MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY DIVERGENT PSYCHES

MY SOLITUDE BLUNTED BY THE DIVERGENT PSYCHES

My solitude blunted by the divergent psyches of too many split ends. The strong rope unravelled into a million weak threads of downed powerlines and neural disconnections. Messiahs on meds asking that the bitter cup be taken from them as they despair of ever being able to express their martyrdom in paint for a forty buck a night muse of morphine that smiles upon them like Mary Magdalene. I seek the silence of the stars out in the dark fields beyond the lights of Perth. I crave their radiance. I expose my veins to the light sprinkling from the tips of their fangs like happy syringes to hit up on the vastness within and how close we all come to eternity without ever experiencing it like fish that are unaware of water. If space is expanding does time go along with it as well? Does time really stand still at the speed of light or does it just slip into the coma of another thoughtless waterclock that carries everything with it downstream? I feel like one of the untimely incommensurables of my own lucidity getting by without a starmap or anywhere in particular it wants to go like a sign of the times with equinoctial black holes that ate the spring and now the autumn of my life. At home with the damaged outcasts of an expedient extravagance that adapted them like seagulls and crows to the generosity of garbage as a survival tactic that made them feel they were getting away with something like slaves right under their tormentor’s nose, I am anciently at home with all things nocturnal like a pariah of dark energies who shuns the spotlight so as not to be blinded by his own blazing and be ambushed on the bright side of things. I face my own extinction like a timber wolf mourns what happened to the moon. And the people I run with know what a leg-hold trap tomorrow can be for the cow they savaged today in the time-honoured way of life to survive on itself. I stray up out of the valley as often as I can on my own after a day of hunting down below just to get the streetlights out of my point of view and keep the omnidirectional edge of my focus on the wild side of things by renewing my acquaintance with stars like Rhea’s milk flowing out of a Cave in Crete where she suckled Zeus into the Road of Ghosts as the Ojibway called the Milky Way and kept him from being swallowed like a swaddled asteroid by Chronos. My mother almost saved me from my father, but I was not breast fed. My teeth came in too early. Long before I was littered like Rome and both sides of my personality were abandoned by my father to a she-wolf’s tit, I swear I was the Egyptian wolf religion Lycurgus brought back to Sparta like a law-giver to straighten things out there by telling everyone to steal all you want but just don’t get caught. I suppose I could have lived like a fat maggot on carrion, or taken one of my frayed life lines and gotten wrapped up in a political career like a tapeworm naturally selected to live securely in the bowels of life with high priced consultants to chew my food for me. But I preferred to pull the sword out of the stone with my teeth like a porcupine quill for myself and take one of these old mountains for my throne rather than be spoonfed Gerber’s bullshit in a high chair. I’d rather be one of the zodiacal misfits not invited to the calendrical table of domesticated knights each with a sign outside a house of their own. I’d rather drink blood from my own skull in a year of drought than holy water from a grail the ailing kingdom is propped up in bed to sip from like soup spit out of a faith healer’s mouth like a cobra or the Taliban into the open wounds of my eyes. I shrug the acid rain off with a twist of my body and inflate my fur for snow. I like the ferocious clarity of the air up here. I’ll get back to the pack later with its lead female and big strikers nipping at the size of the balls of their juniors who keep contesting their place in line. Up here where the ice cracks through the unmarrowed bones of the mountain like a miner into motherlodes of gold I like to clear the coalbin of my head until all that remains of the original impact down below are grains of meteoritic diamond that bear a slight resemblance to the stars that do not so much as shine by a light of their own as snarl.

And O my good bad aberrant brothers and sisters with your precipitous insights into where you have to stand at the edge of the known world to get the best acoustics if you want to be heard like a madman in mourning by the moon above the world mountain Sisyphus is trying to re-roll the last avalanche up. As if even this absurdity of the turning season had an undiscerned purpose you had to be right out of your undefined mind to be privy to. There’s a stark dignity to a bone the flesh has been stripped from like a white-tailed buck in deep snow. Something romantically savage about the emptiness in the eyes of a skull that fell like a bead off the foodchain like the secret name of the god that first threaded it with blood like a rosary of alternate new moons and eclipses of the heart. Here killing for sport and recreation or ideology and desecration isn’t the same thing as killing to pass the flame of life on like a theft of fire from a lightning strike. Maculate mutable blood caked on the maws of the predators sticking their noses in the vital organs of haemorrhaging roses is a scarlet letter closer to the truth of the way things are up here than all the Valentine’s candy that rots the teeth of the sheep in the valley. There’s way more compassion in a sharp knife and a quick kill than there is in being tapewormed to death in the cattle barns and dairy farms of human kindness. Or to have your heart gouged out while you’re still alive like an Aztec sacrifice to a god who’s got his hands full forging passports in an embassy of scapegoats looking for asylum in their afterlives from crimes against humanity the victims are expected to redress on behalf of those who dispatched them like a priestly Stockholm syndrome in reverse.

O my fierce companions baring your lives like the fangs of broken mirrors, your delinquency is not a sword dance under lofty chandeliers that have reserved a space under the table of life for you, not an underground legend of cosmic necessity in a comic farce of star-nosed moles. Raise your muzzles like telescopes to the stars and howl out loud to let them know you’re gathered here in all your crazy wisdom waiting for the snow hare to break cover and run like Lepus kicking up stars at the heels of Orion. Let the world lavish its affection like a leash on house broken lapdogs nosing the stumps of a clear cut forest of fire hydrants for any signs of life they might hesitate to pee on like a truce it wouldn’t be too circumspect to break. I see your gashes. I see how you twist in agony and chew your legs off like Huike at Bodhidarma’s cave seeking liberation. I know how you eat your own hearts for courage. I see your scars. I see the strong medicine of the antiseptic tongues you apply like lunar poultices and bandages in the way you seek solace from one another without making the other vulnerable and weak. You are not the ghost amputees of an ancient dismemberment that defaced the wilderness at the hands of a serial killer among missing messiahs. You are not lurking in a dark wood to ambush a cynical poet karmically waiting to be summoned by a beatific vision of a muse who died long before he got a chance to touch her. Yours are the lineaments of fire not smoke. Desire, hunger, hunting, longing, freedom, grief, and life all burn in you like the rogue stars of a constellation that refuses to be fixed to the usual wavelengths of blood on the snow that hang halfmast from a flagpole in front of a creative finishing school for dead metaphors and symbolic acts to extract nature red in tooth and claw out of the hard cold facts of an explicitly illicit existence.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT STARS FROM SPY ROCK

LOOKING AT STARS FROM SPY ROCK

Looking at stars from Spy Rock

on top of Foley Mountain,

Westport glowing like an alloy

of red algae and fireflies down below

around the sacred pools of small mouth bass

raised from fingerlings

to lure the fishermen of Hazelton Pennsylvania

to this pioneer pantry of wildlife up north.

I can remember you naming them out loud

like Santa Claus’ reindeer.

Deneb, Vega, Al Tair.

And I tried hard to look

but I couldn’t take my eyes off of you.

And I’m up here again by myself many years later

and there are two ghosts on the wind

casting their shadows on the Milky Way

two black holes in time

that took it all in

then disappeared.

We didn’t separate.

We just evaporated into thin air

and I can hear the flowers saying

in their small damaged voices

I’d rather die than put up with this time of year.

Semi-hibernating raccoons

and the occasional brown bear

looking for a last snack before sleep

before snow

before the flame of life

is turned down so low

it’s merely a candle living off

the lifespan of its own fat

just long enough to keep the dream

of what bears dream about alive

until hunger drives them out of their caves

twelve thousand years later

into a world they can no longer recognize

as the one that dressed up in their hides and their skulls

and spit-painted on their cave walls

and appealed to their power not to kill it outright

as it begged forgiveness for its trespass.

Bear magic on Foley Mountain.

Ursa Major in starlight.

And for awhile I thought you might be

my circumpolar girlfriend

and I could be your mystic star map.

You had the right ascension as me

but the wrong declination

and like everything else

that’s ever led me out of the wilderness

like the only direction left to go in

you rose and set over my event horizon

and what had been the fixed stars of my eyes and heart

wandered off like fireflies and chimney sparks

into a darkness I could only imagine

enhances your shining somewhere

like a warm breath of life and light

hovering in the cold night air

as mine is exorcised here.

We breathe the stars in

and then we breathe them out

and it’s been going on like this

for thousands of light years.

Three more nights

and the moon will catch up to Jupiter.

You said you couldn’t be famous

standing in my shadow

but what you didn’t realize at the time

I was the shadow of your shining

whenever you approached the earth

like Venus on a moonless night.

But how remote it all seems now.

Encounters of the human kind

reverting like the unploughed fields around here

to something intimately alien and wild.

We embodied all these stars once.

We stood here on this mountain once together

and breathed these vacant interstellar spaces in

as if we could hold all of space and time

like a single drop of insight

into the circuitous blossoming

of our riverine hearts

and oceanic minds.

And what myth of spring fish

could fathom our depths

though it jump like Pisces into the boat?

Up here in my eagle-eyed eyrie

do these receding hills at my feet

remember anything as vividly as I do

as the sound of your voice when you spoke

and the mountain came down prophetically

like an avalanche of stone tablets

across the ups and downs

of the road that led us up here

to look into the empty beyond

as far as the light

we were given given to go by

whether it be the hundred billion stars

of Messier thirty-one

two million light-years away

like the sister galaxy you are to me tonight

just this smudge of light at eleven o’clock

above the middle star

of the constellation Andromeda

or a firefly in the spider mount of a parabolic mirror.

Sometimes you can notice things more clearly

that you can see head on at the time

out of the corner of your eye

as you look away from your line of sight

astronomical units of light later.

I have come back to those moments

from so long ago

like time with an expanded field of vision

of wildflowers dying all over the mountain

like cornflowers in the grave of a Neanderthal

incarnadined by red ochre

though none were ever buried here

we still share this common ground of death

or Indian tobacco at the eastern gates of the burial hut

of an Algonquin who once stood here as I did

and gazed upon the moon in wonder

estranged by the wound of the rapture

just moments before he disappeared for good

into the bone-box of his having been here once

to amaze his solitude with precipitous stars

looking up from the godless pulpit of Spy Rock.

The cedars sway in the wind

like children learning to swim beside a pool

ploughing the air with their arms.

And the shadows tremble

like the waters of life

inside the heartwood of a rootless tree

the moon ripples with forgotten springs

that once made the fish jump at fireflies

wavelengths out of reach of their eyes.

Sight is a kind of love.

As above so below

like the palindrome of the moon goddess Anna

in the Arabic jana

the English heaven

and the Greek ouranos

Romanized into Uranus analeptically.

O what a brutal exchange.

All that life and light and love

all those stars

all that seeing

just to exhume a few dead metaphors

and breathe a little life into them

as if you were giving

mouth to mouth

heart to heart

spirit to spirit

resuscitation to words

that once saw their whole life flash before them

before they drowned

up to their necks and out of their depths in stars.

PATRICK WHITE

LISTEN WELL IN THE DARK MORNING

LISTEN WELL IN THE DARK MORNING

Listen well in the dark morning

before the honey bell calls your name

to what the silence means

really means

when there’s nothing at all

not a bird not a voice

no syllabaries of bees in a Mason Jar

no drunks on the street

no tuning forks amending the frosty flowers

just dirty windows

trying to believe in stars.

O my poor wretched culpable humanity

my complicit familiar

the holy infidel of my lonely crusade of one

how often has time bruised our hearts

like a still life on the moon

with burnt loaves

and laurel-edged bread knives

sword dancing on a testy precipice

thorns on the tips of our tongues

like two leeches overwhelmed

by a miscarriage of haemorrhaging roses?

I sit across from you now

no salt on the table

an ambiguity facing a paradox

and say grace over our poverty and hunger

for what we have not received

asking only this of the mirage

we share with one another

that the clarity of the silence

that reveals us to each other

not be smudged by the usual obscurities.

The sky is pouring blue wine

into the tear-stained goblets of the windows.

But you and I will pop the cork

on all those messages of help we sent out

like ice-bergs in a bottle

that came back unanswered

with no forwarding address

post-marked Atlantis

by some anonymous water clock.

Here’s to you my fumarole, my watershed

my empty wishing well full of hopeless blue moons

that blighted the sheaf of wheat in the hand of the virgin.

Here’s to all the nice-trys you made

tilting at me quixotically

like the dragon-slayer you are not.

We grow old together stranded

on this most inhospitable of planets,

two halves of the same hourglass

that’s keeping us afloat like a pair of lungs

or waterwings in a desert of stars

fatal as quicksand.

I’m the timing

and you’re the content

and though we share the same medium

you seem more of a message than I am.

I have to wash my brain in antiseptic lizard blood

at least twice a day

just to stay sane in a world

I can only look upon in demonic disgust.

I look at the stars of the Milky Way

streaming across the night

and all I can see is a radioactive leak

flowing down into the Sharbot Lake watershed

or a snail smearing the black purity of an occult mirror

with its nose.

The sewage of the world

runs down into me in this low place

but more of a beknighted hypocrite than I am

you’re the fulcrum of the spring and autumn equinox

and I’m the solsticial extreme.

The same pair of blue eyes

but you’re the dextrous one

that’s kept busy by hope

and I’m the left hand of everything

that’s clear and sinister.

I haven’t made my peace with you yet

but we’ve managed to maintain a truce awhile.

We’ve got a pipe line in common.

Blue Flower. Black Dog.

Can’t say what I’d do

if I ever got off this food chain.

But you’ve got a star map in your hope chest

gleaming with first magnitude ideals

and a heart like a broken toe in a cast

you keep stubbing on the rock of the world.

You think the mind made the body

and the whole thing is just one vast intelligence

that we’re all amazed to be part of

like a neuron with fifty million connections to the brain.

But I know whose belly you came out of

slippery with birth

and where you see a social democratic cosmology

bright with happy stars

I spy with my little eye

a splitting migraine.

I’m the vehicle

and you’re the ghost in the machine.

I’m the engine

and you’re the destination

with both hands on the wheel

that keeps pushing you around

like an upturned planet in an aberrant orbit.

You look for fireflies of mystic insight in your vertigo.

But I’m the thermal under your wings

and the cold star in the hawk’s eye

scanning the ice-caked fields

for anything that moves.

You see signs of growth under the snow.

For you something’s always about to happen.

I shine down on the Stone Age

and there’s nothing new under the sun.

The simians are still flint knapping ballistic missiles.

An aristocracy of trees

has been replaced by a democracy of grass.

Of the two of us you’re the more lunar.

A moon of cool bliss.

I’m the black sun that shines at midnight

intense as global warming when I’m up,

detached as the dawn of a nuclear winter

when I’m down.

But lately I’ve noticed

how I’m softening into you

and you’re hardening into me

and maybe together we’ll make a stronger alloy

of this two-edged sword between us

than all that voodoo alchemy

you used to practise could have achieved

by casting all those philosopher’s stones

like he who is without sin

at the reticence of my base metal

to be anything other than what it is

refusing to be turned like a rat

as you’ve been trying for years now

into your motherlode of gold.

Maybe we’ll learn to get along like hinges

or a pair of wings

Chinese chopsticks

or a centipede of Viking oars.

Who can say?

Sooner or later everything turns into its opposite.

Every genius must sometime or other

get feet of clay

and embrace kind of polymorphous cliche

as if he were laying his head down

on the breast of his mother

like a son who’s come home at last.

Life’s funny that way.

The good are cursed as messiahs

and the bad are martyrs to the cause

and the rest of everyone else

dogpaddling in their blow holes in purgatory

are the slaughter of the innocents at a seal hunt.

And, hey, it isn’t as if it hasn’t occurred to me more than once

how cool it would be by contrast

to lay my head down

like a freshly baked homemade loaf of bread

on a September country windowsill.

There are nights when even dark matter

smitten by their radiance though it might be

finds the stars a bit tedious

in the way they keep breaking their light up

like loaves and fishes on a hillside

with everyone

until we’re both left sitting here in the dark

with the hydro turned off

and you with your energy saving halo on

still trying to save the planet from itself

and me with my horns fully extended like lightning rods

trying to hook a ride out of here

on a black flash of serpent fire

that runs like an open highway

all the way up my spine

and out of the top of my skull

like the exorcism of one too many cosmic insights

into the pettiness of things

that are vacantly bright and darkly full

like a black mirror endlessly reflected in a white.

Blue Flower. Black Dog.

One

the ghost of a dying swan in the fog

trying not to cast a shadow

on its own reflection in a cloud of unknowing

and the inextinguishable other

smoke from a smouldering phoenix

with a chip on its shoulder the size

of an eclipse with a bad attitude

that doesn’t care whose eyes it gets in.

Butterfly in a dragon’s mouth.

Goldfish in a shark bowl.

It’s gone well beyond crying

because tears don’t have much

of a sense of curiosity

and the blood that’s been spilled between brothers

has sealed two polarized halves of the same heart

into an oxymoronic concordat

like dead air in the eye of a hurricane

in the womb of the same dark mother.

Even so

the dragon slayers are dying to know

what those they’ve slain are laughing at like crows.

PATRICK WHITE

O LADY WHAT WOULD IT TAKE

O LADY WHAT WOULD IT TAKE

O Lady what would it take to get you to believe

I’d say almost anything to get into your pants

those lips those eyes those hips those thighs

those breasts like new snow on the mountain slopes

and that marachino cherry ass of yours

so self-possessed that it never leaves anyone in any doubt

when it leaves the room

who’s sitting on top of things

and what someone with a business sense for beauty

looks like when she’s got her shit together.

O Lady you’d know right away

if I weren’t willing to lie to you,

mythically inflate the truth,

bend space into gravitational eyes,

turn my black holes into wishing wells

and release thousands of fireflies like political prisoners

to convince you of how sincere I am

you should have a national anthem of your own

I would be far more culpable in your eyes

of being a dull boy as my mother used to call me

whenever I asked her to explain something

that everyone understood

couldn’t be put into words

like a feel for life

that touched its black and whites lightly

like the music at your fingertips

that never needed to consult the truth

like a voice coach

to hit those high notes an octave of silence

higher and lower than the stars in its throat

nesting like birds in the chimney.

Paddy, she’d say, don’t be a dull boy

and I could almost taste what she meant.

So if my tongue doesn’t stick to the truth like flypaper

blame it on my mother.

I’m just trying to be kind to butterflies

when I bait the traplines of the truth

with the third eyes of sapphire dreamcatchers

I hung over the dowdy windows of the sky

like thirteen houses of a whole new zodiac

you can firewalk through like the moon

without burning your delicate blue feet

with their morning glory skin on the stars.

O lady what would it take to get you to believe

that just because I add a little mystic charisma to the mix

and sugar coat my tongue with fireflies

and the pollen of wild irises

just to add a little lustre to the honey

I’m not just another witchdoctor in a trance of tinfoil

casting for mermaids on the moon like Captain Hook.

What an offence to a work of genius

if the truth just stood there like a mediocrity

without any superlatives in its vocabulary

to go any deeper into the inner vision of the artist

who mastered his solitude

by painting you in the flesh

than to put it under a microscope and say

at least he got the eyes right.

Why blight a ripe tomato in the sun

with forebodings of the obvious

when its skin is as smooth and spotless as yours?

If I take down the rotten curtains

of an abandoned one room school house

like spider webs from an obsolete star map

and replace them with the veils of the Queen of Heaven

and the cool mulberry silks of the aurora borealis

that whisper like ancient wavelengths of night

whenever the wind blows through them

like an eerie lyric of longing and light,

I’m not mixing rainbows and oil slicks

to artificially purple the truth with wild grapes

to take the spit and vinegar out of it.

I’m not washing the windows in wine

just to dazzle the sky with my polish.

Who approaches any ideal of beauty and lust

like a cleaning rag

and asks it to wipe its make-up off

as if somehow holding up a face like yours to a mirror

were a way of lying to it?

Flowers aren’t afraid of colourful metaphors

and the truth isn’t always a Protestant.

Sometimes it’s an apostate pagan behind a mask

that rains on it own ghost dance

like a watercolour at dawn.

O Lady what’s it going to take to get you to believe

that when the moon breaks through the crowns

of the ironwood trees like the white goddess

undoing her bodice in the sacred groves

where she goes to renew her virginity

among the unicorns dipping their horns

in their own toxicity

like a taste of their own medicine

to temper the heat of the waters

before she gets in

the nightbird on her cold shoulder

isn’t bearing false witness because it sings.

What shepherd moon of your beauty born so lowly

that he would approach

the lapis lazuli Bull gates

of the Whore of Babylon in prose?

Who talks to the moon

as if they were grazing a herd of goats in the Colosseum

when they know she’s listening for wolves in the wild

that know how to howl like unrequited lunatics

for the muse of the madness that inspires them

to go crazy under her window?

Would it be anymore plausible

if I showed up every moon rise

with a choir of frenzied Luna moths

flapping their wings against the bug screen

like castanets in the hands of wallflowers

looking for someone to dance with

to laud your candlepower

like a Byzantine scholar

with a vocabulary of mechanical birds

who can’t wait to get into you

like a third-degree burn

in the urns of the ashes of the truth?

O Lady what would it take to get you to believe

that there are some rare moments in life

when the truth can’t be expressed

by a middling ghost writer with a pen in his hand

fiddling for the main theme of a journalistic novel

to record his encounter with epiphanous beauty

like an interview with the ocean

he swallowed hook line and sinker

from the dry fountain mouths

of credibly quotable unnamed sources?

Sometimes it takes a poetic heretic

half out of his mind with desire

to step over the line

out of sync with the choir

and drag his own stake to the fire

to do it the justice it deserves.

PATRICK WHITE

HE KEPT SAYING TO HIMSELF

HE KEPT SAYING TO HIMSELF

He kept saying to himself

it’s not that hard to know the truth.

The truth is what you see

when there’s no one else there

to witness you witnessing it.

When your nakedness lets you be you

without worrying too much

about who that is.

He kept saying to himself

the truth is the infinite elaboration

of an archetypal fractal.

Keep it simple and austere.

The truth is a subatomic shapeshifter.

When you look at it it acts like a particle.

Turn away and it’s a wavelength beyond comprehension.

The swords of the cannoneer cattails

banged on him like a shield in passing

as he covered his eyes

to bull his way through the underbrush

heaving his mud-caked legs

over the hurtles of the fallen birches.

What animal ever moved

with as much clamour and damage as this

as it nosed it way along the soft lakeshore at dusk?

He kept saying to himself

since when has the silence

ever needed anyone to speak up on its behalf?

What idiot spreads a starmap out on a table

to show space where it’s located

or tell time what hour it is

though neither of them have asked?

He kept saying to himself

like a swamp that reeks of enlightenment

now watch where you step

as he monkeyed himself up

a jawbone of grey rocks

to a thin pate of yellow grass

that looked as if someone

had bleached their hair too much.

He kept saying to himself

as he lay upon his side on the ground

and watched the wavelets on the lake making jewellery

and spotted the two great blue herons

on the far shore

standing like gatekeepers

among the dishevelled palisade

of dead trees with its stakes all askew

like an abandoned Iroquois village

that was content to forget what it knew of pain in silence;

he kept saying to himself

because his thoughts were as inter-reflective

as sky and water

nothing needs to be here

none of this

not the herons the lake or me

and yet here we are large as life

each facilitating the other’s interdependent origination

whether we like it understand it embrace it or not

everyone’s the matrix of everyone else.

The waters of life have made a waterclock of the womb

and the day we stop being born

is just a short bridge of water away

from the next bucket of being

that pulls us like a rabbit

out of the top hat of a wishing well.

His eyes tweaked by the occasional glimpse

of the silver eyelash of a star

in the blue-green sheen of the peacock air

breaking through the Persian silks of the sky

as the sun goes down with Venus in its wake

he kept saying to himself

it’s all picture-music without meaning

you can hear in your blood

with your eyes

at your fingertips

on the nape of your neck

like the breath of a friend

or the breathless scent of an enemy

who’s finally caught up with you

like loveletters and death threats from the past

that forgot what they were going to say

when they were given a chance to speak.

He kept saying to himself

as he watched the aerial ballet of swallows and bats

swooping down low over the water

through the starclusters of frenzied gnats in ecstasy

over their fifteen minutes of fame in the after light of the sun

bleeding out on the horizon

what could it add to their bliss

if everyone of them were to have a star named after them?

He lingered in the ruthless beauty

of the spontaneous inconsequence of all this

and felt even less employed than they

as a witness who wasn’t called upon

to provide an alibi

for his awareness of the creative liberties

and impersonal risks life takes with itself

like an isolated imagination

with no more motive or purpose

than the wind when it plays

with the waves and the leaves

and taunts the the autumn willows

to drop their veils

like rotten curtains

blowing ghosts out the windows

of an abandoned one room schoolhouse.

Nothing to learn.

Nothing to teach.

Nothing to conceal or reveal.

No paradigms of spontaneity

out of reach of the mind

that grasps at them

like air and light and water

he kept saying to himself

as he felt the darkness

alert his eyes to a deeper vigilance

opportunistically alive in the woods

watching the anomaly of his presence here

from deep within

like a snapping turtle looking up at waterbirds

like a pair of wire-cutters

sticking out of a tool box

at a no trespassing sign in peril

of taking its purple passage too literally

to heed its own warning to drop everything

and take to the air

before it’s pulled down under

like Cygnus into the starmud of the cosmic Id.

Here self-reflection comes to die

like a third eye in a graveyard of mirrors

that can no longer recognize their own seeing

in whatever appears before them

as the unlikely similitude of a sentient being.

He kept telling himself

you can’t raise a phoenix out of a sumac

when its flightfeathers are falling all around you

like Icarus out of the sun

and expect to find your way out of here

by asking a fire pit of ashes and smoke

how far to the next manger

with a star overhead

before it gets too dark to see where you’re going.

He rose to his feet

as if they had somewhere else to go

and followed a deer path up

through a thicket of excruciating hawthorn

that raked his skin like the needles of old record players

screeching across all 78 rpms of the celestial spheres

trying to torture the truth out of him

like petty inquisitors who had all the right answers

to a man who had forfeited his soul

for the courage to ask all the wrong questions

as he kept saying to himself

as if he were standing in front of a mirror

and not by the shore of a lake

if you take the dark glass away from your eye

everything will become clear as night.

If you take the dark glass away from your eye

everything will become clear as night.

He saw the Summer Triangle capsizing in the west

and the Pleiades like a profusion of insights

at the tail end of Perseus

holding the Medusa’s severed head

up to the mobs of enlightened ghouls

gawking in in a bliss of bloodlust

to discover that the light

was no less heartless than the dark

when it comes to blooding its abstractions.

He walked through constellations of spiderwebs

the sun had moved out of

like a jewel out of the house of a dreamcatcher

so far beyond repair

it forgot timing was as important as content

and expired like an out of date calendar

with nothing left to celebrate.

And he kept saying to himself

nothing lasts forever

not even time

and there are holes in the nets

the Circlet of the Western Fish could swim through

like hanged men who fell through a noose

toward paradise

as easily as threading their blood

through the eye of a needle.

No more rites of passage.

No more luminous renewals.

No more transits of nadir and zenith

in chains forged from unlucky horseshoes

or the triumphal wreaths of olive emperors.

The feast of life a mere table of contents

after a long prelude of taboos

that weren’t worth the menus they were written on

once the real dragons were sedated in zoos.

The trespassers not up to their own temptations

and even the great desecrators and idol slayers

indifferent to their salvation through sin

just so many snakes sewn into a bag

and drowned in the river with Rasputin.

And rarer still that atrocity

that can trouble a child’s dreams

who lullabies a voodoo doll to sleep in her arms at night

because today’s passive victim

is tomorrow’s active participant.

He heard the chronic lapping of bare-footed waves

stubbing their toes on the rocks below

when they tried to walk across the lake without a lifeboat

and went down with all hands aboard

and he kept saying to himself

when the wind dies down

only horses and slaves are drowned in the doldrums

and the rest are left to endure their grim continuance

watching their sails wither like waterlilies at anchor

moored to the docks of an empty-handed port

like a return voyage that never left home.

And he kept on saying to himself

be a good explorer and mount

a northwest expedition through death.

Grind your way out of here if you must

like the visionary glacier that once

gouged out the eye-sockets of these lakes

as if they were milling starwheat on stone.

And let the tears you’ve shed

to absolve yourself of yourself

he kept on saying to himself

over the course of a lifetime thaw and gather here

so that the crow the beaver the muskrat

the shrew the mole the bear the deer the bush wolf

the pike the trout and the small-mouthed bass

can drink from their own reflections

as they appear and disappear in your eyes.

And let the Algonquian women beat the wild rice

into their laps and the prows of their birch bark canoes

under a full moon that buffs their stealth with laughter

ride low in the water with the bounty of life.

As he pulled his foot out of the cleft of a root

and regained his balance

by putting all his weight on the other

like a heron when it’s spear fishing on the moon

he kept on saying to himself

you don’t have to go as far as the stars

to discover the origin of everything

when fireflies are a lot closer to home

and their light is infinitely more intimate.

A fish jumps at the stars

as he makes a path of least resistance

through the junipers and basswood trees

and the lake dilates with ripples

like a mind at peace with itself.

Dark energy accelerates his eyes

at the same velocity as the expanding universe

and looking into the starless voids ahead

he keeps saying to himself

one more insight one more insight

one insight more

like Venus in the dawn

and everything will break into light

like gold pouring out of dark ore

like life sprouting out of a dead stump

like a nightbird with a wounded song

falling like a feather of feeling

out of the immensities it encompasses

within its wingspan

as if that alone were enough

to tip the scales of life and death in its favour.

He steps into a clearing like a red-tailed hawk

into the eye of a storm

where some unknown local

had planted a secret garden years ago

that had gone on growing without them

far off the gravel road where the cars

growled by like bears

and no one could see it

and he keeps on saying to himself

if I’m not meant to be here

even in this happenstantial kind of way

for whom did these flowers bloom

and these rocks flint knapped from the Canadian Shield

be gathered here like Stonehenge

so that time could sacrifice its virginity

to the spring equinox

and the last of the wild geese high overhead

returning the souls of the dead

like water to its watershed

and the swallows and Monarch butterflies

who paused here to add their inflections to the palatte

know what hour it is?

A billion pine needles

from as many lost compasses and clocks

softens the ground he walks on

and pungently greens the air

with the fragrance of thick dolorous tears

running down the bark of old love affairs

that never stopped bleeding out.

And there the New England asters

who batted their violet eyelashes

at the stars all summer long

to catch their attention

hags of the last frost that killed them

like the cold shoulder of a disinterested universe.

And he keeps saying to himself

like a mantra under the duff of his heart

it doesn’t matter whose ghost

was meant to be summoned to this stranger’s garden

like the memory of some cherished intimacy

long past the point of no return

slipped under the door

that’s hinged like the earth is to the sun

to our exits and entrances

like a parting note of farewell

as profoundly poignant as autumn in passing;

all that matters is that someone anyone

however lost or overwhelmed by despair

however helpless or alone

however far from the nearest fire

makes their way through the dark

to a moonlit clearing in the woods

just to sit by a secret garden of their own

and watching their breath

like a wraith on the cold night air

answer it like a prayer

that went off into the unknown

like a thread of smoke from a dying candle

without appealing to the stars for anything.

Just to sit there without saying anything

no razor to your wrist

no complaint

no prophet in your belly

no spiritual lost and founds

looking for the lost innocence

of their missing children

no protest

no surrender

no serpent fire

burning up the ladders of your spine

until you’re frantic with the crazy wisdom

of realizing how much you can’t

and you’re looking for water on the moon

to quench your fever for life

no rejections or rendezvous

with fire-sprites or witchy manitous

no reason to be here

no reason you’re not

the silence not expecting a response

and the sound of life on the nightshift

while everyone else sleeps

and only a solitary watchman

to shine the occasional light

through the windows of their dreams

where what is and what appears to be

is reflected on both sides of the same translucency.

No muse to inspire an elegy to an unknown human

as if the earth itself weren’t enough of a headstone

to lay your head down upon

and listen to the deep underground voices of the dead

rooted in a garden that outgrew its sorrows

like the blood of a wild rose

left untempted in the wilderness

transcends its thorns with the beauty of a wound

that only a human exalted

by the spearhead of the same event

that humbles him to death

could suffer and celebrate in the same breath.

No mixed passions of starmud

that slip like Indian paintbrush and chicory

out of the palms of our hands

when the painter falls asleep

and the landscape finishes itself.

Just this small gesture of a shrine

this tiny enclosure of the heart

to some foregone human divinity

that once made it shine

like enamel buttercups

and scarlet columbine

tinkling in the spring rain

like wind chimes above the moss.

The ululations of a delinquent loon

couldn’t make the night feel

any more lonely than it already was

as he kept saying to himself

real not real

life is art.

Art is life.

The reality of delusion is art.

The delusion of reality is life.

There are toys in the wrack

of the worst catastrophes of life

and serial killers in the toy boxes of art.

You make it up like trout lilies and loosestrife

as you flow along with your own mindstream

like a leaf on the theme of your heart

whether you’re falling

into billions of individual degrees of separation

and the strong rope you were trying to climb up to heaven

frays on the edge of the world

into a million weak threads

of monadic drops of lonely water

working out the lyrics to go with the music

like wild irises in a secret garden that’s gone to seed.

Or you’re weeping like a chandelier

whose candles have gone out in a palace of light.

Or you’re the free-spirited genius of rain

the dispirited wizard of a starless night

or the nymph phase of a waterlily on the moon that died young

as the man said of the things

he just couldn’t keep to himself.

The mind is an artist.

Able to paint the worlds.

As someone here once saw something

that inspired them to paint

this prolifically sad human heartscape

like a bouquet of local wildflowers

and when they were done

and their eyes had gone with the light

from their vision of life

where a black sun always shines at midnight

and sets at dawn

left this palette of complementary emotions

like the fire pit of a phoenix

that’s flown south for the winter

with the spirit of the autumn leaves

that leaves us alone in a place like this

to add a few touches of our own.

Less blue in our longing for death.

More moon in the auras of life

and over there where

the ruby-throated hummingbirds

added their highlights like whole notes

to the picture-music of the wild grapevines

a deeper more loving delirium of stars

like the royal jewels of the underworld

inspired by the darkest muses

that ever shone a light

into the depths of the night in the eyes

of this most human of mysteries

burning in the crowns of the disrobed trees.

PATRICK WHITE

A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE

A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE

A man of no consequence can dress the way he likes. Can think what he thinks. Say what he says. Feel what he feels. And write the way he writes. And a woman with the soul of a nocturnal wildflower doesn’t have to live like a potted plant. She doesn’t need to sweep the stars off the stairs or wipe the blood off the bannister she can ride all the way to the bottom if she wants as if there were no end to her childhood. She can rest easy in herself like the sea. She can approach any of the myriad mindstreams that flow down into her life like a neophyte priestess at the Eleusinian Mysteries and not need to say a word of it to anyone. She can be the lone celebrant of the birthright of her silence. She can summon covens of nightbirds to secret groves of her occult sexuality and no one’s going to show up like a monkish match head and burn the whole forest down like all of womankind at the stake. And if a man of no consequence loves a woman of no consequence they put their heads and their fortunes together like two zeroes and everything is amplified a hundredfold like waterlilies no one ever sees but the stars that try to be so much like them. They don’t need to astound anyone with rainbows to change the mood of the mirror. They don’t try to waterproof their reflections like the heavy burdens celebrity lays on the playful buoyancy of bubbles like heavy slabs of indelible concrete on the sidewalks of fame. Who they are isn’t a name. And what they feel isn’t that easy to put a thumb of light on when there’s no one on stage.

Do you really want to be a rock star trophy chick in a zoo of wounded logos? You’re a good stripper. You work the pole like a serpent works the tree of knowledge until the whole snakepit is tempted to take a bite out the apple of your ass and begins to shed money like sexually frustrated autumn leaves hoping you can turn them green again. Your body is the full moon of an incantation over a cauldron of hormones. Like Circe you can turn sailors into swine. But doesn’t the trouble always start when you try to turn them back into men? And they bruise your heart by leaving you waving goodbye like an island at the end of a long pier you walk like a plank on a pirate ship, drying your tears on the skull and crossbones they left you for a souvenir? You’re no female buccaneer. And I’m not the secret starmap to your buried treasure where triple X marks your G-spot.

A man of no consequence without a lifeboat has nothing to fear from a witch when he washes up on her shores like a drowned sailor whose only attachment is to a gold earring to pay for a proper burial that isn’t unseemly in the eyes of his gods. He doesn’t fall in love like a lifeboat full of sharks scrambling to get out the water because it’s got people in it. A man of no consequence is just as happy ploughing his acre on the dark side of the moon as he is mending his nets to go fishing for a living by casting his constellations like birth signs over the lunar shadows schooling in the dead Sea of Tranquillity. It’s more than enough of an enlightenment to him if he can make his way in the dark by the light of a candle of love that the fiercest wolf on the wind can’t blow out. He doesn’t fall in love to blind others with his blazing. He doesn’t enter a dark room full of blind star-nosed moles groping among the roots of their feelings to get something to blossom like a galaxy flashing its bling like the supernovae of a pimp to his paparazzi. Love might be a hidden jewel that wished to be known but you’re coming on as if the light coming out of the dark were just another clever form of false advertising for a celebrity line of make-up. And it doesn’t really matter if a man of no consequence looks at the full moon in total eclipse face on or squints through a mask darkly to save his eyes, he turns the light around and looks for the first hint of a star in the darkness deep within. Intense heat. Unusual sprouts. A man of no consequence looks over the seed in his garden like a scarecrow until it begins to put out small tendrils of love that grow effortlessly with a little light and a little rain into the harvest wines of an unearthly rapture shedding the skins of earthly grapes. You can tell by the rivers that flow like lifelines on star maps down into the deltas of his eyes that a man of no consequence is spontaneously civilized enough to know what moves the waters of life in a vaginal canal to bloom like the moon and what acids of desire boil over like a snake pit of downed power lines spitting into a wishing well in lieu of rain to put them out like root fires the lightning started. A man of no consequence can stand like a prophet in the furnace of a firefly and light up the whole universe with the candlepower of his love without aspiring to any greater magnitude of radiance or reputation than the wavelength he’s already on. He doesn’t look for a brand name on his myth of origin. A dandelion’s as good as an orchid to him. He just plants flowers. And the hives with their ineluctable honey come like mysterious queen bees in progress through the kingdom of his habitable planet like propitious comets that are the envy of the starfields.

PATRICK WHITE

YOUR RAGE YOUR FURY YOUR FEROCITY

YOUR RAGE YOUR FURY YOUR FEROCITY

Your rage your fury your ferocity. Just flammable methane bubbles you’re blowing in a vulnerable atmosphere. Blood splatter when they break like roadkill and insects on the windshield of a driverless car. Not supernovae. Not deep sky viewing objects hung aloft your desecrated mangers trying to suck a few more wise men into believing they’re on the trail of something hot. I listen to you talk like a fifty calibre machine gun on the back of a Toyota pick up truck. You never take the shot at anyone personally but two people are always wounded and one pronounced dead on arrival as collateral damage of the ricochet. O, poppy mouth, you’re still a bad dealer dipping too deeply into the opioids of your own product. And the flags of your gypsy fires, even when you’re dancing naked, are always flying at half mast for someone you killed by accident in a drunken collision with dinosaurs who didn’t understand how much you’ve grown beyond them like a mammal. But I’ve seen you inspire ingenuous flute-players like a muse who irradiated sex and inspiration, and once they were enthralled by you and completely smitten like stone, I have seen you pick their hearts up by the tail and throw them into a snakepit and say let’s see if your music can soothe the savage breast of these oviparous wavelengths of sick genius. You come on like a blood diamond in an engagement ring betrothed to the stars but anyone with nightvision goggles on can see you’re a crystal rock among the asteroids. You’re global warming in a spoon. You’re a mini black hole in the solar system. And though you’re as prophetically edgy as a Pythian priestess you’re always a comet shy of recognition. Bitter, isn’t it, to be so wonderful, and still have people greet you like a Burmese python in a Florida swamp? I was born under the sign of Hermes Trismegistus and I can tell by the way you’re trying to wrap yourself around my winged staff like a pole-dancer to swallow the dove atop it whole you’re not a real healer. Just because you strip for prominent doctors like a caduceus shedding its skin doesn’t mean you’re into medicine or know the occult meaning of the sign of the winged messenger perched atop the axis mundi ascended by the stairwell of two copulating snakes entwined like bannisters and chromosomes. You might be the apple in the eyes of a convention of oculists charmed by what they see, but to me you’re just another medium that likes to kill the messenger who speaks from the deepest darkest wisdom of his heart. Beware the wings on the heels of the trickster who might gentle you like a morning dove with sweet promises of peace and love and inspiration until you feel tempted by his vulnerability to make a move on the birthmark of his innocence. Sometimes the nightbird that sings to you opens its talons like the crescents of the moon and strikes like an eagle. And it ascends to the heights it intends to drop you from on the crystal rocks down below like the constellation Draco wrapped around the north pole like a dragon that cannibalizes snakes that don’t know how to fly straight like a truce of broken arrows among the stars.

PATRICK WHITE