A DEEPER INTIMACY, A DARKER SHEDDING

A DEEPER INTIMACY, A DARKER SHEDDING

A deeper intimacy, a darker shedding. The night,

the light, the moon, though it’s raining out, the solitude,

the hum of being in a human oasis for the night,

the bestial safety of it, fifty years of trying to keep

the lights on, and now this. What could anybody make of it?

The night is getting naked more like a snake than a mermaid?

I like that. Let people participate in the creative process

so they can see I make the same mistakes they do,

though I doubt for as long as it takes to walk

to the end of the widow walk and back,

nobody ever seriously doubted that. Or they shouldn’t

have. Not for a nanosecond. We’re all lost

if we’re not all wrong together thinking we know

where we are when we say that. Where are we now

if not beside each other huddling in the dark sometimes

like monkeys in the trees of a hundred million years ago

safe for the night somehow. Despite skills.

And the moon large and ancient over the plains

and the burning hills beyond cooling their eyes

in the weirdness of the hallucinogenic air

somehow seeming more clear than it usually does.

As if it just had to break through one more window

and the moon was outside running off somewhere

with Ryokan’s thief. This time he left the window open

for keeps. Things are never going to be the same.

Nothing is. Ever. Never. Forever. At least the warrant for all this is

not by my hand. I didn’t thresh myself. But I can’t

even be too sure about that. I wouldn’t put it past me.

I don’t trust my own deviousness. I’m a clever boy.

A Taj Mahal moment of quiet when the eclipses

go to sleep among the waterlilies on black starmaps

that smell and stain as if they contain the great mysteries

of life in their veins, but they’re quiet about it.

I see the moon on dark sapphire water, and the colour

of time in the mysterious peacock blue that’s letting

just a single one or two stars shine through,

and you don’t know what it is, and it’s the kind

of thing you wouldn’t say anyway to judge

by the way it puts the fingertips of the silence

and solitude to your lips and says, hush, can

you keep a secret? And I say, yes, I believe I can.

And another veil fails away like we’re getting somewhere.

I can see the eternity in the mystery since this space

has been here, and though seldom this clear, it does

happen out of nothing and nowhere, here

and lightyears away. Sharp. Radiant. Breaking. Emergent.

A spear to the heart. You fear this angel. It burns hot.

Sears your soul irreparably with blessing and fear.

I think of it as holy at times. At least as close as it seems

I’m ever going to get. But when I’m real clear,

as it seems I am now, I don’t think of it as anything.

I watch and I watch and I watch and I watch

until the bloom is off the light and then I make

my way through the night as best I can

like a very solitary creature at heart who doesn’t mind

knowing there’s something there so essential

and imperiously beautiful with no intention to be

but you can’t say what it is that haunts you

for a life time looking at this. It escapes you

like the golden fish in the pond at night. Quietly

firewalking their lives out in the waters of life they are

like a candle in a shrine that doesn’t know who it belongs to

but shines anyway, adds its firefly to the stars, and burns on

as if it were born with a million mirrors for eyes

and one, only one, the dark one, where everything abides.

PATRICK WHITE  

SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

SLOW DOWN, SLOW DOWN

Slow down, slow down, look into

the golden eyes and crystal skulls of your soul.

No frenetic redshift, or the blue end of the spectrum

will think you’re stealing its thunder, stepping on its Texas toes.

Blue is an asp. Red is a king cobra that passes like a river

into the grass, but you know it’s there,

and you walk tentatively and you walk slow.

As if you’d just made a truce with

cause and effect, one and zero, or the hydro lines

up at Fernleigh buzzing in the rain where

they crossed the lake with no other music than this

hiss, on a musical stave on which no birds sang

like one of the signs of the last days in ibn Attar’s

twelfth century way of looking at things.

That’s a topic worthy of longer wavelengths

of thought, but we won’t go there until we hear

what the doctor says Friday after high noon

like a Gary Cooper movie walking out

into the bleak, bleached street of the sunshine. Draw.

Pow. Pow. Two tumours with one shot. I think I counted wrong.

Gave them names the other night. Scream and Silence.

Kids of my own. I’ll do my best to treat them right.

Gives a kind of classy ring to their names don’t you think?

Demonic personic psychodynamics of the mind

embodied like Romulus and Remus at the founding of Rome.

How many eagles is it going to take this time?

Two gods on earth, confusion in heaven, and a house

or a skull divided against itself like the cotyledon

of a scarlet runner cannot stand. But nobody

told the seeds that as they climb toward heaven

on their own flames up the axis mundi of the world.

Three poles of triune identity, more like a small fire

that’s catching on its own way, than an auto de fe

that’s going to bring my urn of ashes to heel,

o yes, o yes, but I’m going to keep my spurs on

like Aldebaran and Antares and Betelgeuse.

I’m a three spurred cowboy because I don’t want

to leave my third eye out of this, and every star in the sky

deserves its own eye, like children growing up

deserve a bedroom of their own. A place to run and hide.

Be alone with the Alone. As Plotinus called it.

Crazy mystic. Took himself way too seriously.

But then, again, he had to for the longest time

like a mainspring in an alarm clock until

he hatched it like a koan with a hot red egg

in its mouth. A musket shot. Anachronistic worlds in collision.

Not taking a meteor shower like a combination in the corner

looking for an extinction event among the right crosses.

But Scream and Silence seem to be getting along

with each other these days. Maybe I’ll hire a baby-sitter.

Go play for awhile. Too many farewells in these fingertips

that have been touching the world for the last time

to see how that feels, though I fear these dress rehearsals

like trampled grapes fear rumours of wine laced

with mushrooms like the moons of the Eleusinian Mysteries

on the edge of the wheat flood of Dionysus

dropping tiny spores of ergot in your drinks,

and out of control stampedes that trash your mind,

or the King of the Waxing Year fears body parts,

or Monsanto genetically modifies the crops.

Wonder what the moon thinks of that? And the almonds

and the bees? They must be freaked out by now.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M JUST FIGURE SKATING IN THE MOONLIGHT REFLECTED OFF THE SNOW

Day eight:

I’M JUST FIGURE SKATING IN THE MOONLIGHT REFLECTED OFF THE SNOW.

I’m just figure skating in the moonlight reflected off the snow.

I’m not a Kufic cursive script of blades trying to show off

because I’m not allowed to idolize myself in images.

Melodically, because I need to breathe the air

against my face like a woman’s hands taking pity on me

like a picture frame that enhances the scene

like a rung up from a postcard in the hierarchical

structure of things. It helps to move as freely as you can

while you’ve got the chance. I’m trying to.

Besides it’s beautiful to be out here in the cold at night

as if I were a Russian figure skater alone on

the Ottawa Canal, wondering what she’s doing now back home,

alone, alone, alone, you see, Ottawa’s still got a ghost

of a hope of a poet laureate and the rest of that crowd

is way too entrepreneurial for me. I was busy. But

I never carried a stockportfolio of a bibliography

like a bill board around in my arms to scare people

to a restaurant I liked or a board room I didn’t.

I was busy. But I wasn’t busy, busy, busy. Guess.

They’re poisoning them these days. Collapsed Colony Syndrome.

Hey, this might be a tauromachia, if it weren’t for the fact

it’s only the moon listening to the rasp of her blades on the ice write poetry.

Ice age runes. My own demotic. Is my dream

grammatically correct enough? I know it’s got typos.

And sunspots of cancer on its lungs like the spotted

trout lilies in spring, or the ash spotted sacred clowns

in a crouch at a Sioux ghost dance, way, way off

the reservation where all I’m doing, I swear to God,

is trying to keep my eighty-eights straight as figure eights

on the figure skates of a Moebius infinity sign

I learned in calculus a long time ago

when I thought it was curvaceously sublime

and wanted to know more poetically who she was.

I keep wreaking my neck trying to twist and turn

to see how she can manage to do that as if it were

no trick at all to reality like a bowtie firecracker blasting cap

I don’t mind I stepped on so much if it means I get to see her skate.

Muse or moshpit underneath it all. Anyway, she’s gone.

And I hope we get the chance to sit down one day

and talk about everything under the sun and the moon

full, not empty like this firepit of a happy face

someone put on a pentagular tab of bad acid that looks like

one of my pills. As if Dracula were buried under it.

And who knows? Maybe he is. Let him sleep in awhile.

He’s had a long night of syringes and knives

and spoons that jump over the moon because it rhymes.

Push off, on one leg, as if I were a swan in some other

summer triangle far away from here I saw once

at Blue Skies rise above the trees in the shadows away

from the midway of the stage in the great gulf of darkness beyond

that makes me think I’m a little tiny tintinnabulum of a man

going ding, ding, ding, like a heartbeat in a great symphony

that’s swept away by the first violins of the wild irises

rising to the crescendo of a bouquet they had to fight for

as if somebody had just given it to them for free on their grave

in case, you never know, they made need a spare pilot light one day.

Look at those swords. This isn’t Cincinnatus in a rhetorical painting.

They’ve been to war. Those aren’t feathers. Maybe the talons

of a terrible bird. But I wouldn’t fall on one if I were you.

You might hurt yourself without meaning to.

I stroke my cat under the chin as she looks at me

skating back from the kitchen in a ridiculous image of myself

the way I like her to, on the futon, uncoiling herself

like a bucolated curl of an eddy on a river stretching out

from a warm sleep in the amber satisfaction

of being happy and at peace with herself and me

and life for awhile, three bells, all’s well, get back

to your dreaming. I’ll call or fall if anything happens.

How many cats I wonder have walked beside humans

like this as undemanding companions who want

something all the time, but you don’t mind,

because the way they ask it of you makes you rejoice

in being alive to give it them as if it were a great privilege

bestowed upon you to be needed by another living enttity.

And you know what? It is. Not drastic. Not plastic.

Refreshingly simple and ordinary like oxygen and bread

were meant to be originally, poppies and wheat

and figure skaters and cats waking up from a nap.

Like the way I turned that corner? Watch this. How’s that?

Not catastrophic images of the dead, but life going on as it is

to astound you with the moves it can make when your heart jumps

and you risk the double-lutz and don’t care if you fall flat on your face.

Happens to pancakes all the time. Buildings, too, I hear.

That were once able to leap over themselves in a single bound.

PATRICK WHITE

FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

FEEL LIKE A BIG RED ENAMEL BILLBOARD

Day 7: Little shakey this morning. I think it’s the meds

they’ve got me on. Corduroy road. Is that close to Tobacco?

And typos, swarms of them, blackflies

flying into my eyes and mind like cinders

and space capsules and moths in degenerating orbits

As I am. Caw, caw. Death’s firesticks.

I think I’ll make a kite out of them as long as I can.

Decamethsedone. if you say it fast enough

it convincingly sounds like a train coming your way.

This is the drug that sobers me up when

I firewalk to the other side of the moon, and this

is the drug that keeps me from throwing the last one up.

An angel who saved me from a month long Mafia of migraines.

But this tumour is acting like a competitive poet

in my brain who’s ferociously mad at me

for being the older, better published poet

and I am, at least for the next little while

or he bumps me off he can, and he can’t

and he never had to but he doesn’t know it

not just yet, that dawn is sometimes grey

as a religious order of cigarette butts, and that’s ok.

It can’t always be catacombs, urns and Auschwitz.

And I don’t mean that at all casually. I say it with respect.

Thank you. Thank-you so much for teaching me

what I’ve really never been able to quite as

convincingly learn from myself before

and this isn’t emotional baby oil I’m smearing

all over your heart like a mirror in the shape of your body

that was once the universe. I really mean it.

Or maybe you like the oil better. But either way

I’m trying to let nothing ever come between us

so I’m writing this right out in the open

where the lightning likes to play with arrows

from a war bonnet with Druids of mistle toe

like the streetlights on Douglas St. In Victoria.

God, a I miss that seagull now. That’s natural. And human.

Which is what I want to be with you, not

Heartbreak Hotel, or Hill or bone box at the end

of an equatorial meridian that once a year

kisses the skulls at the other end of the hall

on the forehead like a long shot with a cue ball

of prophetic skulls tucked in for the night. The kids

are all right. But if it’s got to be that, too,

you don’t need to steal the Buddha’s purse

to buy the buy the Buddha’s horse. I’ve got

a bag full of gold in my head that sings

like a waterbed of rattlesnakes that strike like a rose

when their aroused. I’ll be the voodoo doll.

I’ll take the fall for all of us. I used to jump

bareback mares up at Beaver Lake, holding on

by the waves of their manes for dear life as I am now.

Thanks for unbeaching my heart like a dolphin

that’s washed ashore out of a storm of torn fishing nets.

I’m blundering through a labyrinth of life and death

on the internet, and I used to meet each of you

coming down the other side of the road

like Buddha Pinnochio whose nose grew longer

with every truth he told, but now you walk beside me

like a blood and shadow travelling companion

to God knows where (Allaho Allahim) and I’m

grateful, o yes I am, I’m so grateful for the company.

Feel like a big red enamel billboard I painted

once for a pizzeria to advertise out on Highway 7,

two three quarter inch plywood sheets, sticky

hot paint that sweats, I leaned up against

the abandoned four car garage, spiders and tires

and wrenches and spanners I didn’t have a clue

how to use, rusty fans from Precambrian summers ago

and boxes of nails and screws, baby snake fangs

that have been collected over thousands of years

like poisonous punctuation marks, or gravegoods,

in an abandoned hippie organically abandoned farmhouse

that left a lot of pickled fiddleheads and Jerusalem

artichokes ready for a market they obviously

hadn’t made it to in Perth Saturday morning in the parking lot

where half of everybody who gathers there

gets real capitalistically muncipally unmerciful about selling

their wares off as if they were trying to tempt Jesus in the wilderness

and the other half just come to see the Middle Ages,

have a pageant of fun for a change, get out, put a little

colour on their face that doesn’t look like warpaint.

Jerusalem artichokes in bloom O they were beautiful

that hot red afternoon when I kept picking the dragonflies

out of the paint with the tip of a very slim painting knife

to trowel them out like tumors in a red, Burgess Shale,

Vietnam all over again but with a jeweller’s wings

this time, and solemn, yes, but does that black wall

have to look like it’s assuaging your guilt as if someone just

stuck a Scotch thistle under your saddle or

a whole constellation of them like a bouquet of Velcro burrs?

No slurs here, no slurs, please, and if I’ve desecrated

anybody’s feelings and they’re beginning to hear

the roar of savage indignation as the crowd rises

to its feet to savage somebody for being who they are,

well, it’s happened before. (Interjection. A mind spear.

I’ve finally figured out what all these little signs

on the page like little black, squirming, alphabetic maggots are,

and I don’t mean this in a mean way this time, are really all about.

Hoofprints. Cloppitity. Clop. With Siamese fighting fish in them

for a day, a day, a day of life I’m a rocking horse

who aspired to Pegasian elevations that would give

Icarus a nose bleed of mystic fire from a dragon’s mouth

that spared the butterfly by mythic comparison.

And Perseus still carrying that old decapitated head

of a snakepit around as if he’d been part of the French Revolution

or Verinus in serial Rome after his wife committed suicide

to prevent him from committing an honour killing

sporting some kind of new Parisian hair do

with his arm stuck out like a stop sign on a schoolbus

in his Christmas tree saddle, or is it a life line?

Please somebody, help, though I say this more

in expectation of what shall we say, accuracy and art?

That’s got a way with it. We’ll go with that. Accuracy and art

as long as I don’t have to paint it on a billboard

that sings like a gravestone. Who’s this? The sacred clown.

Or spotted tanagers at a ghost dance. This is too much fun

with words for the picture music going through my head right now

to believe it’s madness, and even if it is, it’s

liberating and hilarious in a heartless kind of way.

Some cheap surrealistic circus is in town with its crumby parade.

And I’m drifting oarless too far off shore to make

the continent of a point I was trying to drive across

less obvious than a cattle herd, heard. There. That was a rimshot.

Now let me tell you about the darkness I was

swallowed by like a humid, hot, brooding mouthful

of silence as if it were about to chew on me like a cashew word

with a millstone hung around its neck for good luck,

as if I’d ever let any kind of luck fool me now.

I watched Star Trek. Just to say it makes me feel

all warm and fuzzily nostalgic inside to go on playing

Jim Morrison anymore. Hamlet’s too affectionate

and I like Jim Morrison too much to hurt his feelings.

Blackness, the black dwarf, the black hole, the black matter,

shows up like a bead in transit for an unknown name of God on my rosary,

the one Qasem brought me all the way back from Kuwait

that gate country to God knows (allah ho allah him) where but the way

he so gently and slyly gave it to me still feels good

after all these lightyears I think I’m going to honour

it with an eclipse and a clip of Canada geese out of a Tom Thomson painting

after he stopped painting them with a geometry set

as if he were engineering a highway instead of a snake,

a rosary, or the river of life as it makes it way south

in the bodies of birds I’ve been comparing to urns lately

because I can have fun with the image turning it

in the light of an image I think I stole from Georgio once

but I’m not sure any more and it doesn’t matter anyway.

He’s a priest. And I’m not so sure about all of that.

I take an interest. And drink deeply and passionately

out of the skull cup as a sign of respect for my host

and I’m still wheeling like a universe of Sufis

at the crossroads of my little galaxy here trying to follow

the golden ratio like a sunflower as if it didn’t do very well

in math at school. And I did. But not well enough in my own estimation.

I haven’t been like the old woman Muhammad mentioned

unweaving a strong spinal cord into a million

feeble nervous systems as I keep repeating to myself

my head’s still in the stars as surely as my feet

are still planted on the ground, though I don’t want

anyone to take that quite literally just yet. When

a galaxy’s not ready to bloom, you don’t take a crowbar

to open it anymore than you do a flower or a woman or a child

or pet. Do you get the point? The nebula

tinctured by a moondog of medical grass will blow away

on its path to ignition and the Pleiades will do the rest.

Stars, stars, stars. What is it about them that since that first

night on my mother’s back porch trying to see them

through the Macmillan and Bloedel pulp smoke

that was killing all the flowers I had stolen for my mother

like geranium fire from the gods. O my good

Promethean son. God, how I’d love to hear that now.

That fifty-seven years later I still feel startled

in my heart, soul, mind, body, eyes, blood

tears, joys, terrors, mystic and otherwise, as if

the clouds just broke without meaning to on

the Queen of Heaven’s face and she lifted one

of her veils, though their was no return address

on the envelope, she smiled, I swear to God she did,

into my face as if she really meant it. And I’m not talking

about a flying saucer here I saw one night, She really meant it.

Back to the billboard. To break out of this trance

and be lovingly numb in a weird human kind of way

about emptying the ashtray like a Virgo indulging himself

with a little comfort order in his life he doesn’t have to feel

sorry about like a scar that’s more of a doctor

than the wound itself in a surgical theatre that

keeps whispering in my ear this isn’t like having your tonsils out

and it’s a long chaos between here and the garbage can

I bought to throw them in one easy swing of the arm

as if I were some sort of gazelle of a outfield catcher.

Caught it. Cancer. The crowd roars. Foul ball. I’m out.

And London bridge falls to the ground exhausted after

an extraordinary effort to hold itself up as long as it can

as a tragic clown with a heart as honest as he can make it

thinking that might make a difference somewhere sometime

for somebody else like an old blossom of a baseball cap

that somehow fits them just perfectly like a gift from a stranger

or the gods, if you want to make more of it than

it really deserves, it’s just a baseball cap, for God’s sake.

O, ya, that stupid billboard floating around in mind

like a raft I’m still carrying around on my head

gerrymandered out of these scraps of life lying around

from last winter when I made my penultimate attempt

to get to the other side of nowhere and everywhere in particular

but here. Which is the ultimate ride. When it makes itself

vertiginously clear I’m not here, nor are you, we never have been

and yet this dream’s been swirling around us like a river of stars

that had to get somewhere just the same. Five miles. Left at the next exit.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I CAN HEAR THE SILENCE SCREAMING

I can hear the silence screaming. Space shriek

like a red-tailed hawk that’s just caught something

in midflight in a dark, starless, eyeless terrible night.

Talons. And a strawberry heart. How the stars

and the water eat themselves alive to stay alive

as long as they can, an urgent life boat with a plan

to make a sail out of a starmap and make port somehow

or even the coast of an island galaxy of consciousness

somewhere you can watch the smoke rise

from a fire too far away to answer like the snake road

of a melody line you’re teaching to dance

for your solitary amusement to counter act

your loneliness by imagining it doesn’t exist

by making everything take hands and dance, dance, dance

for rain in a dragon ghost dance in a pageant

of poetic calendars with scenic views of the moon

that scare you half to death they’re so eternally brief

and beautiful. Breathless, if the timing’s right.

And though I’ve argued with the clock my whole life long,

it’s never been wrong. Things happen when they should.

Don’t doubt it, the timing is immaculate. The planet

makes its transit, the stars break through the clouds

like seed germinating in the farrows of newly

ploughed starfields and the water birds come and go

like poets without reason on a waterclock of lakes.

I got to see that, and once like everything else

in existence is good for a lifetime of encores should

you ever want one like a postcard from the edge of nowhere

featuring the local flora and fauna. Beaver teeth and maple leaves

and wolves, wolves, wolves, forever to reassure the moon

somebody’s listening, and the valley has a voice coach

that’s going to help keep this all night one night one man

bandstand on the road to scare the ghosts away

with frying pans and kettle drums and prayer bowls

dialling a phone for an ambulance when the vigil ends.

If it ever really does. But that’s unconfirmable

at this subjunctive cross roads of what if what if what if

and the Sufis and the sundials have got their fingers

crossed behind their backs. Allah hu, Allah hu, Allah hu.

Love is nothing. Love is everything. Love is a beautiful

illusion that isn’t trying to get a point across as if

it ever had one to make in the first place. A scalpel of the heart,

with the heart of a jew’s harp cheese grater keyed out of old

unboiled, uncoiled guitar strings trying very hard

to be in tune with God, and the stars, and the music

of the celestial spheres weeping in the kilns of time

for the beauty in the tears of the tree rings of the rippling willows.

Eternal happenings. I remember the first time I saw

a pair of cardinals show up at my bird feeders in the snow

like two tubes of cadmium red outside my studio window

that could fly. And they did. Eventually fly away as

all things must. But they left me feeling I’d just had a visit

from the Vatican and it didn’t rust for once. And hasn’t since

or I wouldn’t have found a place for it like this in a deathsong

or more precisely, in a silo of a measure beside

in this medicine bag that hangs around my neck

all the way from Silver Lake to Smokin’ Eagles

in a labyrinth of backroads beyond the train tracks

on the high trestle bridge that looks like a hybrid

of a ladder and an aqueduct and a good place

to smash beer bottles on the rocks below as if

you were throwing fledglings and unwanted embryoes

off a peripetein ledge for genetic edification

and because you’re drunk and blundering and bored

and there are no more genies with train lanterns

swaying like bells at the side of the tracks

to wish upon anymore like falling stars and burning guitars

singing everybody’s national anthem in words

that were writ in lighter fluid by a phoenix with a broken heart.

Live up to any one of your poems just for once for one day

and a night in a patch of birches you like because

the way they let go of their leaves as if they were losing

their minds, but in a gentle shedding way

so every little waterguilding paddle of modest gold leaf

were enough for the moment, way more than enough

to squander yourself lavishly on the same budget

as life itself and live cooly and blissfully

like a blue moon in October among the locals

who know exactly when it’s time for the windfalls

to drop their heavy loads and take some time off

the graveyard midnight shift. What diff? As long

as the stars come out, and there’s always something

flying across the moon, whether it’s the urnbirds

of the Canada geese, or a passenger plane heading west

or an owl, or a bat, something you can’t identify, or a witch

as if you’ve ever come to understand what that word properly means

that makes you wonder if people up there

ever wonder if the people down here look up

as I have so often out in the woods, and wondered

who they are and where they’re going and where

we all come from and who gets left behind

to return back to the solitude of being

a human creature in the woods alone at night

wondering what it’s doing alive under the stars

and who moves on and on and on to the other side

of their eyelids to find it was nothing more nor less

than a return journey to their original perpetually

irretrievable innocence only with awareness this time

as if you’d finally found a way of watching the watchers

build their spider webs in space between two blades of stargrass

without anybody minding too much. As I haven’t minded

letting all the animals in the woods watch me paint

whatever they make of the way I work to celebrate them

over my shoulder as I’m walking away after a good day

of doing what I’m not still clear about, but do anyway

because it’s good to hand a flower to a star once in a while

in your mind. Make it a waterlily, deadly nightshade, or the black rose

of a burnt out galaxy that’s about to go supernova in symphony

with everyone with tintinnabulistic triangular enquiries

and say do you know what this is. Good heart health.

Even when you can hear the silence sceaming and space shriek.

Two birds and a lyre we’re all heading towards.

An arsenal of dreams toward a terminal cancer clinic ward.

A sword forged of silver Russian olives and moonlight,

an hour hand, not in surrender, but in tribute to the waters

that blooded it in the pulse of your heart for life and forever.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE'S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

THERE’S A BLUE FLOWER IN ME AND A BLACK DOG ONCE

There’s a blue flower in me and a black dog once

that lived like a big, black hole in the heart in Sirius.

Darkness is an engine. Darkness is a root.

Who knows what’s going to jump out of the hat

the stump, the boot? The cosmology of your guitar.

Set it on fire. See if there are any galaxies in it.

What’s happening to the music in that hole

besides giving birth to the universe because

a spiny little fish with a life line with the back bone

to light it all up was given the risk to live once

with no idea of what was coming after it

and everyone’s been dogpaddling in curses and blessings

ever since waiting for their ship to come in.

It does, one way or the another it always makes port

but you’re the dock, the long wharf and the short walk

that disappears to the end of the plank and over without a blindfold

to be keel-hauled on the hull of the moon like scalpels and calderas,

goblets of bone and prophetic skulls no one’s had

the gall to drink from in millions of silent years

the rudder, the wheel, the emptiness of the lifeboat on the shipwreck

you’re sitting in feeling like some ghostly mode

of foghorn and moonlight swirling all around

like a shroud that’s never had a tattoo before,

or the forearm of an embroidered pillowcase,

as if it didn’t have anything else better to do

than mope around a smoke dance with wet heartwood

cedar boughs in a tin bucket trying to smoke

the bats out of the attic like cinders of chimney sparks

scattering the ashes of a dead sister in a rose garden

as if it were raining somewhere deep inside you

like a calendar of tree rings that had a miscarriage

it almost sounds as if someone is crying

for a mortal loss that’s irreparable as a simple

potted cup at a Japanese tea ceremony that’s been

broken and mended with gold. Things get better. So I’m told.

But that’s something you’re going to have to

figure out for yourself. Is the water hot? Is it cold?

Will you ever forgive the dark for taking hold of your soul

until the stars came out like eyes in the night

that have been looking at you all along like a bloodstream

in that hourglass of stars every night before you go to bed

in a comforter you’ve made a friend of

until the real lover arrives and everything is splendid

as the dawn in the morning or an artificial moonrise

in the shopping mall of a Hallmark greeting card

you send yourself once a month like a death threat

or a loveletter you leave unsigned because, because, because

you’re endless but you know that you’re really not.

And that scares you. Scares me, too. Now let me tell you

about this big, black dog I had once. I let him off his chain

like chromosome with red eyes who could see in the dark

like an emergency exit sign and he hasn’t ever come back since.

And I don’t blame him. I miss him. Which is a kind

of peculiar sickness of mine I’m growing overly fond of

like a dog collar that’s as open and empty as Corona Borealis

for a blind seeing eye dog of savage indignation

probably out somewhere chasing deer through the woods

as if he were dark matter making constellations out his grave goods.

I shudder. And then I think of it all as a happy event in the end.

PATRICK WHITE

O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, THE WOMEN, MISTRUSTED SACRIFICE

O the women, the women, the women, mistrusted sacrifice,

who led me to the altar in a garland of stars

and left me to my own device to figure them out

which I never have. It would have been rude

to declare that kind of solitude resolved in your heart

and inside their urn and hourglass bodies

there’s a kiln of a firewomb and furnace weeping

like a window into God’s eyelids like a rose

with thorns they took out of a lion’s paws

as a simple act of mercy for that much wounded power

you couldn’t say in any other way if you weren’t

so rigidly contemporaneous, than flower, moon, claws.

Man is an abacus of prophetic skulls that have learned to count.

Woman is a rosary of infinite chakras and prayer bells

that plough the starfields when they’re melted down

into chandeliers and candelabra that have gone

witching for light as if there were a watershed of it nearby

or a housewell the grass has covered up like a veil

of green flames as if you just threw salt in the fire

that flared into a genie of apple boom and green leaves

then disappeared like an apparition nobody believes you saw once.

But you did. Like kleenex on the kitchen table

and the smear of red lipstick and the impression

of her lips as if she’d been kissing a bleeding snail

and then the darkness followed as she slipped

between the pages of the Burgess Shale like a loveletter

she decided by then not to send because it would be better that way

and you knew enough about women, at least

by the end, not to argue, but try to make a friend

as best you can. And watch how the river runs

your mindstream across your heart like a whetstone

that sharpens you up like a prophetic skull again

for what’s to come that there is to sing about

which is everything if you learn to sing it right to the end.

Tra la, tra la, tra la, like the live ones have forever sung

or whatever kind of kyrie eleison comes to mind

like water to your lips that tastes like distant rain

in a desert of stars she’s left you wandering in

as an adequate substitute for time when it grows sublime

fecundating the white mares of Libya in passing

like the north wind bringing the mail to Africa

like a million birds with a return address to what

she left behind her in a moment of sadness

when she looked into her heart and all the songbirds were uncaged.

Woman isn’t a sentiment. And man isn’t an adage.

But you’ve got to say it as if you crossed your heart

with a fire ax that a dragon set on fire like the house of life

in a crematorium that celebrates the great event

as if you really did live once and had a chance.

PATRICK WHITE