I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I CAN SEE THE LOVE AND THE LOSS IN YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES AGAIN

I can see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again,

stars away from the light I wanted to be in your life.

Deadly nightshade and sunflowers, I remember the loveletters

that used to arrive like wounded doves with strawberry hearts

bleeding through the snow, wild roses in an ice-age

with flint knapped thorns and the lunar horns

of a dragon of desire for firesticks. I would have

smudged my ghost with a noose of sweetgrass

from the highest rafter in this house of life long before this

if you hadn’t left the gate of your absence open

to the dark paradise of the abyss I’ve been falling through

ever since love got precipitous as a Clovis point with a razor’s edge

and every nightbird in the repertoire of the songs I wrote

started playing with my jugular like a one-string guitar

strung like a highwire act over the voice box

they’re still looking for close to where I crashed.

Some people focus like telescopes on what they can see.

And some look under the eyelids of their deathmasks

at the dreams disappearing like the fragrances and vapours

of the spirits that changed the way they look at life

like a waterclock of endless nights that write their names

in their breath on the black mirrors of a seance of new moons

that can’t meet the same stranger twice, given once

is enough of an afterlife to make death seem petty

compared to the nightmare of the exits we have to go through

to get here, alone and homeless as a welcome mat

on the threshold of a fire escape that descends into a dark alley

where I jam with the feral cats on the urn of a burnt guitar

I carry the ashes of my love poems in like a moonrise in my throat,

birds of the morning singing in the false dawns

of the creosote clinging to my vocal cords like boat-tailed grackles

on a powerline that came down in a storm, how

could it have been otherwise, like a bullwhip across my eyes.

Fireflies are intimate with the tenderness of pain,

but the dragons of love wreak utter destruction in their wake.

And everybody dies in the intensity of the conflagration

like a savage heart on the bone altar of its pyre

just to keep the fire fed like a star that consumes itself

for the sake of shedding a little light on the immensity

of its solitude, many, many nights without curfews ahead.

I resent nothing. I regret less. I don’t plead

like a rosary of skulls beaded like black dwarfs

on an abacus of love that renders an account of all I’ve lost.

If I’ve grown wise as an enlightened eclipse from the encounter,

it was an accident, and if I’ve deepened my ignorance sufficiently

to understand the evanescence of dark matter, there was

never any intent to seek shelter under the wing

of an evil portent that mentored me to see in the dark

that the petals of your loveletters had stopped blooming

in the Jurassic greenhouse of your eyes, like the flowers

and feathers we hoped would evolve out of our scales

like guitar picks into the quills of an oracular snakepit

of picture-music singing back up to the hidden harmonies

in the lonely ballads of the cosmic hiss that puts a finger

to the lips of the silence in a command performance of bliss

that made the darkness shine for awhile, and aged the wine

in the bells of the sorrows that emptied the urns

of the skulls we once raised to celebrate fire on the moon

like lunar starfish burning under water like a shipwreck

of white phosphorus in the Sea of Tranquility

you had to learn to handle like fireflies piloting the Pleiades

through the earthbound starclusters of the New England asters

as if it would always be September ever after

like the crossbones of a harvest moon perishing

like an outdated calendar with the scenic view of an abandoned house

where life once happened in the shadows of the candles

in a wax museum I’ve never been able to put out

like a nightwatchmen that keeps all the doors to his heart unlocked.

A gust of stars settling like dust on the windowsills of the past

and if I don’t say it in a rush of light, I forget

all the words to the song and start making things up

like the flying buttresses of fossilized dragons

I dredge up from my starmud to support the loss

of the faith I used to have in my memory not to lie to me

about how rapturously intimidating it was to see you

walking up the driveway to the door

that keeps opening me up like an unread loveletter

as if you were always standing on the other side

of the pain thresholds I’ve crossed out like the tree ring

of my name carved into the heartwood of a scratched guitar

just to see the love and the loss in your green, green eyes again

and maybe sing, o yes, sing a little in the dark

of what you meant to me like a star in the willow boughs

of the saddest poetry I’ve ever recited like a fire in the night

I ghost dance around in the war bonnets of love

I shed like the swan songs of summer stars in the autumn

as our flightpaths arc like arrows fletched in flames toward earth.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

DEEP ENHANCEMENT. DARK WOUND

Deep enhancement. Dark wound. Ancient pain.

Estranged childhood. I hurt. I hurt. To no good purpose

at the end of things. No timing. No content.

And the body mourns the broken wings of the words

that once rose to the occasion like startled waterbirds,

the wind in a prayerwheel that didn’t know what to ask for.

And the heart, stubborn enthusiast, homely shrine

the gods don’t enter into anymore, used razor blades

scattered like the pages of an unbound holy book

that cut all five jugulars of the fatted calf

that bawled like a guitar at the use its innocence

was put to like a musical sacrifice to the tone-deaf silence.

And the mind, that Mephistophelean shadow

that lives in the wake of the dead angel that said

she died for my sake until I saw who showed up

at the funeral. All those black umbrellas, bats in the rain.

Achievement without consolation. Fulfilment

the scam of a false idol. My clothes are soaked

with the tears of ghosts that blew in my eyes

like smoke from a burning sundial. Bad house guests

in the ghost town of the zodiac I once lived in

like a gold rush in the mindstream of the mountain

singing to itself as if the stars were listening

to heal the ache of an old fault line in its heart

that sends a shudder through its foundation stones

like an avalanche across a narrow road winding

its way between a high place and the certain death

among the ice-floes of a jade-green northern river

coiled like a green mamba below. Sad to see

the roadkill of a wolf that had no other place to walk

below the timberline of the life it was hunting for.

Dangerous to stop. The bus hurries on toward Prince Rupert.

Another poetry reading. How long ago was that? Where

I’ll howl at the top of my lungs like the death lament

of my lupine melancholy in a lunar solitude where

my voice carries through the deranged emptiness

of a vacuum that’s come to abhor its own nature

and the most highly disciplined severities of insight

aren’t communal enough to cope with it like a happy face

on a moonrise instead of the usual prophetic skull.

Blue Flower. Black Dog. Sunbeam and nightfall.

Hydra-headed snake fire. Death to release it.

Death to try and hang on to it all. The agon of life.

The struggle to live. The struggle to die.

As raw at the entrance as the exit is refined.

I struggle with the angel in the way like a mind

that lost an eye to the ferocity of the encounter

trying to see past the halo into the black hole of the vision

it was grappling with like a choke hold

on the throat an experienced shapeshifter

that keeps eluding my grasp of the light

like fireflies without starmaps in a hoax of dark matter.

Between the mountain and the river, where

to be held up is to be cast down like an ostrakon

into the abyss where the victors live in exile

throwing their bodies like gauntlets of roadkill

along the side of whatever road they’re on as they

raise their voices in a deathsong like a challenge

to the quixotic echoes that stand in their way

threatening to bring this house of life down

like a handful of starmud on the impromptu graves

of the losers brilliantly infamous for fire walking

their spinal cords like acrobatic spiders unravelling

their silken safety nets like unnamed constellations,

across the moats of the mountains, scapegoats on a drawbridge

that lets its guard down a thousand times a life too often.

PATRICK WHITE

JUST GO. JUST GO.

JUST GO. JUST GO.

Just go. Just go. I don’t want to do an autopsy

on your voodoo doll. Leave me to the asters and stars

on my long walks into the fields and woods around here.

It was your fault, your fault, as you keep pleading.

I’m glad you see me now the way you couldn’t before

but the roses keep bleeding and candidly, lady, I’m bored

with the abysmal misery of trying to understand

why you look like the Taj Mahal but act

like a hamburger stand where they pat the meat down

with dirty hands. You did what you did,

now be done for good and bad with it. Let’s not

look upon it as a mistake you made, but

as a creative opportunity for us to separate

the salt from the fresh waters of life in our tears.

I don’t think I was cut out to be an organ donor for love.

Full measure and a bit beside. Enough, or too much,

as the poet once said. I gave you all I had to give

with a full heart and an open hand. You were great

in bed, a demonic mystic with a hunger for sex,

but the blood-caked altars remind me of guillotines these days,

blocks to swan on at Tyburn and Smithfield,

and if I thought putting mine on the black market

might bring about a change of heart in you,

the river might flood, the wheat grow taller,

the scapegoats stop boiling their kids in mother’s milk,

I might be more inclined to take a message to the gods,

stimulate my stem cells into reconstituting my body parts

like a Promethean liver eaten like roadkill on the rocks

by turkey vultures circling like undertakers on the fly.

I suppose you expect me to cry or something

and I will, after my own fashion, when this glacier

retreats like an ice-age my species has been adapted to

for way too long. I’ve been flint knapping new moons

like shards of obsidian into spearheads with a razor-edge,

and I may have mastered the art of hunting bigger prey

than I am, but the dreams of the Neanderthal

that has been living on inside of me against the odds

has left me a little flakier than a shaman in a cave bear’s hide

and I’m weary of singing in the false dawns

of the genetically engineered beginnings you keep

offering me as an alternative to my imminent extinction.

The death songs don’t sound the same

when they’re accompanied by a backup band

and a drum machine that never misses a beat

to be real enough to roll with the pulse of the moment

when the heart begins to jam with the rhythm of life

too close to last call to take another request. So please

just go, just go. Shut the lid on the coffin

of my guitar case and save your change for someone else.

I’ve stretched the membrane of my heart out

far enough for you to jump on like an animal skin

that thought of itself as more of a drum at a ghost dance

than a trampoline on the rebound when you

finally came back down to earth like a shooting star

I’d wish on like a lucky scar that might not disappoint me

like the last time you shattered my glass house like a Perseid

throwing the first stone at what you were capable of,

the dregs of a comet that didn’t burn hot enough

to burnish your golden chariot in the emotional crematorium

where the slag of a slum’s been mined out like love.

I buried the yellow canary that used to warn me

you were coming like the Wailing Wall

beside the Dome of the Rock in a bed of Jerusalem artichokes.

Take your body with you when you go. Take

your lips and your hair, your hips and your breasts

and the mammal magnetism of those dresses you wear

as if they were being modelled on a catwalk by the floor

beside someone else’s bed, and I’ll walk skinless

through the world awhile and feel everything again

like a wild aster in the acid rain of a significant climate change

it’s a lot easier to adjust to without you, than it is

to explain to my solitude looking for signs among the stars,

fireflies burning in all these ice-age Mason jars

I’m releasing like the Pleiades from the urns of my eyes,

chimney sparks in a gust of wind, lights out over

the sea at night, and when you’re gone, lightyears up the road,

these first magnitude starmaps I’ll use to start a fire

I’ll sit around, and listen to the wind rustling

through old creation myths like leaves well into autumn,

and try to identify the sound of a tree falling

in an old growth forest when there’s no one there to hear it

and the Canada geese are heading south like hearses of the spirit,

hello and farewell, included in the same calling out

to the silence and the distance between one absence and the next.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

The night that heals the broken day.

The dark that mends the shattered lamp.

The moon that salves the puncture wound.

The star that welds the injured eye

into a stronger bond than the original vision.

The silence that tempers the battered heart

in its own tears like a sword of light it fell upon.

The word that tends the forsaken voices

in our ears, like water whispering

into a dry wishing well on the moon

or bees and hummingbirds come like shibboleths

and sacred syllables to the larkspur and hollyhocks.

Down by the river where there are no mistakes

I can sense the long sorrows of the willows

making preparations for spring. The dead branch

troubled by a dream of leaves it didn’t expect.

The ancient hills washing their own corpses

laid out against the skyline like anonymous chthonic gods

led out of the labyrinth of their watersheds and roots

by melting snow welling up in their eyes

like the first signs of life coming out a coma of permafrost.

There’s a renewed hope in the lyrics

of the night birds exorcising the echoes

and mirages of this albino desert of ice

from their leprous solitude growing back

new limbs and flightfeathers at the approach

of the vernal equinox, moved to sing more earnestly

for reasons quite beyond them

because there’s no logic among the muses

anyone can follow like music rationally for very long

without getting lost in a starmap of metaphors

like a field fire burning off the short straws

in the hands of isolated scarecrows on nightwatch

all winter long, as Virgo offers them all

another chance to feel the wind caressing

an ocean of starwheat again like a new riff in the urn

of a greening guitar sprouting out of its ashes

like the first note of orchards, windfalls and harvests to come.

Soon the sun will treble the clefs

of the wild grapevines like tendrils

and the mushy raspberry flesh of the old women

grow firm again and the green-stick fractures

in the hospitals of the birch groves

raise their branches up to the sky

like wands of wine witching for stars.

And the young will be exhilarated by seeing

everything for the very first time

like new lamps for old and the genie within

understanding why it’s cast aside by their elation

will smile with the affectionate wisdom

of a third eye that’s been watching

this riot of apple bloom and trout lilies for light years.

And the rain will root like wild columbine

on the skulls of the moss-pated rocks

and the cochineal crocuses in the dilated pupils

of the wide-eyed snow will put their petals

together in prayer like eyelids appealing

to a stranger in passing like white water

over the rocks in the wake of his heart

and say, hey, mister, please, we could use those tears

if you’ve got no further use for them. Come here

and help us turn the waterwheels of the eternal recurrence.

Or lend us your breath, if you’ve forgotten what it’s for

to enhance the shining tenderly burning in our starmud

by blowing on the kindling of the fires of life

like a volunteer arsonist attending a nesting pyre

of yarrow sticks from the Book of Changes

we can lie down upon like the phoenix of the sumac

refeathering its skeletal wings in fledgling flames.

The ant that repairs the tunnels and doorways

of its snow-covered barrow to let the light dispel

the shadows from the bone boxes of its dead

like a stem cell happy to be at work again.

The red-tailed hawk repairing the burnt rafters

of its last sky burial by shouldering the wind

upon its shoulders as if the earth weren’t

such a heavy burden to bear as it sometimes seems.

The scarlet cardinal that kept the memory

of lost poppies alive like the lantern of a dream

burning in the windowsills of long, dark nights

of returning one day like a prodigal

to the firepits of hell to discover

they’ve been sown by the dipeptides of meteors

like circular gardens bordered by

Martian fieldstones lying like the kissing stones

of black Kaabas in Antarctica to celebrate

the renewal of life and the return of the light

to the radiant gateways of the trilithons of Stonehenge

where any place you shine like a firefly on the horizon

face to face with the night is the true direction of prayer.

The pine that sweeps the needles from the stairs

like the rusty eyelashes of shipwrecked compasses.

The blue shift of the Canada geese beating their wings

like a drum circle of wavelengths on the eye of the lake.

The garter snake that slept for an eternity

with its tail in its mouth ungnarling the knots in its hair

to seek its own equilibrium like water

in the tree rings of a warmer rain

rippling through archival calenders

like a higher frequency of life in its heartwood.

The thorns that stung like locust trees

beginning to take down the Chinese lanterns

of the hives of the paper wasps and replace them

with the blossoming pinatas of honey bees

singing in a beatific cloud of unknowing

to the metamorphic glory of compassionate mysteries.

The dragonflies drying their wings in the light

that wipes the tears from the eyes

of the rubble of fortune-cookies they emerge from

like gerry-mandered shrines of transformation

with stained-glass windows cracking like old paint

to open themselves as wide as they can

like an aubade of pagan totems at midnight

to the lifespan of the sun enlightening the moonrise

with prophetic fire flowering in the eye sockets of an eclipsed skull,

chandeliers of votive candles burning in the sacred niches

of a holy wall of secret messages riddled with nesting swallows

like waterlilies and love letters from the distant stars.

Breaking like the womb of a beaver dam

with the waters of life flooding the roads

we have to take to make our way here as we are,

the broken tea pot of Aquarius that mends

the continental shards of the rifts of old ostrakons

like Pangea in the spring with scars of gold.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I'M SUMMONED

THE WAY I FEEL ABOUT MYSELF OVERALL WHEN I’M SUMMONED

The way I feel about myself overall when I’m summoned

out of my blue evanescence to be embodied again and again

as an individual with egocentric limits as if

some cooper of flowers had bound up my petals

into whiskey-barrels for the long night ahead.

Not wise to let apprentice mirages pilot the mindstream

but everybody’s got to take their hand off the wheel sometime

and let the facts learn to trust the true nature of illusion

isn’t a mask the truth wears to conceal its face in public

as if it had a bad reputation that smelled like the moon.

Realism is the death of theatre on an imaginary stage.

A spontaneous image out of the void doesn’t

make you a mage, but I thought I’d be wiser

than I am now, when I was twenty-two and sure of myself.

A lot of trial and error in learning how to love

your own and others’ humanity like the shadows cast

by the flames of desire like a bestiary of extinct simulacra

painted on the wall in carbon and red ochre behind you.

We gather and we hunt as before. We acquire and dispense.

And the pain of letting go is insufferable. Trees

in post natal depression after a windfall. It helps

when humanity appalls you to remember the children

these monsters once were, and how dangerous innocence is.

Love feels like the labour of a lifetime

but if you get up close and intimate there’s

no progression in the work. Intimidating spontaneity,

it’s chaos reversing the spin on the order of the cosmos

so you can see the long and the short of it

through both lenses of your hourglass telescope

and you owe as much to your mistakes as you do

when you embraced as if the gift, the giver

and the given to were three waves on the same river of bliss.

Like greys in a painting, all those beautiful hues

of inchoate confusion, complementary colours

of lament and celebration, harvesting the dark abundance

of the full moon, sowing eclipses in the bright vacancy

of the new, wallflowers of the quotidian suddenly

going supernova in the eyes of unlikely mystics.

Love doesn’t sponsor a school, a cult, a coven, a lab rat.

If you’ve ever truly experienced it, then you know

you’re only experimenting with your own homely absence

when it’s gone. It foreshadows a kind of negativity creativity

that makes you feel as if you were backing out

the front door on your own house of life

and all that used to shine like the glazed bricks of starmud

you built it of to shelter your solitude, had

rejected you like a changeling on the threshold

of your birth sign like an illegitimate passport going into exile.

Just as loneliness is merely the table of contents, the shell

of what it means until you put it in the context

of being with someone and the self-contained monad

of cosmic sentience you are is horrifically amplified

into a bubble in the multiverse that’s about to burst

into a new sense of the vastness the light has to traverse

to enter your eye as if time were too slow

to keep up with the moment, so the present

is never any younger than the past, and the future

is always older than you conceived it to be.

Put your finger on the pulse of love. It’s an ageless waterclock

one wavelength long, one bloodstream wide

with no far shore on the other side. High

as your eyes are deep, a dream that keeps you awake.

Born into poverty, leave home, fourteen, then

fifty years a poet scrounging for life

in the flesh and dirt under the black crescents

of my lunar fingernails, doing without

to keep on doing within whatever I’m inclined to

like the axis of Neptune in orbit, turned on its head,

or the dark matter of turning the starmaps over

like a pilot light in an underworld full of untapped potential.

The severe clarities of the blood oath I took

to remain faithfully disobedient to whatever

I might come to believe too sternly about the world.

The curse enlightens. The blessing corrupts.

Whatever my imagination has done to me

in the name of love you’re either scarred by service

or suicide. And heresy looked like the only green bough

among the dead branches on the tree of knowledge

I could sing from like a serpent with wings

in a choir of fanatical bluebirds on my shoulder

shrill in the false dawn of another morning of mirth.

Despair might have gouged my eyes out at times,

but I never struck gold until I learned

to see like the blind what’s reflected in the black mirrors

of the mind that turns the light around on itself.

And as much as joy might have to say, sorrow’s

always said more than the genius of my silence

could articulate. Not a sententious adage of mine,

but I’ve learned never to trust wisdom if it’s

got a bad voice, too much creosote, too few

blackbirds in the chimney building nests

to make sure the song never dies and the lyrics

are as sweet as music to your eyes when you open them

for the very first time and the endless sky

smiles down upon you, day and night, like a birthright.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

SITTING HERE BECOMING WHATEVER DRIFTS MY WAY

Sitting here becoming whatever drifts my way.

Cedar boughs smouldering in an attic to smoke the bats out.

Thought-watching without looking for the answer to anything.

Spiders like badges walking on the waters of my mind.

The autumn’s new, but it’s the same old passage of things.

Apples like bells in the trees of the steeples, shepherd moons

of sloppy solar systems strewn on the ground

with seeds that are going to take them down

a notch or two yet before they make a comeback.

Seven times down. Eight times up. Such is life.

I watch the picture-music flowing through my mind

like a home movie that’s happening as fast as I am

playing the role of everybody else in the universe

all at once as if every ray of light incarnated

in the emanation of an essential existential insight

into the nature of every mystically specific human being

could all be traced back to the root of the same star.

And what does the star do when the many return to it

if not apocalyptically go supernova into transcendence.

Just because the ashes sleep sweetly in their firepits and urns,

doesn’t mean they’re not dreaming and scheming

to wake up from themselves

I’m firewalking in the ether like a sad volcano.

I’m alone in life and it’s not as bad as I thought.

Prolonged solitude blurs the distinctions between

the trivial and the sublime. Beauty seems

the most engaging waste of time I know of.

I think about love more as an event than a thing,

and I’ve made enough attempts in my life

to convince me it wasn’t for lack of trying

that I’m walking alone with the Alone like Plotinus

trying to keep my telescope in focus and stay open-minded.

But as John Keats said. If it come not as naturally

as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Space, too, has its sirens. And time, its lamias.

A gust of stars and the desert’s full of fantasies.

A star blooms and a comet falls from its dark halo

like a queen bee looking to start a new hive

and I’ve seen enough oases with hourglass figures

turn into bag ladies in paradise to stay shy of gardens

that don’t have any weeds in them that might

uproot me as so many have like a botanical mistake

as if I were some kind of hallucinogenic angel of death.

Amanita ocreata. A mushroom in the death cap

of a nuclear winter when all I am is interspecially creative

in the way I adapt to my extinctions. Attentive and tender

toward the flora and fauna that inhabit my solitude.

Though the peduncle is always lost in the ensuing phylum

as I am like the star in the eyes of the women

who’ve drowned me like a firefly in their tears,

I still send bouquets of constellations to the asylum

like the last of the New England asters this time of year.

Sanity might smudge the tomb with a noose of sweetgrass

but the madness stays clear as the waters of life

in the womb of enlightenment giving birth

to bubbles in hyperspace that can spontaneously pop

as easily as they cohere like skin to the shape shifting multiverse

for better and worse, and all the permutative modalities in between.

God bless them all. Each, a rite of passage

I stumbled through like the blessing

of an excruciating ordeal that seasons you

for what’s to come, or who. I must have loved them

better than I thought to miss them as much as I do

now that I do not. Incubus, muse, sphinx, witch,

oracle and water sylph, I gave to each my crystal skull

they could wear around their neck like a prophetic locket

to remember what we were to each other once

before the moon in the corals fossilized the shipwreck

to set sail on this sea of shadows without a star to go by.

Amor vincit omnia. Maybe. But I’m more a pirate

with the eclipse of my third eye for an eyepatch

and a parrot that’s teaching me to keep my mouth shut

than I am a navy even if there isn’t a rudder on this lifeboat

or a bay to sail into of my own. And I’m not looking

for a northwest passage to Cathay through a periscope

that’s stayed under too long to know where it’s going

without a starmap. I’m not interested in exploring decay

from the inside out like some submersible in a lunar ocean.

I’ve sailed under the skull and crossbones all my life.

And I’m not about to strike my colours like the maples,

lay them down like the burning blades of the angels

at the gates of dying garden. I’m going to hold out

long after the irises have surrendered their rainbows

to a retinal circus without any sacred clowns or animal acts

where the judas goats train the tigers to jump

through the brindled hoops of their own screening myths of fire.

It’s wise to tread cautiously among the duff and detritus of death

like a protocol of your own instinct, good spiritual manners

among the extinct so the dead don’t sink into oblivion

like a garbage barge. I revere the autumnal exorcism

as much as the vernal summoning to a seance.

I’m as sincere about my farewells as I am my hellos

as I watch the wavelengths shift from blue to red,

lowering the frequencies of fountains into watersheds

as if a musician were putting his guitar back into the coffin

he carries it around in. Green bough. Dead branch. Same song

as far as I’ve learned to sing to myself in the dark coming on.

The snakes can tie themselves into knots and hibernate

as long as they want, and all my summer visions

can turn into hard cold facts. I’ve still got a dragon of serpent fire

walking my spinal cord like a high wire act

without safety nets because I’ve always made it

a point of balanced awareness along this dangerous coast

to sail with the wind behind me like the light of a star

a wingspan ahead of my fall. The ghost of a battle scar

that’s made it this far into a wounded future

without a pyre or a lighthouse to chart the course

of my desire not to live like yesterday’s flowers

strewn on the corpse of tomorrow’s hearse.

PATRICK WHITE  

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