HOW DO YOU SAY GOOD-BYE TO FLOWERS
Day three: this poem took me off me off
my leash
and let this junkyard dog go for a long
unlinked run.
Medicine for the heart like the howling
of a wolf pack
of shepherd moons driving some
breathless elk into deeper snow.
If you like driving a long periodic
highway
without a lot of pitstops along the way
alone at night,
with your highbeams off driving by the
light of the moon
reflected off the fields of the snow
then read this.
If you like laying rubber on the scaly
backs of asphalt rat snakes,
like a vehicular delinquent you have
been warned. Proceed at your own risk.
I’ve seen the fangs and been wrapped
in the coils of the moon
like the old in the arms of the new
like the deathmask a total eclipse.
Forgive me if this tumor on my brain is
trying to develop a voice of its own.
I think it really is. This must be
the crone phase of the moon
muttering sacred syllables to herself
on her ancient widow walk
I’m trying to understand like the new
sibylline grammar of oxymorons
she keeps repeating over and over
like mad mantras under her breath. lol
How do you say good-bye to flowers, how
do you bid farewell to the wind? Hearts
that
have lain dormant in the loam of my own
for so long, beginning to put out roots
again.
Death germinates as artfully as the
rain.
Nothing more touching than some blue
cornflower
an unnamed Neanderthal threw into the
grave of a child.
And the stars that are going to
overlook you
for millions of years to come, will
they remember
how you once shone for them like a
nightwatchman
in imitation of a starmap making its
rounds?
Last night at four in the morning
shaved my head
like a Zen monk to make it easier for
the scalpel
just graduated from film school to make
a biopic
of the tumor in my skull, to see if
it’s the malignant
villain of the play or the benign hero
of the day.
Learning to love more intimately things
I never
really took for granted as the blue of
the background
shifts into the longer wavelengths and
shades of the infrared
of the dead. X-rays can’t tell the
full story
in a still, one frame short documentary
of what
I’m seeing. Don’t care who gets the
credit at the end.
Death is a nameless place that has no
reason
for being but that the living give it
in their mind’s eye.
It’s got its muses, too, who would
have thought?
They can inspire you like a creative
memory and then
make you cry just like the Thracian
daughters
gathered around the magic circle of the
housewell
on Mt. Helicon do like the witchey
phases of the moon
that binds them to the earth like a
single boundary stone
removed from a cemetery trying to make
more space
to move around in like a ghost in a
coffin
that’s lived too long in the
underground cramped quarters
of the catacombs of the spiritual
slumlords.
Three phases of the moon. Maid, wife,
and crone.
Easy to love the first two, and I have,
but the last
when you’re alone together with her
makes you feel
twice as alone. Something about the way
she wears
too much perfume. Not ambergris, but
the sickly sweet
stink of death she derives from flesh
and bones.
Man pushing an old woman in a
wheelchair backwards
as she holds on to his arms. Who says
people aren’t kind?
As I myself have said from time to
time. They have
their moments, so beautiful, simple and
sublime.
Death scraping the patinas of
lightyears off my eyes,
detoxifying the tainted pollen of the
stamens
of the flowers so they can bloom in the
creation and cremation
in the sky burial funeral homes of
their favourite constellations
of their original beauty again, and the
honey isn’t
laced with the genocide of bees. I can
feel
a fresh breath of air making the
bellows
of my lungs pumping the ashes of old
starfires
to a white heat again of an urn being
baked in a dragon kiln
of a heart of starmud cooking in the
sun
and the unheralded goodness of a gust
of oxygen making a startling impression
on the tumor that thinks it’s the
star of the show
when it’s just a lamp-post compared
to the starmap
that’s presently rearranging all my
myths of origin
into something to pilot this life boat
with
as if you were trying to navigate the
shoals
and the rocks in the narrow channels of
experience
expressive of this beginning of my end
as if
I’d been cut adrift to drift for ever
like the cinder
of a nightbird with a spark in its beak
it stole
like fire from the gods like a burning
twig of peace.
Nevertheless I’m going to try to
befriend it
like a child that’s been engendered
out of my own
flesh and bone. Give it a name as soon
as one
occurs to me that seems as true to me
as my blood,
blue or red. I’ve always been true
blue
to my own death since I first
encountered it
at nineteen when my daughter was first
born
and I was introduced to the accepted
far and no further limits
of a moment of my own mortality when
she fell ill
with a cold I couldn’t suffer for
her. And
God knows how I tried in a flash flood
of tears
to take the pain from her and make it
my own.
Maybe that’s a specious mode of
spiritual insanity
to keep trying over and over again like
the same old defeat, but I know enough
about science,
and the rules that it goes by, that if
I throw it up
a hundred times and it makes a rule of
coming down
there’s no empirical implacable
reason
the hundred and first it wouldn’t
just keep going
like a habitable planet looping around
the sun,
the impossible long shot that made the
grade
against the odds, this heap of dung and
flowers
that has so long taken hold of my
heart, and now,
maybe these tumors, like the great
blessing
and curse with its hands around the
throat
of the bird nesting like a poet in the
chimney of
a demonically inspired poet, a
beatifically
burning madman hoping heaven still
prefers
an insane man to a saint who says he
knows
fanatically what it’s all about. And
throws his tears,
when he cries like acid in the eyes of
a young girl
who’s trying to learn to read for
herself
the difference between a compassionate
asylum
and a cherry-picking hotel that keeps
everyone else out.
And she’s the young girl leading the
blind prophet
around by the hand, until he learns to
see in the dark
whichever way he turns, shines, shines,
shines
like a lost star you find at your feet
like a dime as your heart
shouts out eureka like a supernova that
can be heard
galaxies away, tree rings from the
heartwood
of a rootless guitar, resonating out
like a prayer bowl
or the fossilized choirs of ancient
celestial spheres
singing quietly to themselves like
poets putting out
the laundry so the neighbours don’t
see
how much dangerous happiness stained
the sheets
last night like lovers leaking out
themselves like waterclocks
the angels and the demons both tell the
time by like the Big Dipper,
echoless valleys in the picture-music
of the rain,
orbitting in the unbroken circles of
its longing
like a nightbird singing the beauty of
life
in spontaneous, effortless synch with
its pain,
prisoners lead out in the yard of their
isolation cells,
malignant or benign, to get some long
overdue exercise
like the enlightened shriek of a blind
insight into life
there’s an infinite number of eyes
looking back at you
like wild flowers in the starfields of
the living and the dead
blooming like dragons and fireflies,
lightning, clouds, and rain
rooting in the dark matter of a tumor
in the starloam,
foam, mud, surf, froth (that’s for
you, Elijah)
of the brain, choose which bough of
solitude
you can sing best on, with good
acoustics,
whether it be the stave of a green
branch, or a dead.
Who knows? Que sais je, sorry
Montaigne, because I don’t want
to appear more rustic than I actually
am, when I tell you I love you
and I mean it as much as any woman I
ever said it to,
I don’t know, I really don’t know,
and should probably be
the last one you’re talking to like a
death bed confession
or three bells and all’s well in the
mind of an eyeless
nightwatchman who fell in love with the
stars when he was
the boy he still is who’s trying to
look after the man
he always wanted to be like a seeing
eye dog
with more than a passing acquaintance
with
the fire hydrant observatories on this
beauty mark
of a world like the same dot Hafiz once
saw
on the cheek of a young slave girl with
a bouquet
of black holes in her hands that were
worth more
than all the oceans in the roses of the
Ruknabad
and all the gold of India or the Mongol
capitol at Samarkand,
including their thorns, and crescent
moons, fangs,
claws, blood red in nature all the way
through
not just in its teeth and claws, you
can’t leave
the heart out of that equation and
expect to outdo
the speed of light with thought and
emotion,
the pulse of light in the night nosing
around
like some unknown predatory mammal
rustling
the autumn leaves like a black squirrel
with
the scorched planet of a black walnut
mythically inflating
its cheeks like two bubbles that that
think they’re drowning
coming up for air in the medical
nostrils
of this anaesthetic ice age riding its
own ice floes
like the circus polar bear of this
planetary ball balancing act
on the edge of private and public
extinction,
this coma of a candle that blew itself
out in the night
like that famous Zen master, who gave
his house of life
guest a lantern he could see by, and
then, just as he was leaving
snuffed it out as if to say I’m going
to give you
a gift as a token of my love for you by
tearing the eyes
out of your head empowered by fireflies
of seeing,
beautiful as they are, and put you on a
power grid
of galaxies that can see like a hundred
million
solar panels that see far, expansively,
omidirectionally
deeper into the dark until it begins to
efflorescently shine
in the spooky, beautiful eyes of the
ghosts
that arise like smokey sirens from
ashes of the firepits
the phoenix in its plumage of flames
and the witches
and the dragons jump through like a
bridge that’s burning
behind behind them like a rite of
passage for a sword
that went through the forge on the moon
like the tongue
of a plough turning the farrows of a
forgiveable and forgiving
planet over in the orchards of the
pygmy apple trees
the mermaids are trying to save from
drowning
in the low valleys of the spring thaw
by calling
out to them in this nebular fog from a
small hill
no bigger than a tumor or the pulse of
golden door lock
of skulls, hardknocks and rocks that
were thrown
first like the moon through the windows
of the people
who live in glass houses without sin at
those
that live according to their holy book
of starmaps
like sinful chandeliers in the Pleiades
of the water palaces
in their own mindstreams weeping for
the beauty
they can see through their tears like a
clear seeing night
in a long hall of surrealistic circus
mirrors coming at you
like the headlight of a c.p.r passenger
train
loaded with the abandoned baggage of
the last
pilgrim to pass through on his way to
some unknown shrine
he’s never heard of, but especially
these days
makes him get out of the way of any
night that doesn’t
shine from the inside like the first
magnitude heart
that’s been following him all the way
to guide him
past the snarling guard dogs that have
chained themselves
like Blake’s mind-forged handcuffs to a mythically inflated
ego delusion of a birdcage of the voice
coach
of a canary in the mine that sings like
a snakepit
of wavelengths in perfect harmony with
with the woodwinds that have learned to
cut
their own reeds to play in the band or
symphony
if you wish of this cacophonous choir
of chaos
of the cosmic background hiss hitting
all the notes
just right like the back up singers of
the distant stars
playing bird bone flutes all the
serpents are dancing to
like the picture-music in a jukebox
larynx
or crying at all the sadder parts like
the unbroken
circles and ripples of tree rings of
the liberated chandeliers
of their tears breaking over their
heads like the sword of Damocles
or the Pleiades rising again on the
dawn of a new event horizon
like a hareem or a coven of Spartan
girls, Helen among them,
or a cult of willows down by the river
at Samhain,
hanging by a hair, a prayer, a
one-winged killdeer of hope
like the cross quarter day between the
autumn
and the winter equinox looking into the
bone box
of the fossils in the Burgess Shales or
the La Brea Tarpits
of the light they’ve preserved like
prophetic skulls
rising to their feet like one more
dance with a moonrise
to breathe life again like innocence
into the birth
of the renewed virginity of the sun
without throwing
the baby of a beautiful, inhabitable
planet out
like the bathwater of a grave into the
lost and found
in the forlorn orphanage of unnamed,
unknown space
staring at me from the windows like the
unclaimed grace
of a food bank filling the heart like a
feast of unanticipated love.
PATRICK WHITE
