking for the exit sign he missed a ways back.

And when the night approaches like a widow

whose nightmares all died out shortly after her dreams,

and your devotions smell like the incense of candling skin,

let’s forget you were ever afraid of the dark

and go watch the Perseids plunging into the atmosphere

like a gust of hot cinders from a comet that once

firewalked like a dragon across the firmament

sowing meteors on the wind that flare and fall away

like the flowering of goldenrod and loosestrife

in the wild starfields nature takes back into itself

as if yesterday didn’t adumbrate the way you see things

right now, and the nightbirds remembered all the words

to the songs you used to sing yourself asleep to

whenever your voice gave comfort to the longing in the room.

Let’s imagine you’re not mystically snowblind

in a blizzard of fireflies and there’s still a radiance

blazing like the corona of the sun through

the valleys of the moon in a total eclipse

that rests like a tiara of jewels from the underworld

lightly upon your head, and not these endless

heron’s nests you’ve abandoned to the predatory ospreys

like feathers hanging from the medicine wheels they use

to raise their young in like fledglings of the arrow

that once taught you how to fly as if you had the sky to yourself.

Stop eating your own thoughts like junkfood for cannibals

and all will come right, unlock the aviary of your voicebox

and let the stars out like Cygnus and Aquila

when Lyra’s at zenith riffing on the wavelengths

of Vega singing the blues with the Doppler Effect

of a shipwrecked guitar catching fire in the crow’s nest.

And all will come right as three bells on the bridge

of a lifeboat that’s crossed the bar like an albatross

in the blood oaths of the Knights Templar

who retracted their false confessions

like heresies of insight into the true nature of things

that fed the flames of the fires that consumed them

like the dark vow of a deepening passion for life

when the candle goes out like the wick of a new moon

and there are more intriguing taboos in the shadows to burn for

than the afterlife of a scarecrow crucified

on the dead branch of its own half burnt heartwood

in a firepit at Stonehenge like paleolithic music

frozen in time like a trilithonic danse macabre

at a seance of the winter solstice when the sun

stands still at midnight like a black hole

on the event horizon of a sky burial as deep as it is wide.

Let’s say the bride didn’t have to paint her eyes

like the lens of Galileo’s telescopic third eye

to hear the priests of the tunnel rats in the catacombs tell it,

just to look into the eyes of your face in the mirror

to deceive your sunspots into believing their beauty marks.

See transparently like space into the nature of the light

that illuminates this pageant and progress of perceptions

wandering like a mindstream on a habitable planet

like a purple passage of automatic writing on the foreheads

of our fates deepening the solitude of the woods late, late at night.

What choice were the living ever given by this chance at life

but to cherish the ageless elation of insight into the stars

in the eyes of the mysterious inspiration

to create something sacred as a hidden secret

to this wild and unholy perishing of the light?

PATRICK WHITE