PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

PEOPLE, YES, PEOPLE

People, yes, people. Here comes a rush. A gust of stars.

People will break your heart and then they’ll mend it again

and if you’re lucky, they’ll mend it with a gold sunset.

Me, I like moonrises of the beautiful and mysterious.

That’s what I saw when I was looking through the windows

of a woman I loved as if I were staring straight into

the face of God, and the Queen of Heaven took another veil off.

Be nothing so you can be influenced by everything.

And I’ve always been grateful like the sea or an apple orchard.

I’ve been blessed. I’ve been cursed. I’ve avoided the obvious rhyme.

Most of the time came in through the backdoor but then

so does the moon like a dark, romantic, pale thief

returning Ryokan to his window. What does it mean?

Summations, anybody. Beats me. I don’t know.

I’ve doubted and affirmed, celebrated and cursed

it all my life as the only way I had of exploring it

because it fascinated me to watch my mind walking

its own waters with nothing to save or give away

but what it wanted to and when, fireflies of insight

into the significance of being alive to know it. It’s a gift

that found you on the threshold of the labyrinth

of morning glory you entered to learn to distinguish

the difference between a womb and an empty bucket.

Managed it yet? Or are you still working on eclipses

and sundials with occult philosophies of crickets

to their credits, or castanets by now? Chance it, lady, chance it.

Teach your skeletons how to danse macabre with you.

Sit around a firepit of prophetic skulls and watch the flames

as if it were your first visit to Stonehenge

or Orpheus were being dismembered all over again

by the brutal mystery of the women that he’s slain

deeper into life by going down into death

like a well that could sing to the shadows

under their breath like the waters of light and life itself

when the moon was making its way across the narrows.

It doesn’t matter. Get into it, her, him, whatever

gets you through the night as if it were special,

passionate, blameless, thin as the moon when

it’s playing Zorro with your heart and a masked raccoon.

This isn’t Venice. It’s a cosmic frontier. Conduct

yourself accordingly, walk like a human who cares.

O no doubt it isn’t all fireflies trying to make constellations

in the summer of white-tailed does stepping

out of the mist of their nebularity in the valley

into an apparition made of light. Beautiful. Don’t miss that.

Don’t deprive yourself of your eyes. And keep

the thorns on the roses, especially if they’re black eclipses

in a school for mystical mirrors that are learning

how to dance with columbines. Drink your own

blood out of the skull of the moon, and drink deep.

Let the night wear your bloodstream for a change

and don’t be afraid of the mysterious when a black

hole shows you your face in a dark mirror

and there’s nobody there you recognize. Smile

as if you were glazing the starmud bricks of heaven

to build a temple outside the the lion gates of Babylon,

or bulls if that makes you feel any better. Existential

effervescence. Keep it bubbly as a galaxy of quantum foam,

touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

with your fingertips forever full of farewell

as if the moon were putting her kids to bed and kissing

them on their foreheads as if they were silos full

of butterflies from worlds beyond born in the mouth

of dragon stars. And don’t be feeble about it.

Look it in the eye directly. Have the guts of an arrow

or a sparrow hawk. Make flying carpets out

of the yarn that unravels out of the mouths of lunar toothpaste

that gone’s mad with the taste of itself. Go crazy

but do it human way. Make love to each to each other

and I’m not even going to go there, but you know,

don’t you, you know how much silence there is

in a single, sacred syllable of water and fire and light

and the blue air overhead like an eyelid that just

got French-kissed by a snail that tracked in the Milky Way,

as if your mouth were a garden for thieves and nightbirds.

You hear that. I do. That’s you being a lonely waterbird

among the Lanark hills trying to convince the stars

you’re not an echo of anybody else you ever knew.

Walk beside a candle most of the days of your life,

and when the fire god comes to set fire to your orchid

show him what you can do with moonlight

if you wanted to, but you don’t, because you

just wanted him to see how silk can burn like ice

when it dances with its eyes as if it weren’t looking

at anybody else. Fail if you have to. Just

don’t be mean and mediocre about it. Fail

in a vast attempt to be more than you’ve ever been before,

fail trying to attain the unattainable forgiveably

so you help people on the same burning ladder

up the stars as if they were scarlet runners

with wild aspirations of becoming pilot lights

that put out to sea, full of awareness and dread

but convinced there’s something out there beyond

the starmaps and chandeliers that’s a dark mirror

that clarifies things as deep as you want to take them

seriously in a playful kind of way because I told you

earlier, touch it lightly, touch it lightly, touch it lightly

as the witching stick of a dragonfly on the lip

of a waterlily that’s just discovered

someone’s spiked the waters of life with starmud

and she’s terrified of how much it matters

exquisitely to celebrate the fact with praise

and unlimited joy, though later in life that

will turn into a background noise of cool bliss

summing it all up like a windfall of autumn

as if it’s never been as rich as this before.

Yes, the crows, the shadows, the matriculation

of perfection in the crone phase of the immaculate moon

that takes your breath away, like your life, your love

your wisdom and your ignorance of what it’s all about,

and leaves you with a mystery in a small black box

you haven’t opened yet to see what’s inside

the darkness that shines so you can see the light

and know for yourself if it tastes of fire and ashes

or sumac in the spring in the tender new plumage

of its flightfeathers to get out of the nest

like the sky burial of a starmap and see how big forever is.

PATRICK WHITE

BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

BUDDHA PINOCCHIO

The more he tells the truth, the longer his nose grows.

Buddha Pinocchio steps out from behind his slapstick

veils of paint and poetry to take his black clown masks off,

throw strawdogs on the fire now that the ritual

is over, everything tumours and black walnuts,

the desolate autumn leaves, hungry stray dogs

in the cold-hearted wind as I let my shadow lead

as if it were its turn for the first time in my life

and it seems fair, turn and counter turn, stand,

we’re waltzing and walking together as if we were

friends, Blue Flower, Black Dog, from years ago

I don’t remember when, but the dark, cold air

of farewell on my skin is a fathom more than

I wish to sink, and the lights of the hospital

don’t wink at me anymore through their skeletal

keyholes, and there’s no mercy in the window

with the x-ray geranium on the fire-escape

that isn’t an exit anymore from anything more dangerous

than this beautiful, beautiful world for all

its gruesomeness, trying so hard to think

of something more uplifting than good-bye

to me and my broken arrow of a shadow

out there somewhere, or is it maggots

and a poultice of leaves to draw me out of the earth

like a fever or a thorn of the moon from my dream?

The night doesn’t sing to me in its linear B

of stars. This is too eyeless. Where are the Pleiades?

A democracy of pulchritudes among the store front

mannequins. How lucky they are to not have

to feel their way through this with me. I never asked

for anything I wasn’t prepared to give back

full measure and a bit beside. That made them cry.

And I’ve almost kept my word. What do you say

to the people with Chinese lanterns for hearts,

everybody trying so earnestly to show you a way

out of this, as if you were a wounded emergency door?

Is this great poetry? I can’t tell anymore. It hurts

to go there as I see scalpels on my grave laid

like bouquets of wildflowers, poppies, starwheat,

and the laurels of abandoned changelings I forgot to bathe.

The art of life is long and brief. It’s true.

An arsonist of roses in a volunteer fire brigade

that seldom makes it to this house of life on time

for anything but foundation stones. The Taj Mahal.

The black one. The dark mirror. Waterlilies

and the moon. Unassuagable lovers building tombs.

But o the miracle, not how, not why, not when,

but that we are here at all. That we’re here, though

the firefly eludes us, though the lightning branch,

the strong rafter, the ladder walking beside us

like a shadow with one rung no higher than we can

lift it to save ourselves, though we meant to save

everyone else first. Dark shedding, I could teach

these leaves a thing or two about letting go

but I save it for another day that’s never going to come.

Let’s look at it that way. The quiet doesn’t stain

the silhouettes of the maple leaves reading yesterday’s paper

as if it were news of the day on grey, grey, grey cement.

It glows with a light that’s happily bemused with itself

but you can’t tell if it’s a candle or a tunnel or something else

nobody’s ever guessed before. And my body so full

of strangers trying to party with death in the nude.

If not now. When? There’s a new exactitude

in life and it’s got a friend with a scalpel

that looks like a crooked, little smile with a twist,

almost a clown with a smirk that’s pleased with itself

it’s done its work. It’s done it well. And it’s done it fast.

Could almost admire that if it were human.

Shining, yes. A motherlode of blind pearls

at the bottom of a hopeless sea of shipwrecks.

That’s not despair. That’s seeing it straight. It’s dark

out, less so inside, and I’ve passed by these windows

many times before. Life inside going on

like mystic crosswalks that have grown lazy

labouring at not believing in themselves enough

to make it shine, even when they cry like I do,

though it’s not required. The drugs have spliced me

into their circuitry to put a smile on the world

they’re not faking this time. No migraines

and I’m not wobbling like a drunk in orbit

as the violins take to the stage like Jerusalem artichokes.

Fiddleheads of death. From Kaladar to Calabogie.

It’s ancient enough to dance to for a man facing

his own exit, both doors open, with a silhouette of himself

projected ahead as if we both knew where

we were going in black cowboy boots with

bevelled heels and Texas toes. Life was

an arduous guest we taught to shut the cupboard doors.

O, more than that. O so much more than that.

I was a happy arduous passionate apple with a star

for a heart, believe I was, condemned to be demonic and blessed,

or silver Russian olive full of hermit thrushes and nightingales,

peacocks and stars, trying like the sea when it labours for the moon

to say it, page by page, leaf by leaf over the years.

Minding the shedding. Minding the budding. Minding the threshing.

Not minding anything at all as if it were a long lost art not to.

My light burned late into the night as if someone

were still awake, doing something, who can say,

he believed in as if the stars depended on him to get it right.

Reduced to what you are, black dwarf or supernova

in the galaxy next door, you drank eclipses

from the eyes of beautiful women who thought

they saw something in you worth living for awhile.

It was a gift not to have to convince them. And you didn’t.

The full moon, and the lake, and the farmhouse

and the stars, o yes, the stars and their apprentice wildflowers

with the winding road took care of that for you.

Animals in the night, wary of their severities on sight.

Not numb. Not resigned. Flashing a little attitude

at time like an angry star on the horizon

of a cold bath in your own grave with no one

to scrub your back again to get the dust of the stars

and the gardens and the flowers you walked among, off.

And the poems, and the paintings, all the craziness of love.

As if it mattered you didn’t know why or where.

You were there. And that was more than worth asking for.

PATRICK WHITE

O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

O WHAT DO YOU DO NOW?

Day 11: Thank-you for the sunamic outpouring of love and affection

I received from everybody yesterday. Plank after a shipwreck I could

cling to to keep me afloat, and, man, it felt better than a door. I’ve been

trying to respond to you each individually with a syllable of something real

and tangible behind all these pixels and bits. An indefensibly, imperfectible

human constituted of starmud, flesh and blood. Definitely a heaviness

going through all this. But one of the great, lingering sadnesses for me,

and it might seem small and trivial to someone who isn’t a Virgo, is

the compulsory neglect the disease imposes upon me in terms of

the energy I’ve got to spend on the poems, the rush, the intensity, the meds

they’ve got me on, the wonder, the horror, the intrigue, the death,

listening to a good, sensitive man who’s got healing in his blood,

it’s cellular, a calling not a career, the way I’ve got poetry in mine

as he’s trying to explain out of compassion how if the cancer

metastasizes to your liver it’s relatively easy to scrape that off

surgically, and it’s all bizarre and weird as you try to figure out

how some artist you can relate to, because he was you just a few

thousand million years ago, got the effect that he did in a small

painting above the clinically starched bed where they ask you to lie down

on the raspy clean sheets that feel as if you were sleeping with the bride

at a wedding of leaves. And you’re nervously, peculiarly jovial,

laughing at everything with Zhuangzi in the autumn leaves

that are shedding their way into eternity outside the soft lustre

of the small window that let’s you see the light as if there were

some meaning to all this you haven’t discerned yet, that might come clear

if you stayed calm and quiet, cool and continuous enough.

I have all my life given nothing less than everything all the time

to poetry. That’s what I am. A poet. So it’s never been charity

or heroic in my mind to do so, but a reflex inflection of my very nature

to be myself, whatever that really is, even if it’s nothing. What else?

And the way I’ve lived my life is precisely the way I want to live my death.

Giving nothing less than everything all the time to my art.

It’s my joy. It’s my immensity. It’s my intensity. It’s my heart.

Best part of me, in my estimation, if I can say it without colluding

with an ego delusion that’s on the verge, never known one

tentative day of life on earth when it hasn’t, of threatening to prove

to me, what a fool I am. And it might well win the argument yet.

But I’m the kind of seahorse that rides off into the moonrise,

not the sunset, fortunately born too stupid to be a cynic. So I go on

dooming myself to trying to attain the unattainable, knowing

it’s not something you perfect through your craft, but you might

just reflect a little bit of it if you get lucky, and stay circumspect

enough to slip under the fence.

Literally wrote myself into an oblivious stupor last night until

five in the morning, so I didn’t have to flip through the drastic

album of pictures alone in the dark, curled on the futon before I slept.

Knowing I needed sleep but couldn’t. And there’s an element

in writing all these poems that is undoubtedly therapeutic for

a person like me, but over and above that, there’s a poet like a nightbird

trying to pour his heart out to you without singing mere documents

of hysteria. So the poems, as rightly they should, ask a lot of me

and I give it to them to the best of my abilities. Zorro on a burrow

sometimes I’m sure. And when I’m not him, I don’t know who I am,

but it’s beautiful and fast. I’m watching the way it moves in the grass.

Fire alarm. Strange reversals of words and suffixes, swarms of blackfly

typos like learning to walk all over again, I’ve been sending good gangs

of outlaws after to hang them like a posse of mistakes. Think it’s

the pressure of the tumour putting pressure on my brain, or the effect

of the meds, and I’m sure some of it must derive from pure exhaustion.

Realized when I was wobbling my way up Wilson Steet the other day

like a drunk in a public place, to fill my first prescription, I’d been

consciously placing my feet as if I were following

the painted footsteps on a Fred Astaire dance floor

for eleven blocks, and instead of listening to the conversation

the crowns of the trees were having with the sky, all I was doing

was dancing with cement. Poor me. But just the same it’s

sad and frustrating, not wholly debilitating yet, to have to practise

a vigilance over these things that yesterday you didn’t have

to think about, it just came naturally because you’ve done it

all your life. I’m being honest with you here because there’s

no point to any of this if I’m not. So if you would be so kind

as to let me lean a little on your good minds and eyes to point out

a spelling error or a typo that got by me, I would be deeply appreciative.

Might seem like a funny favour to ask, but, believe me,

in the way I see things, it would mean a lot to me. And you’d

have my heartfelt thanks for it. You don’t want to go out in public

looking so cool with a piece of toilet paper sticking to your cowboy boot

like a comet from a bevelled heel. lol There. There’s an antidote

to an sos. I feel better already. So little time it seems to say it all in

but trust me, it’s all there in these one or two little sacred syllables

we rely upon to express what we really feel. Thank-you for caring.

And the way you touch.

O what do you do now? Sit here in the loveable deep shadows

of the mindstream with the other fish all over the world tonight

wondering if they’re a wavelength, a widow-walk, or a river reed?

Go tell a parachute from a milkweed pod to go find

a Monarch butterfly and try not to poison it if you can?

How much of this is a drug singing to you, how much is a tumour,

and how much is a man? Hard to assess, but I’ll

keep an eye on it for you if I can. Duress. Excess. No.

Let’s sit down on the ground somewhere and have a good laugh.

It should end in laughter, if the laughter really ends,

and to judge from the amount I’ve been laughing lately,

I doubt that it really does. You want a nice thought.

Try this. A demonic firely with the soul of a star in its heart.

Power with a switchblade knighting flowers. There.

That’s nice. Going to keep that. Like a pair of cowboy boots

I expect to be buried in among the waterlilies when I die.

Don’t want to make anyone cry. Want to make them laugh.

What else am I supposed to do with this? Laugh, laugh, laugh

at how silly it all is, and profound and eternally enduring

to have pulled this off out of all those atoms. To be

a human, I hope I have, among humans in the same lifeboat

of a heart that’s been calling to us for a long time now

from a foggy hill. Over here. Over here. Maybe we should listen.

Or what were the sixties all about? You soaked your jeans

in bleach all tied up in knots a little too long this time?

That was my seed-manger. This is my flower, though

that makes me feel a bit like a little teapot running off

at the mouth again at a Japanese tea ceremony where

they mend the cups that have fractured with gold. Wonder

if they can do the same thing with this skull I’m drinking from?

Here is my handle. Here is my spout. Aquarius

with all the stars pouring out as if somebody were

preparing a bath for someone they cared about.

The candle. The flower. The water and its shadows,

and the bubbles, yes, the bubbles that broke like hearts

of quantum foam, and the dolphin you look at

in amazement because it looks like a human that’s gleaming

naked in a bathtub as you add the wine. Nice touch.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

THIS IS ME BEING BEAUTIFUL

A mystic dimple in the middle of my chin.

Courage, the Arabs tell me. Hope I’ve got some.

This is a long, dark, strange, radiant journey

I’m never coming home from again. Pain. Pain. Pain.

And the night so quiet, and me in it like river fish

listening to the town breathe, cars out on the highway,

hush. You can just barely hear them now.

The rush of surf on asphalt. The interrupted silence.

The sweetness of life on earth as it sleeps,

and the trees I keep thinking about in Stewart Park.

The trees, lovely, the trees, even after

the ice-storm spoke. The trees. The trees. The trees.

And water and light and air as the chimneys

hold their seance, and the ghosts bite their tongue

whenever anybody’s talking about smoke. And fire.

Now that’s a mouthful. Almost as powerful

as a woman who’s attracted your attention like a star

you can’t name. And you’ve never, ever seen

her anywhere before. And you won’t again,

but she was there once, she was there, I swear

like wild rice in the moon as the mist lifts off the lake

and you think it’s a wild swan heading south

and you want to go with it, but you live here, and you can’t

until your bones are dust in their medicine hut

and then you go west, in the urn of a Canada goose.

They bring you tobacco and berries, choke cherries,

and they adjust the feathers on your war bonnet,

three if you live out east. One for the dream of a totem.

One because you fed somebody somewhere once

and you’re thought of as a mighty hunter. And the last

because you were ready to stand up and fight

for something real you didn’t know if you really believed in

at the time, but it was hopeful. It was just. It was free.

It was sublime. And I liked the way people adjust.

Look at me, Maw, no hands. I’m supercharging

reality with significance. Or is it all just a bad dream
I’m gaining elevation in but it’s all going to come down

on me any minute now like a mountain of gravestones

in an avalanche? I’m a weather balloon. But I was trying

to be beautiful, useful, dance. I was going with the wind

there a while ago. See. I’m gone. A winged samara

on the back lawn. Float plane. That’s me. Or maybe a maple tree.

Feels like a three ring freak show black clown circus

on tour sometimes, but this is my Zen death song

and I’ll sing it with you like a birch bark canoe

gathering wild rice in its prow if it were my mother

in her apron, and you can be the cowboy this time

and I’ll be the flower. Black dog. Blue flower. He’s back.

That means I’ll have the power of a black dwarf at my side.

I think that’s good. But it’s not as beautiful as I want it to be.

Let’s get back to the trees. I painted them once, broken,

fractured, shattered, plinths of chandeliers and stars

all over the place, misspoken candelabras of the twigs

trying to remind themselves of their unhierarchical place

in the scheme of things to come, thump, thump, thump,

like a flat drum roll. Spare me the timpani and drums.

I’m trying to be beautiful here. There’s a moon

out on a lake above the pagodas and totems of

the pine trees and the water’s slowly willowing

with the fish, an elegant black undulance on the water

that reminds you of a woman’s flesh you caressed once,

and you still want to touch it with your fingertips

full of farewell, but you can’t, and you know that,

and it still hurts. My muse was as lovely as any

running doe. And you hope it fits the scenario somehow

of me being beautiful, for her sake, at my own expense.

And I’m not looking for anyone to thank me for that.

Not even her. The wonder was bountiful and holds me

in good stead now. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

It was her. And I’m sure of it now. The wind is rising

out on the lake, and the mist is a veil that’s lifting

off her face. She wants to show me something

I haven’t seen before. You can’t see. It’s an art to love.

And you can’t ignore. But trust me, she’s beautiful and pure

and dangerous as a watersnake swimming beside you

in the feathers of the moonlight I mentioned before

to be beautiful as the cars are out on the highway tonight,

and my occult philosophy of trees as they were seen once

writing poetry about how badly wounded they were

and yet so beautiful, aren’t they, in the way they bleed stars?

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR AND YOU SAY

YOU LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR AND YOU SAY

You look at yourself in the mirror and you say

I’m dying and he is too. Kind. Blind. Bliss.

Two in one. One in two. What does that

add up to? I forget. I remember. I regret. I rejoice.

Think I’m going to share my voice with him

if he’s got anything to suggest. Horrid world, rest.

At least for tonight. Lifeboats in their nursery,

Crows in their nest. Does that feel real? Your guess

is as good as mine. But it’s quiet now. I

can hear the night breathing in the dark souls

of the tenants next door. River move me. River flow.

The stars are whispering something in their sleep.

It’s deep, but that’s a cheap rhyme to live up to.

I’m being focused by death on the window.

One fly woken by the furnace from death, one

star still trying to take my breath away, and it has.

Big space out there. When you die do you dwindle

or expand? The kind of question a child would ask.

It’s so simple nobody has to guess. Let it pass.

PATRICK WHITE

O THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD

O THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD, THIS IS HARD

O this is hard, this is hard, this is hard. I pulled

the mandrake out. I heard it shriek. Ginseng

does the same thing out in the woods in spring.

It tries to sing but it loses control of the words

that come out of its mouth. You rub the genie

in the lamp after it’s put the kids to bed and it’s given

them what they wanted that won’t hurt them

as you wait to see, by God, you do, what happens next.

Hey, I think you just got included in a poem

dogpaddling in infinity here with me a bit but it’s ok,

we float. Sting like a butterfly. Dance like a bee.

No my tumour hasn’t reversed that. This is me.

This is what makes Muhammad Ali truly great in my mind.

He showed you his victory. And his effortless defeat.

Like a pulse on an electrocardiograph you can trust.

It’s his. Not mine. I’m not so sure about mine,

but I’m trying, and that’s all you can really ask of a human.

Bubbles and candles and wine. And a dolphin

from time to time. I’ve had mine, and it was beautiful.

Sublime as the moon in the birch tree groves

as if you were listening to an echo of the Druids

shine, shine, shine out in fireflies and lightning bolts

that are keeping the fire fed for the night

as you throw pieces of your life into it like salt

to watch it flare up green. Robin of the Hud,

and his merry men. Brief spirit of my solitude,

a flash in the pan. Or as Dogen says about as much

as you can say about life and humanity, no more

than the moon reflected in a drop of water

hanging from a heron’s beak in the dark and the light.

I added that last part because it’s the way I speak.

Are you listening to the same picture music I am?

Seek. But don’t make a big deal out of it. Take your time,

look around, find a place to sit down. Make yourself

at home. But you put the next pot on if

you’re lucky enough to get the last cup.

Bathroom’s over there beside the starmap.

Drink up. There’s more where that came from.

A whole pot. Remember the gold scars I told you about?

They mean a lot. Root fires screaming in a choir of ginseng.

Soft, gentle things like the fragrances of time

from a flower with a tumour in the dark trying to bloom

with the music and the moon as it always has.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SMELL OF MY BODY IS SWEETER THAN BACON TO ME

THE SMELL OF MY BODY IS SWEETER THAN BACON TO ME

The smell of my body is sweeter than bacon to me

like walking into a room and recognizing an old friend

by the smell of his armpits. OK. Cachet. Odiferous.

It’s my side of the bed. My pillow. Saturated

like a salt lick with the fragrance of my hair.

How many nights have I drooled my dreams away here?

Went to bed expecting black swans and woke up to pigeons.

To poultry. To pheasants being murdered on a pheasant farm

to grace the tables of Paris, the hats of Berlin,

Robin Hood, Shakespeare’s pen, with plumage?

Do glaciers have skidmarks on their underpants when they die?

Runic striations, tree rings, shit scars? Doctor’s tomorrow.

I’ll take a bath tonight in the stars. Old spice pure sport.

I’ll put a tie and suit on my smell. Or a crease in my jeans.

I’ll have my catcher’s mitt reeking of rose. I’ll put

a clothes peg on everybody’s nose like I’m hanging

laundry on the line, or pinatas of killer bees

like Christmas decorations I’m hanging from Christmas trees.

Sea breeze my skull and crossbones.

Virgo. Supposed to be clean. I want to be groomed for bad news.

Just in case. Just in case. Just in case an emergency fire ax

tells me I’m going to rot. In the meantime

I take a good whiff of the sunset I am, crepusclar smell,

and I swear there’s something sometimes, in the duff

and detritus, the xylem and the phloem, the flotsam and jetsam,

see what I mean, twins again, in the fragrance of being

that makes the compost sweeter than the flowers

it’s being spread upon. Smell’s a fingerprint

of the labyrinth in my nose. Trust your instincts.

Or it’s a shameful waste of good pheromones.

Think I’ll make a waterclock of burnt-out half cut

whiskey barrel armpits and sell it to the town

for them to plant coleus and petunias in along the sidewalks

to show the tourists we’re bumpkins with style.

We smell like apple piety. Our bread stinks like a butter urn

in a bonnet with a blue ribbon. My dad designed

the package somebody told me a long time ago.

But it was margarine. Rank. No thanks. Let’s keep it clean.

I don’t ever want to smell him released from jail again

after a diarhettic drunk. What runs from my mouth

when it does is enough. Maybe I should get a rheostat.

Or a monostome that shits out of the same mouth it eats with

like a politician. You want to wash filth and blood

off your skin today you don’t use water you use a spin doctor

with wind power. Solar will do. Blazing is a kind of blindness.

This is the way I used to write when I was sixteen.

I’m looping again. Goofy planet. Everything is. It’s

daunting as handcuffs of rain. But I think it’s great I might

be getting a conditional discharge, a summery summary,

or absolute, between the first and last crescents of the moon. All of life is in

parentheses. Where’d ya get those crowns? Her teeth are stars,

they come out at night, ha, ha, see, I think I just lost

a couple of years more? But it’s always amused me somehow

to think about it and giggle about what we’re not

ever going to be again, once, once, once, here comes Rilke

all over again. Amazing man, talk about class.

A little fiercely German for me. Neitzsche scares me too.

But wow what a man, I mean it. Mongol bows

with an encore. Deadly child enthroned on the moon

lonely as a lighthouse. I would have been your friend.

I would’ve understood feeling like a funeral home

for aristocracy. But I’m not half the matador you are

when it comes to roses. I do deadly nightshade and mariposes.

And, man, you should see what I can do with a waterlily

when it fires me up like stars. Rope tricks with

the most beautiful evenings on earth I’ve ever spent.

You may be a merman but you’re not a metrosexual.

Keep your eye on that lily in his hand when

he was practising dying in Vienna. Look real close.

Real close. That street globe of a lily meant something even

way back then. I think there’s a crystal skull underneath it

that punishes you like a Medusan jellyfish for letting

you see things like a knife on an altar that doesn’t know

what you’re being sacrificed for but it’s got it to mean something

if it’s going this far, but I don’t want to hear about it.

Buddha Pinocchio. The more he tells the truth,

the longer his nose grows. But I’m not lying about anything.

I’m trying to be real, real, real clear about everything,

cross my crossbones with a confederate X of stars.

There might be some redemption in it I’ve overlooked.

I’m a union man. Workers and officers. Don’t even

go there. It’ll start a fight. Wrong is wrong. Right is right.

I’m enough of a mystic by now to know. A journey man.

Nightwatchman on the moon in a grave yard shift.

Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark, but, man,

could that banker write. But you’re a lot more deadlier.

Seductive child. Wounded by the mirrors of the mysterious

as if you had to have thorns on your roses,

or it didn’t count. You weren’t really in the bullring

with the moon or the roses with no one keeping count

of the moonsets you were made of when you were being yourself.

Praise. That’s it, praise. Whether you’re spitting in the eyes

of something like a righteous cobra, or the Taliban,

or looking at willows with cold-hearted stars in their hair

along a river I’m beginning to feel like a sentry

for a waterclock in the grove of Diana, tick tock tick tock

with a little sword in my hand. Who goes there? I’m an alarm clock.

And I’m going to comb my hair with a comet or two.

Skulls like to look good, too. That’s a joke. For etymologists. Ha, ha.

PATRICK WHITE