YOU PHONE ME UP AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

You phone me up after all these years

drunk and coked up

hot enough to blow glass

and ask me to forgive you

for things I didn’t even know you’d done

until you showed up at my funeral

with more mascara than tears on.

You turn the tap on

and it shrieks like a banshee in the rain

and then there’s a few moments lag time

until the blow back in the pipes

of a great apartment to burn to death in

groans like a foghorn in the desert.

In Perth they put the slums upstairs

to buff their coke in butter urns

just like the pioneers.

But I live like one of the livestock

they brought over on the boats

to go wild in North America

until the whole Sioux Nation

is mounted on winged mustangs

that refuse to be broken

in inspiration and spirit

even when they’re spurred in the eyes

by night riders with stars on their stiletto heels.

You want to know

if I might want to see you again

and I can hear you flipping your zippo

as if you were ejecting

the cartridge of a spent shell

like the coffin of a corpse buried at sea

to ignite the flame of love again

as I recall last time went out

twenty minutes to forever

after it was lit like a love lyric

to burn for eternity.

Now you want to see if it can live longer

on the ghosts and ashes of seasoned desires

than it did on the pyres of elephant bones

you dug up from the graveyard

like the memories of old lovers

to cremate your pet mouse by the Ganges

to give it an afterlife as big as the Taj Mahal

compared to that hole in the wall it used to cower in

for the few crumbs of the dreams

that used to fall from your eyes

into a coke spoon in the morning

like shining from cooked foil

to give an ironic twist to a line from Hopkins.

The black widow with the hourglass on her back

wants to know if she’s lost her sense of timing.

If she can still wake up from her coma

like a ravenous alarm clock

to eat her mate in the throes of sexual rapture

before he can dismount

and scamper away into the sunset

like an eight-legged easel

that paints a picture of itself

running back into a burning barn

like a horse that knows its way home.

The aging undertaker

wants to purge her crematorium

of the smell of burning flesh.

I want to tell her

that perishing isn’t so much

a matter of forgiving and forgetting

as it is a thorough exorcism of everything.

But I bite my tongue to spare the young and say

I was the one who put my heart in harm’s way

like a small warm mammal

thinking the same flute

I used to charm the spitting cobras

could teach an anaconda in pantyhose to lap dance.

You say you had two kids with the same biker

as if that were some kind of new norm for you

but then the government stepped in

and took the two kids and the biker into care.

And you’re on your own now

with no one who knows you the way I do

to ease your inconsolable despair.

And I don’t want to

but I remember how painful it was

patching that deflated vision of you up

when it went flat as a bicycle tire

by gluing my eyelids to your skin

like Japanese plum blossoms

over the holes in your inner tube

that kept letting the air out of the coils

of a Burmese constrictor

that couldn’t find a heart anywhere

to anchor its fangs in

and crush the life out of

and had to settle for the butt-ends of its own tail.

You were always a lamia

picking on sickly knights

who came to your rescue

but you occasionally appeared

almost human to me

whenever you were baffled to tears

realizing as your nerves went off the grid

like Sleeping Beauty

as the spiked apple fell from her hand

(Or was it a thorn she pricked herself on?)

even a full moon isn’t immune

to the poison glands of her own crescents.

And there’s no known antidote

tucked like sweetgrass

in the medicine bags of anyone’s balls

that can do anything for you

to break the fever

except offer them to you like a placebo

knowing the cold sweat of your nightmare

is as terminal as the dew

on the last flowers of autumn

when your blood drops below zero.

You ask me if I remember

when I first saw you

pole-dancing in Vanier

to pay your way through university.

A stripper into kundalini yoga

you wrapped your body

around the axis of the earth

like two wavelenghths

of synchronous serpent-fire

winding its way up the spine

of the winged cross

tattooed like a medical symbol

on the arm of that all night pharmacy

you called your boyfriend at the time.

One to afflict the wound with desire

and the other to heal it

by opening all its chakras at once

like a chimney-fire

making the pipes glow cherry-red with lust.

The silver thread of the moon

interwoven with the golden thread of the sun.

But it’s been a long time

since the tapestry

of that flying carpet came undone

and though Aladdin’s magic lamp still burns

it shines like a night light

in a morgue among the urns

of the afterlives

of a phoenix prone to nightmares.

So, yes, pop over if you want.

Sit down.

Unburden yourself like a volcano in therapy

and I’ll try to show you as I always did

the tropical islands that became of all that fury

when things cooled down enough for birds.

As the Oxyrhyncus sayings of Jesus Christ point out

what you bring forth will save you

and what you don’t will destroy you.

You can take the same approach to i.e.d.s

if you’re enough of an apostate not to kill.

Whether you’re a junkie

a wise-guy or a terrorist.

Not to make the hit

and then frame God for it.

PATRICK WHITE

POST-MORTEM CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELF

Post-mortem conversations with myself.

Dissociated memories of old fires and distant smoke.

Rainbows in eclipse.

Gothic lovers with oilslicks on their lips.

Covens of doves at a black mass for bleeding hearts.

Echoes returning like smart comebacks

to the original lines of the voices

I keep trying to slip between

like a love note waiting for a name

to address it to

as if thinking weren’t a dialectic at all

not this not that

being and non-being

but an ancient mode of migrating

without anyone noticing you’re gone.

And I still burn in the memory of some fires

that weren’t worthy of the heretic they consumed.

Creative intensities that turned my eyes into glass

to clarify the darkness of the black stars

that kept their shining hidden

from the cults and constellations

on the fast track of the zodiac

that liked to see their name in lights.

I preferred hydrogen to inert gases at the time

and there was always something garish about fame

that made me see all that neon

flickering like a cheap one night motel for attention.

All outlaws are wandering scholars

but these days I feel more like a Druid

walking between warring factions

with the diplomatic immunity

of an estranged superstition

to put an end to old conflicts

that live and die like blackflies

in two intense days of direct sunlight

at the end of May when they cleanse the temples

of what winter tracked in like a shelter for demons.

The victory is as boring as the defeat.

And I’ve run out of white flags and red capes

to use for bandages to stop the bleeding

so I let my wounds mummify themselves

without interring any grave goods

under the geoglyphs of their scars.

And here come the righteous rich again

like another crusade against the infidel poor

to dislodge them from the global expansion

of the holy lands over the whole earth

like dandelions in the lawns of Disneyland

within the corporate reach of napalm

and bell-curves of white phosphorus

going supernova

like the Star of Bethlehem

burning through the eyes and skin and hearts

of the children of Gaza

like the evil side of Tinkerbelle

spreading the fairy dust of ethnic cleansing

like a foreign policy that salts hell

with deathstars no one can make a wish upon.

Six pointed stars.

Eight pointed stars.

And that square constellation of fifty

arranged like beer in a box

over thirteen wavelengths

of blood on the snow

with no return on the empties.

And there the bloody handprint

of the red maple

of my own autumn country

complicit in the history

of bigger fires on the world stage

than this one little flame

we’re all huddled around

trying to keep one side of our hearts

warm and human

in the first storm of the new ice age

that keeps blowing it out

like a candle in a manger of straw

like a phoenix in a barn-fire of heritage ashes.

Armoured war mice

war elephants

warring troops of snarling baboons

with red decals painted on their asses

like underbellies of Mitsubishi Zeroes

to identify the friendlies

from the swarms of killer bees

raising cults of i.e.d.s

like terrorist drones

in hives of milk and honey

wired to cellular phones

like bombs in the promised land

that break the word of God

like the bodies and hearts and minds of children

who huddle in their ancient places with the fairies

under the concrete rubble

of the stone that slew Goliath

and all his children

like a ricochet of collateral damage.

Hashashim pouring out of the mouth

of the Old Man of the Mountain

like fire ants down the slopes

of their heaps of formic acid

to sow the olive groves with stinging nettles

and make war on weddings

by rending that which God has joined together

asunder in Islamabad.

Undoing the zippers of their flies

as if they were parting the Red Sea

like the chromosomes of the unborn.

Half their genes on crusade

and the other half on jihad

where love has pitched its tent

as a disappointed Yeats would say

in the place of excrement.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYWHERE BUT HERE

upon being informed by a friend that she was dispassionately seeking an end to her life

Anywhere but here. Anyone but me. Any time but now. Worn out more selves than I ever thought I wanted to be. All these masks like petals fallen from the same rootless tree. But where’s the fruit? Where’s the face all this was practise for? Where’s the great unveiling that breaks through the clouds like the moon? Voids within voids within voids like the fractals of Chinese boxes. Gopher wheels of intellection. Cosmic eggs the mystics never broke out of. Where everything begins and ends. In wonder at the horrors and the radiance. Ageless wonder. Sixty-three years of experiencing it and still the noviate that apprenticed himself to deepening his ignorance at the hands of an unknown master. And what’s a master but someone who realizes they’re a constant beginner? The teacherless teaching. The gateless gate. The hinge of the way. Just to be here. Though my head be under its heel. Though my eyes long for fireflies. Though my heart aches for things that I did and are gone for good and things I didn’t do and are still not done. Though all that is lovely and kind soon perishes and everyone moves up one step in line as if nothing ever happened. But to be here wholly, intensely, as if it did matter, as if this much wonder at the mere fact of it could not be squandered on the banal absurdities of inconsequence. Why would sentience emerge from chaos if it’s just a masquerade of it own irrelevance? If it wasn’t as necessary as random chance to explain what we’re all doing here trying to second-guess what we’re all doing here? Is the planet breaking into consciousness, evolving a neo-cortex to cover the earth, growing itself a global brain and each of us a neuron, one of millions with fifty thousand relationships each, brought forth to facilitate the process by transcending our own? Are we the starmud out of which will come waterlilies with cool soft white lunar skin? Five petals open and one flower blooms? Infinite gods of darkness and light all peers of our own human divinity housed in the one temple that’s dedicated to the worshipper?

Stone. Water. Air. Ions. Space. We’ve progressed through increasingly rarefied mediums the least tangible of which is mind. And if the medium is the message, then why have we come all this way and what are we here for if it isn’t to speak for ourselves? Each charged with a vision and a mission of their own to express themselves like a loveletter in a bottle cast upon this expansive sidereal sea of awareness. And it doesn’t matter much if the message is trivial or sublime. One small red thread of a wavelength or the whole blue-white blinding radiance of a galaxy. Cherished or despised. Treat everything, every thought, every feeling, the ants at your feet, the shadows of the black walnut trees at sunset pouring their shadows out over the grass like water, as if it were the first sign of extraterrestrial intelligence. Because it’s the wonder, the mystery, the intrigue and shock of being here at all and our insistent urge to look through the open doorway and cross our old thresholds like dangerous taboos to run after the stranger who knocked and walked away that is the most vital about us. Wonder is the life blood of the imagination. Sever that jugular on an ostrakon of a broken mirror you’ve spent years polishing, and all your images, metaphors, similitudes and symbols will bleed out into ghostly abstractions that are forced to return to the gravestones of their senses at dawn to remember who’s buried under their names. And isn’t the wonder enough? Whether in love or in art or science isn’t it the wonder that impels everyone to express their amazement at what they see arrayed before them? Startled into being out of the inconceivable aren’t the rest of our lives just one long spontaneous gesture of fright and fascination? Each of us what the world whispers into its own ear when it wonders what it’s doing here alone? I was a hidden god and I wished to be known? Isn’t that the image of us? Each of us a different response to what’s going on at the moment, and all of them true, including the liars and illusions. The whole of the content expressed in all phases of the moon. Nothing ever missing because nothing can’t be grasped. You just take it in as it is as if you were the world the bottle the message the lover the sea the disappointment and the consummation all in one. The wave not distinct from the sea and neither of them strangers to water. The Luna Moth just one night flys up against your window out of the darkness and spreads its wings like a thought or a feeling and shows you the eyes it’s brought to the light to deepen and enhance the radiance the darkness and your seeing all alike staring at the mystery of each other in wonder at the other’s occurrence.

You are that. The voice and the listening. The witness and the event. The loveletter the lover and the return address. The myth of origin you’re writing that’s making you up as it goes along. Created and Creator. And always the space that goes beyond both to receive them like stars being poured into the mouth of nothingness to revive the moon skull of the night with eyes. Each of us the way the universe talks to itself in its sleep whether its dreaming the world on a lotus or agonizing its way through the excruciating transformations of a nightmare. And some flowers are looking at the stars. And some are listening. But whatever the outcome, when the world wakes up, it’s us it wakes up to. Us in our baffling mystic fearfully boundless entirety. You who are the meaning of meaning. You who are the hunger to know. You who are apprenticed to chaos. You who let things go. You who are trying to hang on. You who order yourself like a ladder for the birds to perch on. And you who approach them opportunistically like the green branch of a snake. You who underestimate your complexity to the detriment of your simplicity. You who can’t see in the act of washing your hands what the dead long for again. How the trivialities, follies, and mundanities of the world are as crucial as oxygen to those who are crazy enough to be wisely alive while they have the chance. You who are deceitful in love because you expect to lose your happiness last. And you who realize your own fulfillment in the act of truing someone else’s life to their longing. You who have given up asking the silence to speak because it never answers you gazing upon the stars that frequent your solitude until one night in a blaze of insight you realize the universe itself and you in it just as you have always been since the beginningless beginning is the way the silence roars.

You can taste this world with your eyes. You can distinguish among flavours of light. If your mouth has grown stale on a diet of cliches and your voice hoarse with screaming at the death masks you carved out of the jungle like Olmec skulls in the likeness of the dynasty of your own ferocious dissatisfied selves, you can exchange sculptors with other cemeteries and let the wind do the work of the rain. No pain no gain is the ethic of a puritanical food chain. How much work was it to be born like light in the body of a lamp to find your way here like the next step on the Road of Ghosts where everyone walks on the graves of their ancestor-selves like an afterlife that isn’t theirs alone though they cling to it like a single drop of water clings to a blade of star grass? Five and a half billion years of spontaneous emergence from the Burgess Shale to a hundred million neurons rooting in the starmud of a mind so boundless and indefinable it can encompass the superclustering of galaxies and the singularities of black holes and most of it growing effortlessly whether you grimace like a decision maker or smile as if you couldn’t care less. Not for seventy years of forced labour trying to soil your shining on the night shift. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust if you must see it that way. But stars to ashes to stars to dust to us and back to stars is a more accurate way to see it. The shining takes root in the earth and becomes flowers and trees and blackberries and fish and reptiles mammals and birds and then the radiance takes its greatest risk and accelerates us up to the speed of light and beyond into the faster shadows of thought and feeling that enter the available dimensions of the future ahead of the stars. And all for what? So you can answer: Creative play without a motive? Cosmos without an agenda? Chaos is the dark partner of all principles of organization? Or maybe just to stand in a wild open field silvered in moonlight by the wind and look at the stars until you can feel no veil between your eyes and them as you realize your seeing is no less than the latest masterwork of their genius whether you’re dazzled by the Pleiades or collapsing under your own mass into a black hole in a burst of gamma radiation. The predators evolve eyes for hunting. The prey learn to lie about their appearance. The predators see through the disguise. And life changes like a mood ring. The rose that’s as vulnerable as blood is always the one with the most thorns. The harvest moon in a total eclipse like the prophetic dreams of famine and plenty Joseph had of Egypt like a rainbow in the dry well of his abandonment. If you don’t want to be called back to this life don’t get caught with the goblet of the moon in your donkey’s saddlebags even if it’s given to you as a gift to keep you here. Just remember you can’t pour the universe out of the universe and time is an hourglass that drinks stars and sand and even when it turns its glass over as if it’s had enough for one life never runs dry. Look how the Milky Way runs from Rhea’s tit. And Cronos swallows his sons like swaddled stones. Where are you going to go when all roads and rivers and mindstreams lead you back to ask what you’re still doing here? Flee the light and it’s always ahead of you. Run from it and even your shadow takes the lead. It’s like water trying to run a race with the sea.

Deal with it. Don’t sit there on my futon, glaring at me because I take your suicide threat more seriously than you do. That I can take it to a darker place than your eyes have ever been eclipsed by. Grab your flute and see if you can teach the snake pit music. I care. Deeply. But the bitumen of my tears has turned into hard diamonds over the years with increasing access to clarity. Kill yourself. And what’s been left unaccomplished? Don’t kill yourself and has anything been done? And if I say you’re light, we all are, that doesn’t mean that you’re a candle and can snuff yourself out. And if you’re as dark as you say you are and want to end it all by putting a gun up to your temple what could that do but deepen the night for all of us? Add to the darkness by one less star? Don’t you think breaking into light would kill you into a new life faster than the Big Bang exploded into stars? I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m not saying do it. Look at the moon. It pulled the last crescent of a trigger on itself. Dead world. No atmosphere. Frozen cataracts of water at the southern polar cap. Drinking shadows out of the dry seabed of its skull. And yet it still shines like it or not. Brightest when it’s full. But darkest when it’s new again. Yes, pain. Yes, death. Yes, the rabid ferocity of human injustice. Yes, atrocity and savage indignation. Yes, madness and absurdity. Yes, the obscenity of human lovelessness toward all living things. Yes, futility. Yes, the maggots who run the world for the corporate delecti. Yes, the sorrow that longs to pour into the absence of everything and everyone you’ve ever cherished the way nature abhors a vacuum. Yes, joy denuded of its innocence and no one left to cry to but yourself. Yes, people in the water. All sharks into the lifeboat. Yes, ignorance, indifference, war, the skull beneath the skin, the dungheap covered in snow. Twenty-five million children starving to death every year on a planet that attributes the birth of civilization to agriculture. I understand. It’s as real as one of those razorblades you used to scar your arms and thighs like a prisoner scratching out a paleolithic calendar on a bone in a Neanderthal cave. Or do you cut into your flesh like an early version of cuneiform that’s become your mother tongue? And what is it exactly you’re trying to express? Your disgust with yourself? Your disgust with others who get up in the morning to count the raisins like an abacus in their cereal, certain they’re being cheated out of something they deserve while their kids are seizing the day on the sly from the medicine cabinet? And yes, I know your father tore the wings off the innocence of his two butterfly daughters just as you were beginning to grow breasts and that empathy isn’t enough to identify with the experience unless you’ve wholly lived through it yourself. But I’ve seen you when you didn’t know I was looking open your wings on the rim of a poppy that suddenly flared up like a distant fire on the hillside of a dark valley at night. Something warm and inviting that wasn’t as lost and dangerous in the vast homelessness of despair as you were. And when you opened your wings. They weren’t the wings of a housefly stained by snakeoil rainbows. They weren’t soiled or torn or bruised by the world’s filth like the lunar hymens of the morning glory. I swear when I saw you open them the first time you looked like you were opening a slim volume of lyrical love poetry that escaped the book-burning of the Grand Inquisitor of the Court of the Star Chamber. You are not the original sin. You did not bring death into the world. You are gold. You are the full harvest moon over the white gold of the grain. You are the sun at midnight and the sun of shadowless noon. Bathe in your own fires to burnish the shining. Time, tears, rivers, blood, the mindstream, the Milky Way clarify themselves by flowing as if they had their tails in their mouths and the circle remained unbroken. Inviolate. Zero. Black hole. The plenum-void, the dark abundance, the bright vacancy that keeps on giving by adding its nothing to one and making it ten times bigger. Dark energy. The engine of the expanding universe. The dark mother who bends space into a womb and gives birth to galaxies. Sex isn’t just a choice between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, as if you had to make love with one foot on shore like an oil slick and the other in the spiritual lifeboat of an immaculate womb. You could be Isis. The Queen of Heaven. And no one could lift your veils who stood before you with the slightest shadow of selfhood like shit on his shoes and track the slime paths of the world across the thresholds of the black rose of your mystery. Darkness is a big asset, a hidden jewel, the translucency of inner space that lets things pass freely through it like light on its way to see if it can inspire the beginnings of life on a habitable planet that needs a gentle jump start. The original immunity of your mind can no more be wounded than self-healing water can be injured by a sword. Letting go of things that inhibit your growth is not a concession to the atrocities of those who foul themselves with the salts of Sodom and Gomorrah so that only the poison fruits of the earth root in them and no stars flower. It’s not giving them the satisfaction of watching the toxin of their spiritual sterility paralyze you as if they’d finally found a way of wielding their impotence like real power. The spider stands back at the perimeter of its web and watches the frenzied death throes of the damselfly, gratified by the ritual obedience to its hunger. Why hang like a mummified fly on its trophy line when you can unbead the necklace like a radiant drop of water by dropping off your bodymind as easily as birds drop off the powerlines or whole notes off the strings of a guitar that isn’t tuned to the fangs of the crescent moon like wishbones ice-picks and death wishes. Serpent-fire might manage it in the talons of a Zen eagle with an eye for enlightenment high in the mountains, but why let a maggot wear your wings and think itself a dragon? Live well in defiance of those who would see you perish. Live like a happy antidote that knows how to milk the fangs of the destroyer like a healer who administers the power of compassion toward herself like a herb of immortality she extracted from a snake pit. Don’t believe anyone who tells you you can dive as far down into the corals of a dead seabed as you have to retrieve the pearl of the moon only to come up as empty-handed as they are. Open your hand. Your oyster mouth. Look at what you can do with a grain of sand. Isn’t that the lustre of a nacreous dawn returning like a new atmosphere to the milky tears of the moon like birds to a wordless aubade? Rise up, rise up, rise up like the gender of the sun in Arabic that feminizes the new day nurturing everything alike on the indiscriminate generosity and splendour of her light. Let the moon enslave those who subjugate others to the servitude of their appetites like long foodchains moving through the night like caravans through the lunar deserts that refuse to drink from the tainted wellsprings of their half-mad mirages. Preferring the taste of its own shadows to the fever of lies that fouls their watersheds like sewage. I think it was Dogen Zenji or it could have been Nangaki who said of enlightenment that fortunately you only have to shit once up here in the mountains and it’s good for a whole lifetime. Live, butterfly, live. Open your eyelids like chrysales and cocoons and unfold your wings like a love poem from an unknown mirror you’ve been carrying around with you for light years like the memory of someone you keep forgetting to look at. Revel in the life-giving fertility of your own creative powers as if you’d just turned a corner of darkness in yourself and come upon a constellation of white waterlilies transforming the malevolent decay of their supperative beginnings into the enlightened symbol of an earthly excellence. Do this like something unbelievably beautiful in the face of your ugliest disappointment. Don’t try to live up to any image, bad or good, you might have of yourself. That comes and goes like a ghost that wasn’t summoned to the seance. But thrive past that into fulfilling what is most inconceivable about you, knowing the possibilities are as boundless as all the permutations and combinations of omnidimensional worlds in the multiverse. Infinite. Blessings like the abundance of zeroes it takes to play that secret guitar in your heartwood like a tree in the rain. Like a night bird that greets every eclipse of its heart like the new moon of its longing to fill the void in the empty cup of its inspiration with the wellsprings of a lyric that sweetens the waters of the moon with their first taste of inextinguishable fire that burns like a feeling for life that isn’t estranged by the love affair.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU LIED TO ME ONCE

You lied to me once

and then you lied again about why you lied.

And I couldn’t tell if you were a hall of mirrors

who thought you could warp the truth like space

and bend the light to your way of shining

or just liked talking out of your ears

like the sea in a seashell

with multiple piercings along its nacreous lobes

like a Stonehenge of silver moon skulls

you kept like a calendar

to mark the best night of the year

to start planting things

in the hearts of the lovers

whose flesh you turned over like soil.

You said you were a witch

and I was your broomstick

but you didn’t mind

if I came along for the ride.

And though it felt foolish

to fancy myself a warlock

I’m intrigued

by the cosmology of dark matter

and alien planets with exotic atmospheres

I could explore like a runaway space probe

for signs of my own kind of life

and ok when in Rome

do as the Romans don’t

and throwing the stars over my left shoulder

like the spilled salt of an older radiance

wrapped your night around me

like the cloak and chrysalis of a warlock

and hoped I wasn’t defaming anyone

in the name of what you wanted me to be.

Your body was a unified field theory

and when I first lay down beside it

there was nothing in the universe

it couldn’t explain

and in that menacing shrine

of frankincense and black candles

you called a bedroom

we broke the oaths we’d made

to the thousand swords

that came between us like reasons not to.

And when I kissed your emergency mouth

I could taste the earthly taboo

on the lips

of your celestial fortune-cookie

like a full eclipse of the harvest moon.

We sowed the dragon’s teeth

and renewed the flesh of the skeletons

that arose from the dead.

And in front of the fireplace

where we made love on the Golden Fleece

I remember how you used to burn the prophets

who came dressed up in our feathers

as if we were waterbirds

and not the spawn of a phoenix

on the pyres of our ancestral demons

our mouths speaking in tongues

to our bodies

as if they’d just been discovered

like the native language of all Rosetta Stones

in a desert of bewildered stars

urgently trying to tell us something

for our ears only.

Dark raptures that didn’t sweat the details

of the unreal mirages we exorcised

through the pores of our skin

like the hot tears of lesser elixirs

that tried to palm themselves off

like snakeoil antidotes

to the serpentine love potions of original sin

though the consequences be damned for it ever after amen.

We knew a wonder that’s older than God

and deeper than night.

And I swear there were times I couldn’t tell

if I were shagging a witch

or in mystic connubium

with the eclipse of a hidden dakini

on the other side of the black mirror

of the mind I left behind me

like a note to reality

to go looking for itself without me.

And apparently it did

for the thirteen lunar months

I was with you at least.

And that’s not to say I have any regrets.

I can’t remember you

without hungering

for the dark fruit of the dead

you arrayed like the feast of your body

out on black satin sheets

that glistened like the skin of a snake pit

to summon Orpheus down into the underworld

like an oracular succubus

that liked to be possessed

by the picture-music of prophetic skulls

in the same key as her G-spot.

I was Hermes Trismegistus the Thrice Blessed

and you were all the occult sciences of the flesh.

Your esoteric eroticism

isn’t the kind of spell

you can cast off all that easily

or pass on to a willing novitiate

uprooting weeds in a herb garden

of untried remedies.

And lust has always been harder to heal than love.

The warlock thing wore off like a cult

once you started

handing out black kool-aid

from the fountain of youth.

I never really understood

why you thought

there was a lock on my heart

when I’ve always thought of it

as the missing link in the food chain

but you did

and it’s still oxymoronic as hell to me

to remember you sitting

in a rhombus of sunlight

on the hardwood floor of the living room

reciting an imported mantra

like a repeating decimal

that would eventually crack the code

to the vault where death kept its darkest jewels.

I used to watch you grind your teeth

like kernels of corn

on the lingam and yoni

of the stone age cosmic eggs

you tried to break like koans.

I still don’t know what it was

you were looking for

and I still deny

I was Ali Baba or anyone

of the forty-thieves

and there was no Open Sesame

that could have opened the cave any wider

than I’d already opened it to you.

And though I don’t mind

taking a bath in my own grave once in a while

to rinse the dirt of life off me

I told you from the very beginning

the tomb was empty

and I didn’t know who it belonged to

but if you wanted to believe you were Mary Magdalene

I’d try to relate.

But you let an open gate come between us

and the mirages evaporated

and the oases returned to their watersheds

the wishing wells dried up

and though I know you wanted

to breach the ultimate taboo with Jesus

and all I could manage to do

was get it up like Lazarus

I knew it was time

to add a little more sweetgrass

to the medicine bags of the scapegoat

and drive myself out into the wilderness

like an unwilling ascetic

to avoid being tempted by Jesus.

It gets lonely out here

but I still have dirty dreams of you

that puts the religious pornography

of St. Anthony’s hard drive to shame.

I’ve been the scapegoat for a lot of things

not of my doing but who knows

maybe not undeservedly

but I do know

when you place the burden of your own sins

like a lot of heavy judgment

on the backs of the irrelevantly innocent

they take their ostrakons out into the desert

like pieces of a broken urn

and in the vas hermeticum of their ashes

reintegrate themselves

into Renaissance masters of all evil.

The bestial becomes personified

by the sophisticated features and dark clarity

of intriguing familiars like Azazel

flying the Satanic banner of his bloodstream

from the horned crescents of the moon.

And the payback can be more illuminating

in its own dark way

than a mystic black hole in a hood

on the via negativa to enlightenment

or anyone of those myopic jewels you were looking for

like eyes that could see better in the dark than you could

even when the sun shone at midnight.

I’ve heard it said

that the devil’s last trick

is to prove that she doesn’t exist.

And it’s hard to imagine

a darkness deeper than that.

And though we’re overly discrete

when we encounter each other these days

as the Quran says

evil is separation

and knowing what I know of you

how could I doubt it?

Just the same

given you can only see

as far into the dark

as the light you’ve been given to go by.

You into burning your bridges behind you

and me into crossing the ones I see ahead.

The way we were in bed together.

For every demon that jumped from heaven

an angel rose from hell.

The zeniths and nadirs

the apogees and perigees of the bodymind

the spirit that knows the darkness in the fire

the shadow in the lamp

that like everything else in this looping universe

is cyclical

so as many good things come of the darkness

as bad things do in the day.

Nothing sits above or below the salt

at a circular table

and even that thirteenth house of the zodiac

the others signs used to peck at

for getting around like the warped ellipsoid

of a waterclock with its own tail in its mouth

instead of the precision cogwork

they were wasting their time on

finds a place for its homelessness.

And a sword they pull out of their hearts

like iron from a star

like a king from a stone

like a thorn from the lion’s paw.

And even if you could prove to me

you don’t exist

trying to pull the wool

over the sacrificial sheep’s eyes

like a Klingon cloak of invisibility

like Cat Woman at a bat rave

I wouldn’t believe you anyway.

Ten virtuous scars in a choir of bleeders

couldn’t hold a black candle

up to one of your wounds

or six exorcisms

and nine lost holy wars

or the decretal of a curse

stuck like a rolling paper

to the pope’s lips

ever make me forget

the human divinity

that conceals its sensual blessings

like hidden jewels

in the depths of a spiritual eclipse

I still walk in the shadow of even today

like the dead seas

of those long lunar wavelengths

redshifting in your bedroom

like the lost atmosphere

of a young igneous moon

lying in the arms of the old.

Water might grow bald

as a polar ice cap

and stellar passion

shrink to a black dwarf

and even when entropy

sinks into the rapture of oblivion

in the sexual narcosis

of its fourth level of dreamless gratified sleep

at minus 273 degrees Kelvin

you’ll never grow cold or inert.

In a cemetery of dead stars

that have relinquished their haloes

like the heavy metals of excruciations

too heavy to bear

one atom among

the dead starfish

of billions upon billions of galaxies

will budge.

Will run like tears of gold

out of the dark ores of time and space.

One small unspent firefly of desire

one chimney spark

in the mouth of the dark cosmic furnace

ignite the creative lightning of lust

that gives the universe its thrust

and gets the whole show

on the pilgrim road to radiance again

by deepening the darkness

that makes the night bird sing in extasis

like an inextinguishable candle

at one of those black masses

that tried to scandalize me

for being able to embrace

so much that was dark about you

so lucidly.

PATRICK WHITE