AND SIDELINED HERE LIKE A BOXCAR

And sidelined here like a boxcar without an engine always from somewhere else waiting for them to lay track on the moon so I can get on with my ambitious deliveries a lifeline ahead of myself, everything sounds like the mournful whistle of a wounded bird, a killdeer passing away through the starfields just beyond the apricot glow of the tungsten roses that hover over everybody in town like tents. I can remember, young, when I burned with the ferocity of unadulterated salt to rise like a constellation of my own, a legend of luminous eloquence to crown the endless darkness of the throbbing sea that surrounded my empty island throne like a wound without a voice that couldn’t find its way home. I wanted to grow eyes that could write loveletters for the starfish imprisoned in a confusion of tongues; and a heart that hung like a lone apple that stayed ripe even in an abandoned orchard in winter for the bluejays, redder than an emergency exit in a morgue. Now I bow my head to the years like a streetlamp or a sunflower under a yoke of snow dreaming of seeds like lovers and poems I let go of to open their vagrant eyes in gardens of their own. And I’m not dead yet, but the voids that have come like the homeless to the wrong return address, deepen the echo of my own pleading through the vastness of a wilderness that swallows me like my own words in the wingless distance. But there’s no point in bewailing the failure of the astral gravel I tamped under the ties of all the translunar runs the soft clay of my own shiftless humanity derailed, the headstrong midnight expresses that toppled into a junkyard of thought trains that over-reached the trembling trestles of my bones only to fall like a bad hand of death stars from a plague-marked house of cards. I still follow the blind Polaris of my destiny, an outrider on an iron horse that follows the lines of track like surgical stitches on starmaps of my own even if it be to have none, even if it be I do nothing more than trace my name in the scars of a hundred late-night collisions with my own mountainous immensities, the ghosts of an extra-gang in northern B.C. aligning the lengthening shadows of my passage to the sea. PATRICK WHITE

AND NOW THE SHALES

And now the shales of the night congregate for revival and great liquid bolts of flowing diamond seek the rivers and lakes the sky inhaled up out of the dreamtime of their mirrors, and angry at the new awakening, photograph God in a line-up, and shatter the fossil record of the life they signed in hieroglyphics, releasing the drums and the orchards and the thunder of scalded serpents striking at the tree that bound them, revoke the curse, destroy the power of the old mandala, kick sand in its face with the ferocious clarity of a truly compassionate buddha, burn and desecrate the ram in its ashes, bleach the blood and igneous bone of all attachments, freaking the assassins in the dark with scars, seams, unstitched threads of light. And this must be made human; even this domain, this dark cleft of furious women, integrated like the black star that burns in the hearts of the poppies into the synaptic squalls of a storm deranged in the form of a terrified human, whirling like an iron-winged weathervane in chaos, all needles north the electric eyelashes of a dangerous freedom from detection, as the rain, the merciful rain, taps its tin fingers on the table, detonates slowly, the prelude of adagios to come, as the flashflood downpour that sweeps the dead boat from its banks belatedly climbs the emotional stairs like a back-up transformer and knuckles the shuddering door. And there’s no help for it but to peer the lightning into flesh, to run your tongue along the razor sword of the warrior iris, and kiss the horned viper on the head, drink from the violent grail of the dark fever that gluts the arteries of the bloodbed with the torrential editions of a man without a stone to smash the window from the inside, and raise the dead. Out of the net, out on the heath, the singed atmosphere wincing with fists and eyes, elemental accusations and the mineral sages, atomic oracles, that answer the indefensible humanity of harsh enlightenments in the random salts of radioactive configurations that cleave the roiling sea of the starless, desert spirit with delirious chariots hounding the prophetic clowns of clamouring paradise. And there are contexts of becoming so severe they fuel the divining furnace with bituminous ores that cower in the heat, pyramids, coffins, mummies, cocoons, the chrysales of the dragonfly’s eyelids, the acetylene hives of the wasp, and all the red oak cordwood of the heart cracked across its ripples with crevices and empty webs of pain, all, without exemption, reprieve, promise or defection heaved into the fire-mouth of a roaring lionstar that staples and holds and tears the throat out of disparity like the hourglass jugular between the crowns and roots of a resigned gazelle, feeling the silence slip out of it into the sand. PATRICK WHITE

AND LOVE CAUGHT

And love caught by the gills in the mesh of human need, and the storm outside a leaden drummer sick of war, and flesh and rock the same, and the eye no more than water, and mud no less than the spirit, and the heart in the hollow of its own hands, a lifeboat that failed, an attempt that floundered, a rescue that failed, and everything beyond right and wrong, no river mapping itself, every direction, the thorn of a rose, the fang of a coiled compass, the black toxicity of depleted stars, and no one to surrender to, no victor, no victim, no vanguished, everything the metaphysics of sand and salt, dead leaves and brittle seaweed, lost bolts to crucial connections, a graveyard of windows, and every step forward a return to what was never left, a knot that grows by doubling back on itself until it’s stopped by the eye of the needle, and the only thing left to burn, this bouquet of unanswered love-letters, the rain comes down steady on the yellow leaves through the milky windows and the sky is a mass of ashes. And I concede there are jewels on the vines of the fire, and not all razorblades mistake themselves for eyelids and supple petals, and there are fingertips that haven’t been dipped in acid, and sometimes the robin mauled by the cat gets away with the worm to fill the satchels of its young, and that everything that is must in some way be confounded by its own intelligence, even the atoms somehow separate from everything, and birfurcated reality, conciousness, a matter of split ends, peeling propositions like dead skin off propositions about life to understand nothing, and the general spontaneity prevails like a camp counsellor with a bow and a target, and there is only a you and an I when the bridge has been washed away, and there are rivers that drink too much and flow sideways over their banks like sailors on the deck of a squall, and one stone hits another like hearts trying to free a spark over a tinder of straw to survive the cold of the cave they will paint like a womb with inception, and every astronomical catastrophe is only a random blow to the gut that makes the stars go flat and panics and baffles the next breath, and what could my pain and sorrow be to a mountain on Mars, or a frog in the mouth of a snake, and no book ever sipped wine from the pressed flowers between the shales of its erudition, and nothing I know can help me die enough to be free of this moment, and there’s no point sending a wound from door to door recruiting ghosts as blood donors when the rose has already leaked out of itself like a flag or the poppy of a colour-blind matador falling on the horns of an iron bull like the balloon of a punctured child, and the silence that hovers over everything like vultures and angels is louder than the scream of a mouthless wind in a crematorium cooking the marrow in the bones of a dead mime trying to teach death to talk; I concede to all of it, the dull, stupid futility of a vision that tastes like glue on the tongue of an empty envelope that once was filled with stars posted like light and rain to an urgent sky and let the amber of reason flow over me like the bitter honey of a stalled traffic light and its exudings harden into a glass eye I can use for a paperweight in the rare editions library of the unopened letters of resignation I keep addressing to myself like a poor man’s copyright, sick of mining the ore of dead flies for gold. PATRICK WHITE

AND IT'S SOMETHING

And it’s something I’ve been trying to say for eras something almost there, almost ready to leap from the penthouse of my tongue like an encyclopedic suicide note coming down the slopes of my heart like an avalanche of blue strawberries, a starmap that finally let go like dice, a pool table racked with prophetic skulls, and if I could say it, if I could make you see it, if I could make you taste it like light in an apple, or the blood of a tree, or smell it, the perfume sampler of a black rose in heat slumped like junkmail across a mystic threshold I’m sure it would make you silent and sad and you would know what the rocks lament when they finger the mirror like braille to see their own reflection, or the grief of second hand shoes in the long hallways of farewell pleading for a compassionate echo. You would see what I see when I peel the moon from the hidden watersheds of my eyes like the skin of a grape, the scalp of a frontier comet, and look into the wound like an arrow; delusion transcending delusion like buddhas playing leapfrog, refugee oceans cowering in the hold of the moon like spiders in a duel of flashlights, the desolation of all human endeavour. And if you could break the black bread of an unleavened eclipse cooling on the windowsill like a crow in a cradle of wine, just once thumb your nose at your mind, and aristocratically disdain to die in an outhouse, I could show you what it’s like to live in the vastness of an abysmal solitude like a concealed weapon. PATRICK WHITE

AND IT SADDENS ME

And it saddens me, drowns me in the hopeless waters of the moon, to remember the passions that died like bruised orchards at my feet, and recollect the startled approximations of the days I thought I should have lived like an englightened dunce in the corner, grinning like a park bench at every passer-by, even in the moist silence of the storm that is now approaching, sit like a conscientious objector under a strategic tree circled like a date by lightning, a bridge in the way of the flashfloods that keep wiping me out like the lean smile of the first crescent off the face of the river. I no sooner get the teeth and the stones of my last demolition straightened with braces, my rosary of abandoned planets rebeaded, and I’m washed out to sea again like a alphabet that hasn’t got a word for mercy or an eye for its own survival, a why for its sudden demise. And there is no buoyancy in the diurnal heart that sinks like the keystone of my solar arch that has ever turned into a faith I could float on my bloodstream. I just keep rolling the rocks back up the hill, hoping somehow I’m happy I’m not an avalanche of windfall asteroids, dog-eared, pitted fruit shaken to the core from an unpruned branch of gravity, the abused leftovers of a stellar reformation, the slagheap of a creekbed creation that pans my tears for gold, though all my options are open from radioactive slurry to the wine of a purified ore. I don’t expect any grace from the agenda of a day that sharks the hour with shadows and fins, regatas of slooped sundials hinged to a halt by noon. It’s enough to be a wall sometimes that isn’t wailing for the deconstruction of a temple that stood like a hammer of peace on the meteoritic cranium of a pummeled hill. And what’s the point of slinging planets around the sun to keep the word of a promised land when there are no giants in residence at all? Better to keep on picking prophetic skulls of lettuce with the migrant Mexicans who work like monarch butterflies than try to revive the vertebrae and bones of these dinosaur aqueducts that went extinct all over the moon waiting for water to spring from the rock like the dolphins of their leaping arches and cry. PATRICK WHITE