GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

GREED. POLITICS. CORRUPTION BEYOND SURREALISTIC CONCEPTION

Greed. Politics. Corruption beyond surrealistic

conception. I’m going mad in self defence.

The delusion of insanity doesn’t look so bad

from here. How did these distortions get

elected to represent the things I stubbornly believe

I so breezily accepted in the sixties? The mediocrities

are fracking the well of the muses and the astronauts

have grown old and died of gravity that use

to float freely high, high above the earth.

There are perennial truths to our experience

of humanity, of being human, that endure,

without divine sanction, or with if you prefer,

to this very day like oxygen and water. Love

and understanding, compassion, empathy,

pity if it’s not meant to destroy someone,

freedom to say, protest, or create without

a profit margin being where all things come to rest

like autumn leaves in a gutter with an iron grate.

Fifty years, a poetic heretic, a literate demon

good for the angels’ imaginations if they’ve

got one among them left of their own. As well

as those abject modes of starmud that

have no idea of what’s shining within them.

The frogs have dressed up like cannibals

far to the east and everything is scum,

born that way like the cosmic eggs of a priest.

Is the day ever going to come, not as

a supernatural act of intervention, whether

God’s an extraterrestrial or not who sneers

at our technology, people realize they need

each other as a coral reef needs the moon

to remind the polyps they’re not alone?

I’ve had enough. I’m overwhelmed

by the termites munching in the house of life,

untimbering the heartwood of the rafters,

undermining the foundations we built

our pyres on, turning our walls to a weather front

as if the rest of us were the asteroids

of a natural catastrophe with hidden strings

like a kite that nose-dived like a puppet

into the powerlines that ignited a universal

conflagration, a good capitalist that fed

on everything it touched, Midas in a vegetable garden

looking for a golden harvest under

the genetically modified rocks that feel

more like a skull of dry ice that’s been fuming

forever it seems, sublimating itself as smoke

and ghosts since the beginning of this new fire age.

I can’t believe how the one-eyed liar can deceive

the many new ways of communicating life

and death issues with the convenience of a cellphone.

A fly on a computer screen. Even walking

beside the Tay River that never lies to me

like my own mindstream offering me a mirage

of what there is to drink from my own reflection.

I see the stems of the fallen leaves stacked

like a logjam or the wicks of clear cut candles

whose flames are single petalled starmaps

of someone who didn’t have to ask if they

were loved or not better in solitude than company.

I feel the suffering of everyone until

I can see it somewhere between the treeline

where the river winds, and the stars overhead

that made it all possible in the shining forges

of their fire-wombs, the sacred smithies who said

one half of you shall plough the moon,

the other, raise a sword against water

that can’t be wounded by the tears in your eyes.

And for the mad espionage of the war mongers

there’s always an adulterous fishing net

the dolphins, muscled as they are, get snagged in

like a spider web, a dream-catcher, a suspension bridge

on fire with the naked acts of the truth

that has no where to hide its eyes or alibis or lies.

How many gates and front doors, entrances compared

to the back, emergency exits, second-holes

of a groundhog’s labyrinth in this house of pain?

I see it in the junkie prostitute’s eyes at twenty seven

open to whatever comes though she puts

a smile on her life to gloss over it and keep

up with the Joneses. I see it in the bones

of the baby muskrat the wolves have been

sniffing around for from the day it was born.

And even the thick asphalt of the rat snake

that made its way through the grass like

a highway slick with rain. Pain. Until

it doesn’t matter anymore it tastes the air

as if it were witching for water with forked lightning.

A million hues of oxymorons on a colour wheel

turning grey as the journey gets longer

than shadows at moonrise on a premeditative sundial.

The agony of giving birth to something bigger

than a self. The impersonality of suffering

though you send it birthday cards that are

always well-meaning however absurd it is

to believe your pain taught you anything but how

to hurt as if it were teaching you to transcend yourself.

Even if you wanted to be a fountain efflorescing

like a mirage in an eyeless desert and you

turned out to be a waterclock going supernova

in the endless emptiness of a blossoming flower.

Even if you walk alone by the Tay River

as you have a hundred troubled times before

at night when the willows, in the summer

of their long green locks, or in the winter

when they open a bordello, are on

a first name basis with your business here.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I SHOWED UP WITH A ROSE

I showed up with a rose and you said

it was the wrong colour. I showed up

with my head on a silver platter

and you asked as you danced for another

where I’d buried my heart

like the last love affair of the summer

as I watched your body move

like the moon on a famous river

where others before me had drowned

like fish in a dead sea of shadows,

shipwrecks thirsting for the waters of life

you denied them like the taste of your reflection

in the oceanic deserts of their tears

as they died in a graveyard of wine.

I brought you the fallen leaves

of my latest book of poems like autumn

but you swept them off the thresholds

of your hidden doorways like junkmail

and said, yes, there’s fire in their longing,

but if I’m the muse who refuses you,

next time edge the razor of your tongue in blood.

I retreated like a hermit for awhile

into the severed candle of my solitude

that burned like a comet to return

on the day of my death in your eyes

like the last known address

of my homelessness on the lost gospel

of the loveletter I sent you lightyears from paradise.

O how much I couldn’t second-guess I loved you then,

like a weathervane loves the wind,

how much I learned and took to heart

like the golden fossils of sorrow and regret

that lie buried like sundials and hourglasses

in the secret gardens on the moon

where I used to wait for you life after life

like midnight at noon when the earth

stood still and the light held its shadows

like a drowning man holds his breath,

like content delays the timing of its heart

until it’s too late for anyone to show up

like a water-gilder at a Zen tea ceremony

to mend the broken cup of the skull-faced moon.

PATRICK WHITE

LIKE A CHILD THAT'S BURNT ITS HAND

LIKE A CHILD THAT’S BURNT ITS HAND

Like a child that’s burnt its hand experimenting with matches,

testing your sympathy, suffering in its innocence,

to see if you understand there are rattlesnakes

under the rose-bushes, and they both have thorns,

as the moon sheds its scales on the lake

that turns them into feathers when it’s in

the right mood, kisses the burn and makes

it better, as if your lips were two scars coming together,

I don’t cry out to the fixed stars anymore

thinking anyone’s there to take notice of the hurt.

I don’t turn women into mothers with me

as their only child. Black roses no less

I don’t bring them bouquets of bladder wort.

If a woman isn’t far seeing enough to spot me

in the crowd like the Hubble telescope

toward the oldest, fastest, darkest galaxies

she’s just a mere window to keep the cold out

and let a little light in when there’s light to be had

in the middle of winter. Her eyes don’t

touch me dangerously, there’s no creative mystery

in the way she speaks to me like the Pacific ocean

in a storm or kingfishers flying all over the place

like flakes of halycon blue soothing the waves.

There’s healing in the left breast of the Medusa’s

most ancient body cells, and tumours in the right.

The antidote’s in the last crescent of the moon.

The Milky Way not the issue of mammary glands.

Who could look at a woman that way without

a heart of stone back in the Burgess Shale?

If she takes you for a lover, you’ve got to be equal

to the horror and the lust. You’re never going to find

a winged horse in a bird cage made for the heart.

Woman’s what beautiful about being fashioned of starmud.

There is no other image you were created in,

no earth, no night, no sky, no art, as the angels

stood around and marvelled at the names you gave her,

the metaphors you kept compounding into light

as everywhere she walked the Periodic Table of Elements

was set like a garden with underground rivers

and a candle of a firefly or a star to slay death

for a moment in the hourglass figure of the beauty of life.

She’s the crone, the nymph, the nubile witch,

the abyss, the dark mother you return to. She’s

water that burns like the fire of hot tears

in the shedding of the leaves, in the wedding

of her blossoms to a windfall of overjoyed orchards.

You draw a sword from the stone. She draws

a bell that mourns and celebrates your coming

and your going, a door on one hinge

like a lapwing that’s trying to distract you

from yourself as you try to square the round table

like a line you drew in the sand. Assessment hour.

You were lacking for the longest time weren’t you?

Draw a line in the sand. Dare the wind.

If she got the better of you, you didn’t give your best.

I’m not talking about slavery here. No

quisling metrosexual with gender confusion

who smells as if the cows just ate deadly nightshade.

Love is genderless and the law follows suit.

She’s Bellatrix in Orion. She’s the first sphinx

at Gobekli Tepe that we know of like a lioness

that does all the hunting, the bitch that leads

the wolfpack, or lures the barnyard dogs

with her pheromones lingering in the air

like low-hanging fruit the mutt can’t resist.

To be torn apart like a stuffed boy having a temper tantrum.

Hic sunt dracones and blood sports with the heart as a goat.

She’s three bells on the quarter deck and all is well.

The moon lies down on the water

like the Silk Road to a vocal mulberry bush.

And then the silence of a sandstorm coming

in the deserts of the moon blind as the stars

to the havoc they cause on earth. Unforseeable

circumstances that burn the bridges and filaments out

in the light bulb of a good idea. The wicks

and antennae, the lightning rods of a billion fireflies

all going off at once like ladyfingers

or a Gatling gun on the Sioux at Wounded Knee.

One moment you’re having tea with her

mending cracks in the cup with gold as if

you were repairing your own synarthritic skull

or a continent at a Chanoyu Tea Ceremony on Pangaea,

and the next there are volcanoes of dark matter

connecting the dots along a fault line

of separatist feelings that can read between

the gaps of the mountains on the moon in eclipse

like Bailey’s diamonds, hard and cutting as the mind.

She’s to be celebrated, if that’s at all possible.

She’s to be trusted like a muse not a precedent.

She’s to be feared like a blasting cap in a beaver dam

or the beginning of wisdom. She’s the dark mother

of her own inner child for the child’s sake.

She’s the healer of your scarred medicine bags

and she knows what herbs to look for like

silver green Usnea lapponica on the forest floor

as if the moon were in the corals and she made

a lichen tincture for a Zen tea totaller allergic to penicillin.

I owe as much to women as I do windows

and wide open night skies exotic with

Spartan stars culling the helots as the sun

does asteroids. They’ve taught me to keep

things to myself like the private life

of a sad mystery that isn’t trying to cultivate

an audience. Emotions deeper than poetry,

more radioactive than fish bleeding from their gills,

or somebody standing too close to the ricochet

of a rifle shot before the firing squads of the stars,

blind folded no less and not allowed to smoke

as the sentence was carried out against

the unwilling heretic for the good of his soul.

I have been untrue to myself to be faithful

to them. And I haven’t lived long or down enough

to regret it yet. A vow of silence doesn’t

echo in a nightclub, and the shadows in the mirror

put their fingers to their lips as if time

were creeping by like a sundial in love

with the moon on the far side of its dead seas.

And it’s not a matter of grace, not

a stray hair from the head of an imaginable

aristocrat in pursuit of an earthly excellence

by coming down off his high horse like a king

who lived among the peasants, so much as a way

of honouring what I’ve learned of love

and how binary stars learn to dance around

one another like a seance to the trines

and the first violins of an exorcism waltzing

with the willows down by the river

that doesn’t give a damn where it’s going

as long as it’s flowing seaward against its own current.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I CAN HEAR CRYING ALL OVER THE EARTH TONIGHT

I can hear crying all over the earth tonight,

sad children in the windows of their eyes longing for things

they dream of growing up to make come true,

fireflies in wishing wells the shadows drink from

on the moon where the spirit’s lost and found dwells

like a small glove shed like a skin of moonlight years ago

as we grew out of ourselves like shells of the dawn in the morning,

waiting for some flesh and blood human hand

to loop back like a habitable planet in its second innocence

and come and claim us like life on Mars again.

The return journey of the morning glory to unmapped islands

we set out to explore, each to our own star,

like the lifeboats of newly-hatched turtles running

from the cosmic eggshells of our abdicated crowns of creation,

toward the abysmal shore of our oceanic aspirations,

each of us enduring the transformative initiations

of our shapeshifting hearts on the thresholds

of the endless event horizons of the black holes and rainbows

that beguiled us with their joy and despair deeper

into the mirage of the music believing in this desert of stars

even here we could hear the mermaids singing,

and pluck pearls of enlightenment from the third eyes

of oysters open on the beach. Or the mouths of books

that had lost their place in the universe, left open

gaping in the sand at the incontrovertible signposts of the stars.

So many echoes from home you can’t help but lose track

of your soul sometimes along the way trying like the rain

to better the world like a green tree ring pinging

the heart wood of a petrified forest like a tuning fork

or a witching wand that might break into blossom yet

if only we don’t give up like grails and constellations

looking for the watersheds of the shining whether

they’re dragons that swallow the moon to bring the rain

or the bell weathers of irreversible delusions

that fill the abyss with the elixirs and love potions

of our intoxicating affair with our own laughter and tears.

Over the course of the intervening lightyears

the lost flightfeathers of many strange skies

under our wings, lonely prayers in the moonlit tents of the doves

growing like morning glory all over the childhoods

we abandoned like buckets beside the wells we fell into

like hourglasses of quicksand leaking out of ourselves,

like stars from the perfect bodies of contiguous time and space.

We’re exalted in the midst of our humiliations. We’re humbled

by the excess of our celebrations. We ghost dance against

the gathering thunderclouds of preeminent war

like a guild of sacred clowns and shepherd moons

on tour in protest against the bulwarks of gravitas

enslaving third world planets, and for a time, our hearts

feel like angry strawberries glowing in the starfields

as if Aldebaran had just blue-shifted toward the spiritual life

of the Pleiades, and were young again, the red flame

of the poppy in its blood that dreams of sustaining

and renewing life, even if it be just the tender green placard

of a leaf unfolding in the ashes of our urns, one

shy tendril of morning glory seeking the light

in the terrible stillness of an implacable abyss,

we are made young again, clear again, by the gusts

of a moody, blue muse of emotional hydrogen

flaring up in us like the inspiration for goblets and fountains

of cool white flowers hanging our bells and trumpets

like music growing all over the cedar hedges in the early morning.

Can you listen with your eyes? Can you see with your ears

how the ghosts of the stars walk the earth at night

in the flesh of flowers blooming like chicory along the roadside

in the blue irises of the eyes of September, or in gardens on the moon

left untended by the gentle rains of our imaginations

for more childhoods than there are watermarks in the heartwood

of the tears it took to get here like rootless trees

spreading across the earth like an unplanned pilgrimage

of exiled immigrants returning to the ancestral shrines

of their prophetic skulls burning like prodigal stars

in the spacious windows of our visionary homes?

Realizing at last, if nothing else from our insights into life,

the starmaps of the fireflies at the headwaters of our source

aren’t bounded by the hearthstones of our wandering hearts

where the vagrants lay their heads down at last

on the hard pillows of the moonrocks they brought back with them

to dream of breathing new life into the lost atmospheres

of their childhoods returning like the lyrics of the nightbirds

to a wheeling mobile hanging like a windfall of planets

and dancing apples from the rafters and boughs of the ceilings

that couldn’t keep the lid on the toy boxes of their bedrooms

or the hoods on the marvellous third eyes of the falcons

perched on the tree limbs of their telescopes in the corner

trying to see into the dark as far as the wingspan of their light will let them.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.

The stars were dazzling through the tops

of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings

like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight

on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake

in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet

as ancient as the wingspans of the stars

I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines

in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand

to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan

laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram

as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent

like the feathers of the highest weighed

on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam

of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps

in your eyes without seeing the blueprints

of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry

celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars

that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires

trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers

in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth

I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice

when you reached out and touched my skeleton

like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy

on the petals of the roses in your blood

I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life

like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell

for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me

or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse

that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did

the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,

trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets

in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood

I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way

to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,

like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear

the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea

handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs

so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels

and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers

at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon

where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts

of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies

bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken

and left the rest to the silence to explain because

it never took any of your dream grammars long

to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth

to say something when I realized immediately

my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat

like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared

to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed

the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire

and leaving me your spirit to follow suit

as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing

into the religious art of two wavelengths

of healing serpent fire entwined around

the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking

pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae

getting ready to put some English on the planets

in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking

the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes

of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds

of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss

from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE  

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

THE LONG, DARK NIGHT

The long, dark night, more anthracite

than bituminous. And one star, alone,

fierce above the town, burning, as a jetliner

blinks its way down to landing in Ottawa.

Pythagoras’ transmigration of souls

in the body of birds, Iranian angels

with lives like messages for loved ones

and strangers. But I’m deep in the valley

where the Algonquin and Ojibway

got here first, and the Canada geese, though

they’ve flown away, bear the deceased

after their bones are dust to the south

and the west of the dawn they watched

lest they forget where things rise again

and set, through the eastern doors of

their burial huts as if death were a kind of love.

Samhain, soon, Festival of the Dead, witches’

New Year, All Hallowed Eve, where the dead

are allowed yard time free of their isolation cells,

or wherever the waterbirds took them,

ventriloquists behind the mesh of their

electric veils, the hand of the living

pressed against the hand of the dead,

let the witches jump naked through

the sun at midnight, half way between

fall and winter. Let the prophetic skulls

whisper something old on the nape of poetry.

Aldebaran and Capella to the north, one week

until the Pleiades breaks the horizon,

the moon and Jupiter rising in the east

after midnight through the denuded trees

in the park. Perfectly still out, not

a human in sight if I don’t put the emphasis

on myself. Just me and the streetlamps

and the last of the flowers wondering

what’s happening to them as their dyes

are charred by the frost like a bonnet of warpaint.

The more I study things as I get older,

common things, obvious details, the more

I am estranged by my own knowledge.

The leaves are making silkscreens

on the sidewalk. And what I thought

I knew, I’ve shed like the last skin

of the moon’s original totem before

I go into hibernation like a wavelength

with cold blood. A red shift and then oblivion.

More calm than morose, there’s not much

left to lose. The flames of the daylilies

have all been snuffed and they’re up

to their candleholders in the leaves

of yesterday’s fires like a brown out

of a dragon in a crematorium, a pyre

trying to make its bones disappear

in perfect combustion, not a scale

left unincinerated, dust to dust, ashes

to ashes in the subliminal holocaust of the heart.

Things pass, things perish, things die away

like a woman back lit by a window

more than once. I carry on to nowhere

I know I am, not in the mood to stare back.

I’ve made this town the nave of my spoked wheel

of birth and death for the last thirty-five years

writing and painting the mindscapes

of the tourist traps that think they’re here to fish.

I’ve hot waxed and laid my life out

like a glossy brochure without a computer app.

More the picture music of the way things are

than a photograph or an advertisement

to sell you terra firma in the winter

than starmud that will flood you out

in the spring when real estate begins to thaw.

I haven’t exaggerated the longing

of the nightingales or hermit thrushes

that sing unseen in the woods at night

with more hope than I have that something

will answer them back out of the pitch-black abyss,

for reasons of its own. The La Brea tarpit,

or a nest egg quilted in goose down like

moonlight, or hobby farm wives cutting

patches out of a working starmap gone

at the knees, with too many black holes in it

to mend anymore, the sail of the pirate

fired upon like a mailbox at the side of the road,

commemorated as the death shroud

of a colourful bedspread empowered

like a mandala to lead you astray

by following your dreams wherever

they may lead, a heritage cemetery or buried at sea.

Or maybe, if you’re nocturnal and rustic enough,

just roadkill somebody put a blanket over

so you didn’t have to see their face

or the shock in their eyes this isn’t such

a petty place. It compares with a tole-painted urn

from anywhere and the fire masters

scry by the rings and the cracks in your heartwood.

Things heat up in the winter, in the summer

they chill out by the doe-eyed lake caught

in the highbeams of the moon looking for

a blue number they can relay to the ambulance

on its way to pick the corpse of another workhorse up.

“Gonna die less than a hundred feet

from where I was born. How many can say that?”

Buried deep enough in his own starmud

the bush dogs don’t dig him up again

like grave robbers to see what a pharaoh

wasted his life on thinking it would distract

from the pain to build in stone what

he rocked from the starfields and tongue depressors

of the graveyard to see what he died of

without ploughing his body up like a tractor

gone crazy on the moon he seeds with cattle corn.

Or the mad farmer they found sowing the woods

holding onto the tail of a huge black bull that led the way.

What do you think? Is there as much moisture

in the soil at the new as there is at the full moon

because gravity pulls the tides one way and then the other

under the influence of the dreams of a sleeping child?

Is it a boustrophedon or a labyrinth? Is it a good time

to plant new ideas like stars in the dark matter

that clings to our rubber boots like the heart

of something that has remained stubbornly true to us

without making a big fuss about it? Or not?

PATRICK WHITE