WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE'S NOTHING TO HUNT

WHEN GRIEF GROWS SAVAGE AND THERE’S NOTHING TO HUNT

When grief grows savage and there’s nothing to hunt

and all your mandalas are turning back into cave paintings

running down a limestone wall like spears

in the tears of weeping shamans, and you want

to tear your heart out and eat it to nourish your emptiness

but you’re not sure if it’s still the noble enemy it used to be,

or if the power of its sympathetic magic has past

the expiry date, and you think you might be

the last of the big mammals to go extinct in the ice-age,

time to sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

at how the things we take most seriously in life

make sacred clowns of us all in the last analysis

just before enlightenment. Put your lifemask on again,

coax a star or a firefly out of the tinder of that nebula

you’re blowing on until you’ve got a good blaze going

then throw all your grave goods on it as if

you were sending them on ahead of you

while you danced the pain away like the sky burial

of the ghost of another age that’s been haunting you

like a glacier that’s slowly beginning to wash itself clean of itself

as the numbness in your heart thaws like a baby mammoth

that fell into a crevasse of ice, and your fingertips

are melting like elk horn candelabra at a native exorcism.

And, yes, it stings for a while just as things are starting

to warm up, but that too will pass like a wet snowfall in April,

when your blood will begin to flow again

as if it were teaching the wild columbine and gypsy poppies

to waltz to the picture-music of the wind without banshees

howling and scratching at your eyes like dead branches

as if they were raking their fingernails against the glass

of a cold, crystal skull disappearing like an ice-cube in a night cap.

Sit down on the ground and have a good laugh

on the tab of everything that’s ever wounded you

and you just watch how easy it is to wipe

that gruesome grin off the face of the moon

like the sabre-toothed Smilodon that mauled you

and replace it with the smile of a Chesire cat

that just ate the canary in a coal mine of fossilized constellations

because grief can intensify the darkness into diamonds

that can see through the translucency of the tears in your eyes

new stars breaking out all over like waterlilies in the night skies

waiting for you to name them and give them myths of origin

derived like starmaps from the legends of your own shining.

Eventually the jesters of crazy wisdom will come to us all

and wipe the tears from our eyes and paint stars in their stead

we can point out to the cloaked ones

under the covers of their death beds

as if the deeper and darker the night the better to see

trillions of fireflies flung off the wheeling

of the celestial spheres like compassionate insights

into what we suffer for, what we lose whenever

we try to possess forever by trying to pour

the universe out of the universe like a waterclock in Aquarius

when we’re already swimming through eternity

like Pisces and there’s never a moment that passes in life

that isn’t a vernal equinox in a locket we hold close to our hearts

that doesn’t bloom in the fires of enlightenment

like star seeds hidden under the eyelids

of last year’s dolorous windfall of pine cones

because however the wind screams

through the broken wishbones and harps

of our shattered limbs, our torn dreams,

the eighth time we get up from our seventh time down

we get up and stand our ground like evergreens in the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE  

WHEN MY HEART ISN'T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

WHEN MY HEART ISN’T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

When my heart isn’t a hummingbird on a keyboard,

it’s a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon

my mother used to say, the air bright with potential

and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,

a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.

Now it’s an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith

over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.

Blessings on everyone’s head, I’ve shed a few lives of my own,

but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,

scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning

like a nuclear winter that won’t let me forget.

Now there’s nothing perennial about my paradigms

and the flowers don’t grow as imperial as they used to.

Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden

and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails

impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.

I’m looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos

to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage

by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me

as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending

to a recurring dream I haven’t woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don’t climb higher than the mountain is tall

unless you’ve got a star in your eye you’re going to follow

for the rest of your denatured life. But no one’s listening.

They’re all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.

Can’t stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity

of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.

But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent

I like to slip out through and let the darkness

wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes

and encounter six thousand stars whose shining

ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone

where who I am is nobody’s business but the willows

and they’re not saying anything to the wind

that’s heard it all before. One moment you’re the canvas

and the next you’re a paint rag up to your alligators

in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.

If there’s any rafter of my life left standing

it’s as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.

One moment you’re teaching spiders to play the guitar

without barring their chords, and get rid of

those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner

like dreamcatchers they couldn’t hold a note

if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next

you’re boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there’s no assent or denial,

and the false redeemers are orphaned

in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,

I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds

bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse

without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords

the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.

No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils

among my crayons, I have been schooled

in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees

I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death

without having to turn around and go home again

or forget I’m just an organ of light that makes things visible

for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time

to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet

like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

PATRICK WHITE

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I WISH I KNEW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO SAY

I wish I knew you well enough to say

everything there is to say, one heart to another.

I wish I had the art to write this poem in stone like a glacier.

Write it in blood and honey and snow.

Write it in moonlight on the water,

in the sands of sidereal deserts

where the wind doesn’t sing

as if it’s the larynx in the throat of an hourglass.

It’s a hair breadth between seasoned wariness

when you’re on hallowed ground and those

who are scared to death of what it all means

and will discipline their fear into any kind of obedience,

give it all up just to make it go away.

Sometimes you’ve got to break a taboo

to get to the blessing, risk the dragon’s teeth

to get to the golden fleece, or as Coleridge said

imagination is obedient to laws of its own origination

and in a poet’s case, that’s inspiration.

And that’s the way space gets bent

like the nightsky of my third eye

whenever I’m around you like a distant shepherd moon

that’s got life on it, for sure, but prefers

to keep it as secret as solitude in a locket of rain.

Inflammable waterlilies blooming in methane.

A theft of fire that burns sweeter than the proceeds of crime.

Orpheus is trying to prophecy using his own skull

that he could probably get used to a lot of the same music

you like and if he were ever called upon

to go down into hell again before your eyes

got used to the dark and the darkness showed you its jewels,

I’d be able to break my heart like the wishbone of a harp

for someone like you to follow me up out of death

without looking back on the black lustre of oblivion

that has made us both feel at times,

like moonset in a tarpit that will perfectly

preserve our bones, if nothing else, so

the future can tell by the fang marks

what pierced us through the heart

like crescent moons into voodoo,

baring their canines like toxic dinosaurs

so we both look like we’ve been carved on

like a calendar of scars and Mayan dream grammars.

You’re the kind of lens that brings chaos into focus

You can weave a wavelength into

a beautifully disciplined flying carpet

and have it all intertwined like a wild grape vine

on a trellis putting flesh on a skeleton

that thirsts for wine from your heart well.

I may be the inspired in this, but you’re

the lunar inspiratrix, creative matrix,

a shape of space that teaches matter how to move

in orbit around you, even from this distance

where my solitude is urgent with ancient mysteries

to lift the veils as if I were worthy of being no one

and the dark queen doesn’t turn her face

toward the stranger at the stargate in Orion

for nothing. Sex and death are old bedmates,

but life always comes like a vestal virgin

or a sacred whore to these affairs and the stars,

who knows what they’ve seen in their time,

but whatever it was, or is, or will be,

they still shine, and the shining’s always new.

You may have your occultations, but I can see

the same thing in you as I do in the Pleiades.

Hot, bright, mystic fire in a blue negligee of light

as if you’d left your breath on a cold nightsky

and the windowpane of space I was looking at it through

like a smudge of radiance, the first wildflower

in my field of view for light years that have left

the present so far behind me I’m catching up to my past,

one warm breath, and I begin to melt

like a chandelier of icicles in a summer storm.

The stick arms of a snowman are covered in apple bloom.

Visions are greened again from the stem cells

of the crumbs of my dreams I rubbed from my eyes

when I began to believe they were seeing things

from the wrong end of a telescope that stood things on its head.

Now I know when I feel homelessly lost upon the earth,

even in exile, I’m rooted firmly in the sky as you are,

and if I’m not weeding the constellations

in secret gardens where the gates open

at the same time as these flowers in my eyes

it’s just because of the way I can empathize

with their plight, and heretic I can’t help being,

show some timely respect for the pariahs

burning at the same stake that I am for flaws

I indict myself of whenever Venus on a moonless night

casts me down like a shadow of love on the snow

and I take it as a sign of a woman I want to know.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

THE NIGHT DANCES WITH ITSELF LIKE AN ONLY CHILD

The night dances with itself like an only child

to the sounds of its own silence

when it thinks no one is watching.

Every falling leaf, a gesture of the hands,

poised, a word, a bird, a butterfly on a branch,

a sacred syllable from an alphabet that can dance,

caught in the updraft of a momentary insight

of falling to paradise like a flightfeather of light,

and landing the move just right, just so, with perfect timing.

The maples by day, easels for hot palette paintings,

red shift through red, orange, yellow, green

from the outside in toward the trunk, same

as a rainbow, same as the dynastic colours of a sunset.

Same as the fires of life returning to the root.

Same as the starmaps of the visionaries

flying like shamans from the nests they were fledged in.

Same as the ripening of the fruits of the earth,

or roses with green stars under their eyelids.

Different instruments, different voices,

the wind, the rasping of the leaves, the beaver

slapping the startled flesh of the water at my approach,

a twig snapping its drumstick on a rim shot

and the crow, and the squeaking bats, and the lapping

of the waves like the plectra of an aquamarine harpsichord

at the whole notes of the rocks, but a confluence

of picture-music washing the roots of the dead violins

of the wild irises and the timpani of cattails along the mindstream.

Merrily, merrily, row your boat, life is but a dream.

But to judge from the windfalls of green planets

shaken from the black walnut trees, it’s a dream

that’s urgent with the myriad realities of a multiverse

waking up in a place like here, and a time like now

with a lavish appetite for inhabiting itself

as if appearance weren’t just the rind

that had to be peeled away like the skin and the shell

of the meat of the real, the shapes of the known worlds

the rat snakes shed like intimate illusions

that have naturally outgrown themselves,

the new moon in the arms of the old, like a nightsky

leaving the Milky Way, a mythically deflated windsock

tangled in the tree line like a runway that tried to fly by itself.

Now the Great Shedding as the earth turns

like the old abandoned mill wheel upstream

like a circular waterclock making linear time

take its tail in its mouth like an eternal recurrence

that’s always pouring itself out of itself like life

into the emptiness between the equinox of one thought

and the solstice of the next like the silence between heartbeats,

the night between the stars, like the inseparable gap

between the distant moon and the intimacy of the moon’s reflection

on the newly surfaced dark skin of the water sequencing

its pentatonic scales to the seasonal themes of the mindstream

you can’t step into twice, as Heraclitus said in Ephesus long ago,

though it seems that way if all you’re doing is dogpaddling

like a delinquent green apple on a snow covered bough, instead

of going along with the perennial renewal of the flow

by letting go of your water skin with its lunar tattoo

like the bright vacancy of an old silo of the light

for the dark abundance of the new insight

into the nature of life when it full in October.

The fall. This hour of my becoming

when everything is burning like the sumac

with the fires of life but nothing is consumed.

Because fire doesn’t burn fire and death is unperishing.

And autumn is no less of a transformation than spring

as this new day dances as readily with the old woman

watching from her kitchen window as it does the young girl,

than the rain is to the tides of a lunar ocean

swaying in its shadows as if it were dancing

with its river reeds like a lonely child

in the embrace of her imagination,

like a poet in the grip of his crazy wisdom

flirting like a firefly with the dragons of his madness

without listening to the search parties of the lighthouses

bellowing like the foghorns of mournful trains back on shore

being swept away into the distance like nightwatchmen

and unconvincing ghosts. Things are unmooring

like lifeboats full of seeds and the souls of the dead

taking to their wings like the oars of waterbirds,

and the lowest of earthbound snakes

are dreaming of feathering their scales

into the vans of a dragon firewalking with stars

around the wobbling axis of the earth

on a potter’s wheel, turning it like sentient starmud

that’s fired up in autumn like an urn that burns like a kiln.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU, IN TEARS AGAIN

YOU, IN TEARS AGAIN

You, in tears again, broken chandeliers of pain

that came crashing down upon you just as you thought

he was asking you to dance. Save the moment for me

but you got caught in an ice storm of crystal candelabra,

your heart slashed on flint knapped glass

and the moment, brittle and clear, shattered

the mirage of the window you mistook for a mirror

in this desert of stars that keeps passing through your life

like a squall of serpent fire in an hourglass.

You, in tears again. Your eyelashes coming unglued,

and your Medusan mascara running down your cheeks

like the wavelengths of watersnakes in eclipse.

I know your suffering isn’t face-paint, but, little sister,

you look like a sacred clown in a circus of grief.

No. I don’t mind you showing up at my door

this late at night. You’re not a thief, you’re not

junkmail, you’re not a bill, or just as bad, the landlord.

You’re a friend of mine. My heart’s your heart.

Let’s give it shelter and lots of sacrificial space

because I sense it’s just been ripped out of your chest

like a strawberry and stepped on. You take

the black futon and let’s forget about the altar for awhile

and the strange gods you light candles to

as you grow increasingly blind to your own beauty

like a bruised orchid trying to bloom in the shadows

of the outhouses you keep falling in love with.

Nothing to say to you that I haven’t said before.

But there’s no told-you-so in the tone of my voice.

I’m not a self-righteous boor. And you’re not a penitent.

There’s silence. The crazy wisdom of my interior

dream mondos remembering the love affairs

of the ghosts that got caught in my highbeams

one foggy night on a lonely dirt road going nowhere,

or you could let the scorpion out of your medicine bag

and we could talk about your life as it is now

until the eyelids of the rose started to droop like bells

and the watershed of sleep began to heal your wounded housewells.

Up to you. Which would you prefer with your coffee

and cigarette? Here’s a towel. Your lipstick’s messed.

You look like you’ve been French kissing a poppy.

When you’re down like this, it helps to look your best.

Vatic in your sorrows. A little more oracular erotica

than abstract expressionist. A priestess with a python

wrapped around her shoulders like a rafter in the snakepit

of a volcanic caldera. We’ll take shelter under

the same lifeboat on the moon together and pretend

we’re a hydra-headed turtles willing to stick our necks out

for one another for awhile. Don’t want anything from you

as usual. I think that’s why you always turn to me

like the last recourse you have to fall back on by default.

Flattered. Glad my emptiness can be of use to someone

and I’m not wasting all this compassion on myself.

You know I sit here some nights, my hands idle

at this wheelhouse of a desk I’ve turned over

to the night sea of my awareness of being alive,

knowing it has more buoyancy than me, and I stare

out into the darkness above the rooftops of the town

as far as my eyes can shine, and all I look for

is a star I don’t have to follow if I don’t want to.

Sometimes it’s Venus going down in the west,

sometimes it’s Arcturus tangled like a kite in the powerlines.

And I rue the light pollution of Mac’s Milk,

and the shapes of the buildings occluding

my field of view, so sometimes it’s hard

to know the name of the star that’s caught my attention

like a splinter of light in my third eye without

seeing the rest of the constellation. But I guesstimate

it’s not a mystic revelation, more a match

of spiritual elation I’m playing with to see

what might catch fire in my imagination.

I don’t expect anything. Don’t feel I have a right

because I think I’m an expert about things in the night.

I just sit here like a lotus on a helicopter pad

waiting for a dragonfly to return like the air ambulance

over at the Vet’s Hospital, dreaming the world

on the nightward among the morphine drips

falling like the tears of Etruscan gods in a dead sleep,

and more rarely now that my prophetic skull has aged,

a waterlily on a platter served up to a dancing girl.

If you’re alone long enough, you come to feel

your solitude is an affable companion that knows

more about the world than it’s got the good grace

to let on. My silence comes on like an anonymous muse

and I’m inspired to ask, like a fly with a starmap at the window

what space-time continuum does the human divinity

of my starmud inhabit like a planet, or even a shepherd moon

in the inconceivable vastness of what I’ve become

just by wondering my way in and out of it

like a labyrinth of blackholes digging their own graves.

Undertakers in winter with back hoes. It stings sometimes.

Sometimes it’s nettles and wild parsnip to know the roses

with their thorns, the sunflowers with their bluejays,

and the lovers like you, in tears again, who come in

off the street like dream figures that have woken up too late

to realize the new moon’s waning like a deathmask deeper into life,

and the night’s bleeding out through a crack in the door

that’s been left ajar. The candlepower of supernovas

melting down like the hemorrhage of a star, and all,

without exception, however viciously they cherish

being possessed by a seance of the hungry ghosts of love

feasting on their bodyminds like wafers and wine,

all perish alike when the honey stops flowering

in the beeswax of their flesh, and their spirits

are the paint rags of an art theft that got thrown on the fire.

An encaustic masterpiece of ashes in a macabre museum.

But don’t abandon hope, even if you enter here.

Look directly into the eyes of your horrors

like a sparrow staring down a rat snake and see

for yourself what everyone fears blink

without eyelids as if it were carved in stone

by a waterclock with a wavelength as long as your tears

as if it were raining on the Sphinx again

as it has been, little sister, for more lightyears

than a mirage has eyes and irises the colour

of the waters of life greening the Sahara

with the flood myths of the grasslands I can see

are beginning to take root in your vision of love

like climate change among those estranged

like watercolourists by the loss of their own lunar atmospheres.

Here, a pillow, you can lay your head on for the night

softer than the stone of the world, the down

of a thundercloud passing like a storm over the treeline

of the echoless valley of death in your heart

the low hazard fireflies will reoccupy soon

like a chaos of lighthouses on the moon arguing

when the next tide comes in, and you can wrap

yourself up in the metamorphic cocoon of this old tattered

comforter of a dreamscape you can terraform for yourself

like the barrow tomb of the vernal equinox,

or the winter solstice in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,

or the garden of Eden if you prefer crying

yourself to sleep on the shores of the four rivers

pouring out of you into the forbidden zones

of human awareness where sulphur butterflies

immolate themselves in the flames of the wild irises,

and milkweed is the wet nurse of migrating Monarchs

and the bull gates horned by the crescents of the moon

that sometimes gore the rose on its own thorns

are glazed in lapis lazuli like star sapphires of cool bliss

and bricks of starmud baked in the kilns of the Pleiades

I’ll show you one night just over the top of the bowling alley

like a mobile of glass-blown tears recycled

from broken mirrors turning pendulously in the wind.

PATRICK WHITE  

MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

MADNESS, AT ITS BEST

Madness, at its best. Should I name a star

after you that rises in the west and sets in the east

and later gouge its eyes out like a cartouche

on an obelisk I erected when you were

the queen of heaven, and I was pointed

in the right direction, make a course correction

and say the compass lied? Things just

reverse spin sometimes. The moon

gets stuck in your throat like your last thin dime

in a telephone booth, and everything you feel

is long distance after that, a soothsayer

parsing aorist oracles in his sleep, as he grinds his teeth.

Would you understand, would you know

what it means to enshrine what you’ve laboured

to love the longest in the ore of meteoric metaphors

with nickel-iron swords at the core of the rock

I keep pulling out and falling upon

like the significant absurdity of a peasant king

who refuses to sit on any throne he can’t abdicate

on a whim. I want to wing it on the wind

like a maple key, or the silhouette of a crow

in the locket of the moon. But know this,

consider this wisely as a starmap on a lake,

crazy as I am not to care what I sound like

when the stars confide what’s in their hearts

to the leaves of the silver Russian olives,

there’s a magnificent abyss without a view

of anyone when you come before them

like a lover’s ledge no one’s ever lept from

precipitously enough for you to believe

the inconceivable has fallen in love with you

like a discontinued theme song that never

made a big hit on the bottom you’ve been reaching for

like the bedrock of a water palace whose depths

are way over your head like a waterclock

you weren’t counting like a lover to show up on time

at your door. Can you hear my words ticking by

as if they were sword- dancing with their own shadows

like galaxies and sundials, Sufis and Buddhas

comparing mirages at a crossroads in the desert

and laughing because so much is missing

from the message they have to humour the medium

into making a surprise appearance at her own seance.

The underage magician is pulling doves and crows

from behind your ears and releasing them

from your privatized aviary like voices

breaking their parole like a love song they’ve

been singing too long in the choir of a false dawn

at a sky burial for lapwings on a pyre of crutches

that weren’t even real, that never got the feel

of spreading their feathers out on the lake

like wild swans getting ready to take off in the moonlight

with no cause for alarm among the stars

they leave in their wake like the Milky Way

rising over the horizon of the flightpath they’re on

like a catalpa tree in the spring, or a road of ghosts

beyond the gateways of the starfields in the autumn,

a scar of light on the wounded waters of life

that heal themselves like eyes that have cried enough

to return like the rivers of paradise

through the burning gates of Eden as if, water

only once, but you get to jump through the same fire twice.

PATRICK WHITE

PEACE A MOMENT

PEACE A MOMENT

Peace a moment. A bubble of cool bliss

in the skin of a tear. Grace, with a green thorn.

The moon as I’ve never seen it before.

A ghost in the willows feathers down

upon the dark waters of the Tay

in an aura of moist summer air,

indelible as chalk on a blackboard

as if it were trying to write its name.

Solitude’s a priestess leashed to a water snake

that meditates on the moonlight

like a theta wave on its own path through life.

Look where you will, even the search parties

you organize like poems with real candlepower

are still lost in the labyrinth of your homelessness

looking for your true address until

you realize it’s been under your feet all the time.

You are the road. And there’s no one on it.

The shadows of the trees lie down

like thresholds that sense someone’s

been crying in a derelict doorway for years.

Severe sorrow. A bell for a bucket

bailing out the empty lifeboat of the moon

long, long after it’s set. Love. No help for it.

White sweet clover, swan’s plumage,

both sides of the road. The wind

in the vocal cords of the wild grape vines

overgrowing the half closed gate

of someone who meant to return one day

like a loose page of a book to its binding.

An unfinished loveletter to the fire that wrote it.

The maples reach out to touch me

to see if I’m real. Nocturnal enough,

but who’s to judge? The dream

doesn’t have a dawn or dusk. The end

goes on forever. The beginning never happens.

Born into perishing my way through life

what could death mean but another night

of living my passage through it

as the juniper sweeps my tracks

from the trails I cut down to the river

like deer paths, and the stars

in the shrine of my eyes devote their candles

to the same darkness that inspires the fireflies,

or my insights into the nature of love

as the way the nightsky is transfixed

by what is born of it like the mystery

of why life shines on its own likeness

without going blind or turning into stone

as if imagination were the first sign,

black walnut trees losing their voice

like Lyra in the west, as above, so below,

autumn approaching, o, yes, the autumn

and the poignancy, almost the flavour

of creation, that what we love last

and the deepest, is the perennial beauty

of our own passing, galaxies and waterlilies

embedded in our hydra-headed starmud

like a blue moon inseparable from

the dark waters of life it blossoms in.

A nightbird shrieks. A ghost kicked up

by the dust of the Milky Way in my wake

weeps like a sad loveletter that’s taken the words

right out of my mouth like an empty mailbox

standing at the side of the road, listening

when there’s nothing, not even an echo,

a whisper of my own innermost voice,

to the silence that lingers in the woods

for asylum from the intimacy that has

forsaken it, and the love in its heart

that trues it like an arrow fletched by the light

to a rapturous wound that hasn’t,

as the fish at both ends of the equinox

jump back like bulls-eyes into the targets

they made of their exits from one medium

to hit in the next like the tree rings

of the grand entrances we make on our way out.

Love perishes like apple bloom in the spring

to be born again among the windfalls of autumn,

the burning bridges of the maple trees

between the fountains on the moon, with birds,

and the housewells we dig like graves

here on earth, to drink our own tears from

like sacred syllables pouring through

the open floodgates of the moonrise

like a prophetic skull trying to hit

all the oracular high notes of the shrill treefrogs

celebrating the dark abundance, bright vacancy

of our corporeal entrances and disembodied exits.

PATRICK WHITE