IT'S STRANGER TO CONCEIVE OF ME

IT’S STRANGER TO CONCEIVE OF ME

It’s stranger to conceive of me as I am

than to imagine that I’m someone else.

There’s more largesse in the early spring air.

You can tell by the tears that well up in their eyes

the glacial stars are beginning to thaw splinter by splinter

withdrawing their claws from the corpse of the snow

like thorns from the Lion’s paw overhead.

I can hear water in the creek tuning up

for the dance to come as soon as

the first violins of the crocuses get here,

the trout lily, the purple passage of the wild violet

under a leaf it took like a page from the book of autumn,

trout lily, hepatica, wood sorrel, grape hyacinth.

I like it here because it doesn’t matter who I am.

Things are alert and vivid with life because

they’re not threatened by the possession of it.

And time is a lot more honest

here where it lets its hair down

than it is back in town

where it’s always now, now, now,

and the streetlights, blinded by their own blazing

turn their backs on the stars

like the distant fires of native peoples

who preferred to dance to see

where they were going at night

than watch their step

like the next best real estate deal.

Even without intention, every time

I try to shape space with my mouth

and say this is who I am, this is me

whatever similitude I use I always feel

I’m exhuming a dead metaphor

from the coffin of a word

that’s been taken out of the context of the world

and put on display in a dream museum.

It’s as if I can relate the history of smoke

but not the flame that lived it.

As if one of these half-submerged skulls of rock

that have been trying

to pave their way across the creek

for as long as I’ve been crossing here

were to try and understand the mindstream

that’s been ploughing around them for lightyears,

not realizing what they’re rooted in like cornerstones,

are islands on the moon, mere shadows of water,

mirages on the tongue of those who have

never tasted it like their own blood

to know whether it was hot or cold,

blue or red, sweet or sour, real or not.

The earth can sleep a little longer yet

under this tapestry of snow while

the dreamweaver at the loom of the moon

is unravelling the threads of a thousand loose night creeks

the sea will gather up again into an oceanic consciousness

of the flying carpet of wavelengths and life themes

we’re riding on well out of reach of ourselves

like waterlilies in winter when it’s coldest,

and snowflakes on a furnace when it’s hot.

It’s as fun to say it as it is to play with hula hoops.

The ecliptic intersects the celestial equator

at the equinoctial colure and it’s spring

in the northern hemisphere. Canada geese

thread their way like rosaries of snake skulls

through the stars in the eyes of northern lakes

peeping through the cataracts of ice and clouds

breaking up like mirrors that can only

hold this pose of starmud for so long

before it’s time to change studios again

to keep up with the light

that’s trying to capture your likeness

like the whole of the sky on the skin

of a drop of the water of life

that reflects like a mirror

but sees through appearances

into the deeper darkness

like a gravitational lens of pure insight,

the lamp in the hand of the light that leads it

like a blind lighthouse to the perilous reefs

of morning on the moon among the corals.

Was I born to wonder what, who I am

or not, as is more highly probable?

Is the persistence of the question, the way

it makes you suddenly look up

from a seemingly unrelated matter

at the moon in the black walnut trees

or a bird in passing that commands your attention

without in the least meaning to

until everything but it feels like the intrusion.

Is the question on the agenda of the answer

or does it have a life of its own,

a journey that doesn’t end in a key?

I look at all these twisted forms of life,

not cast out, but abandoned, these

deadly gray limbs of swamp wood

silking their legs in the moonlight,

these mauled pines that look more like weather

than evergreens, the sparse, despirited crimson

of the ground willow paintbrushes

that have lost their handles in the snow

waiting like a newly primed canvas

for the first rose petal of blood

to fall from Virgo as a sign of consummation.

Things, forms, things of the world,

things of the bodymind that shapes them

out of starmud, out of the outer receptacles

of the five senses on each hand,

that conceives of a bee like a hollyhock

calling it into being like the fragrance

of something that was said, but wasn’t

meant to be heard by anyone else.

Animate and inanimate alike

a grammar of things, ritual magic

and we’re the diction,

we’re the verbs and nouns of the spell

that keeps us creating the world in tongues

so even as strangers we end up speaking

the same language as stones and stars and birds.

Maybe the question is just an answer

that’s travelled back in time from the future

to ask the prophetic skulls of its own ancestors

if any of them had foreseen what was to come?

Or the question is all and the answer is negligible?

Or left speechless, you achieve wisdom?

Or left unanswered, you awaken

your own creative freedom

like a world you didn’t know

you had it in you to make any way you want

in case this one doesn’t fit, you don’t have to bear it.

Absurd as it seems to seed your dreams

and expect to harvest them when you wake up,

and yet I’ve seen it happening all around me

every day of my life, objects, symbols, stars,

insights casting shadows of themselves

into the darkness as far as the light

they’ve been given to go by,

sowing the available dimensions of the future

with a world that isn’t so much said into being,

but arrayed lucidly before us

like eyes full of mystery that don’t reveal a thing.

I sit on this rock and I watch the night creek

until I can’t tell which one of us is flowing

and it occurs to me that maybe the question itself

is the crucial essential of my existential dilemma

and the answer’s only the temporary afterlife

of who I’m becoming now. Not as I appear;

not as the psychic life of a heart-broken mirror,

not as the mirage of a snowblind seer

who approachs the desert on my threshold with a broom

as if I were trying to keep house in an hourglass.

I don’t sweep the stars off my stairs.

I don’t follow a trail of breadcrumbs

in the corners of the eyes of last night’s dream

as if someone had been here before me.

I don’t pass myself off like counterfeit leaves in the spring.

Honesty isn’t a fact. And clarity isn’t a starmap.

And love’s only another religious con

if it isn’t wholly unconditional and inclusive.

I’m not looking for asylum in the abyss

like some petty alternative to living this

without knowing what this is or I am

or at least trying to get my ignorance

as close as humanly possible to it as I can

whether it’s aware of me, these stars, this

broken thatch of wild rice, wheat, and cattails, or not.

Then I will celebrate the creativity of its absence

with reverence and compassion for all

that it’s left in its wake like a sleepwalker

shaping this mindscape like a retreating glacier.

All that abide here with me tonight

like the gateless gate of an open mind

wondering if there’s anything left to catch up to

that embodies the dignity of the beginning

in the dead of winter, as apparently it does in the spring.

Or if we’re all words in a language

we’re just learning to speak on our own

that can point to anything, say anything

except themselves to themselves

whenever the question comes up

about whether they mean anything at all

when they’re not leaning on the world to exist

as we all do, trying to make sense of it

in this dumb-founded dialogue of wonder.

PATRICK WHITE

I LEFT YOUR IMAGE OF ME SHINING

I LEFT YOUR IMAGE OF ME SHINING

I left your image of me shining

just where you wanted it

in that glass menagerie

of broken mirrors

you’ve hung from the ceilings

like chandeliers

like constellations of frozen tears

in the thirteenth house

of the misbegotten

on the wrong side of the tracks

off the beaten paths of the zodiacs

that sometimes like to go slumming down here

when the sun shines at midnight

and the moon’s out of town.

I left the light on

but that star is long gone

past these extremities of shining

into the abyss of an unforeseeable future

that disappears into its own illumination

like an eye into its own seeing

or a bad likeness of God

into a human being.

I leave you handcuffed to the dead

like the Standard Model of the Universe

that lost it all

like the physics of the Mad Hatter

to the singularity at the bottom of a blackhole.

I would have met you half way like anti-matter.

I would have found a way

to bend that negative space

that so often distorts your face

into a more comely illusion of time

that isn’t stitched together so clumsily

like some patchwork bride of Frankenstein

taking it out on the mirrors

that keep dodging your reflection

by turning their eyes to the wall

everytime you insist

you’re the most beautiful of all.

So be it.

You are.

Good-bye.

You’re trying to impose

a habitable order on the universe

like the cube of the sphere of life

that would allow you to get by

like Tolstoy

who built a shoemaker’s hovel

in the middle of his aristocratic palace

to improve the commonality of his inferiors.

You’re like the Taj Mahal looking for a room to rent.

You’re a shore-hugger trying to teach

a jumper how to fall toward paradise

without a parachute.

And if I ignore your raging advice

as I do now and have done

it’s only because I play Russian roulette

with the lightning

and you come to the table with a cap-gun.

And I’m wholly at home

even immortally alone

in this compatible chaos

that improvises my life

sometimes as a dirty joke

I go along with for a lark

and other times

raises me up above

the web of my furthest horizons

like a spider that’s transcended clinging to anything

and dancing in my radiance

like a star that isn’t afraid of the dark.

Listen to me, woman.

I’m singing.

PATRICK WHITE

MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED

MY HEART SAID YES TO EVERYTHING MY MIND DENIED

My heart said yes to everything my mind denied.

Certain women, poetry, doorways, cosmic risks,

a few back country roads that knew enough not

to ask me where I was going that late at night.

My absurd familiarity with sacred clowns

and this ghost dance of stars I see in their eyes

whenever one of them makes me cry in remembrance

of some old rag of laughter that ran before the bulls

like a rodeo clown in a whiskey barrel of fermented sorrows.

I said yes to exile. I said yes to my homelessness.

I said yes to the reflection of the kid

in the broken window of the burning orphanage

he’d just pecked his way out of like the shell of a phoenix.

I said yes to the abyss, to nothing, to emptiness

to the purr of the tides of sand in a desert

combing out the manes of lion-fire

that bloom like spiritual ferocities on the wind.

And I said yes to the rocks on the mountainside

who repeated what my secret teachers had said.

If you’re still clinging to one placard of your freedom

you still haven’t truly let go. And I said yes

and jumped like a snake at cruising altitude

without a parachute into a sudden enlargement of everything

and said yes to the dragon of that transformation

as it took to the wing like a fire in a furnace.

Yes to the altars when it was time to sacrifice the hero

to the unattainable he surrendered in the name of.

Yes to the dark niches of love

when the candles have gone blind

so much like eye-sockets in a skull beside a wishing well.

Yes was a way of sharing what no

had a tendency of hoarding for a day that never came.

Yes is doing it for everyone. No

does it for no one and can’t even make it on its own.

There’s something fundamentally revolutionary

and heretical about yes that burns in cleaner fire

than the dirty holy water no washes its hands in

to rid itself of the matter once and for all.

No takes account of every injury like a mandarin

standing off in the shadows of a rain dance of willows

to see who prefers the moonrise to the lightning.

Yes hasn’t even figured out it’s wounded yet.

Yes is the sacred syllable that all others words aspire to.

Yes opens more eyes than there are stars to look at.

More flowers and doors and hearts to the mystery

than there are keys in the spirit’s lost and found

outside the gateless gates to paradise on earth

where no throws its crutches down as things

of no use anymore, and yes, the seed

that everything shape shifts out of

plants them all over the barren mountain side

like rootless trees with a path and a voice of their own

such that every time the lightning strikes another one down,

they say yes, and drop another pine cone

on the fire that will give birth to them

like an encyclopedic fortune-cookie

whose cup runneth over with assent.

And, yes, even as the night approaches me

like an animal it no longer has to be wary of,

as the shadows of the trees lengthen into rivers

that disappear into the oceanic deltas of the night

like the leafless boughs of the trees of life

slendering into the sky like smoke from a sacred fire.

And, yes, to the crazy wisdom of this life I’m dreaming

I’m living on behalf of someone else

wholly inconceivable to me, not shallow, not deep,

neither near nor far. Not the intimate familiar

of fireflies, nor yet a perfect stranger to the stars.

PATRICK WHITE

ANSWERING THE WOLF

ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.

Its agony, my own.

Its long howl of irreproachable pain

enough to silence the mountains

with trepidation before something holy.

Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses

pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.

The bounty of two happy hunters

kneeling beside their rifles

as if something had been accomplished

it would be worth telling their children about.

Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.

It can do this to anything that lives.

From blue algae to Auschwitz,

Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.

Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,

twenty-five million famished children a year,

an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.

Beyond wanting to know why

there’s this black spot

in people’s hearts and minds,

where sentience turns rabid,

where intelligence seems

the most inspired enabler of death,

where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,

how do you answer the innocence

of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?

Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.

You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out

with an X on your forehead

for a thousand excruciating transformations.

You kill a wolf. And the rivers

will turn against you and bide their time

until you come down to the water to drink

from your own blood-stained reflection.

The sun will begrudge you a shadow.

The wind feel fouled by your smell

like dead meat in your own house well.

Even the maggots who will come

to your heart one day

like undertakers and garbage-collectors

will look upon it not

as the virtue of a noble enemy

but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.

They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,

even the white-tailed buck laments

this atrocity of psychotic caprice

that slaughters simply because it can.

I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these

and the stars dip their spears in poison.

And I will dance around the fire with you

mad with grief at this wounded eye of life

and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask

to regret everything about me that is

pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.

To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.

Do this to our own. Do this to natives.

Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water

they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately

to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.

These kill to eat.

These eat to kill. You and all like you

who did and condone this, I ask you,

what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?

You never ravened for the meat;

was it their death that glutted your heart?

Were you compensating for some hidden impotence

giddy with the knowledge you could

extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?

Were you urinating on your own wombs,

the graves of your ancestors because

you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?

Are you angry at life because you were born?

Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?

I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos

you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,

bruising sacred ground without knowing

where it is you walk or the risk you take,

the danger you will encounter,

because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind

robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind

insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind

to find you when you least expect it

from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,

and exonerate the act in the abstract.

These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each

with a mystic specificity of its own,

wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal

each the work of some unknown muse of life,

the spontaneity of some lavish genius,

the inspiration of the same dark mother

that never creates the same masterpiece twice.

These had seeing, mind, emotion.

These had been touched by the mystery of life

and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains

offered their delirium up to the moon

like drunks beneath a vacant window

singing to their own reflections. These

accepted their homelessness in this strange place

without doing it any harm as if

there were no other place they could belong to.

These were at peace with themselves and the earth

in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.

These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.

These were noble without lording it over anyone.

Were they executed for their innocence?

Was there not enough room in your cage

for their kind of freedom? Did you envy

an understanding they had among each other

you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years

you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy

staring back at the glass eyes of the animals

looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo

with the pity of the unaccusing

that anything that’s ever lived

could be so full of self-hatred,

so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves

in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,

from blue algae on over to blue whales,

could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,

could be so vindictively blind

they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars

and finger the braille of the bullet holes

they’ve put in the side of their coffins

like a mailbox with a return address on it

than open their own and read the writing on the wall.

Does Cain still blame God

that his sacrifice was unacceptable?

The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?

The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?

So you murder your brother

and then you murder the animals

as if they somehow let you down.

And in the death shroud of the dark mother

she sends a crow not a dove,

not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome

to teach you how to bury the dead,

to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted

with meat and bullets and how they only bloom

and come to fruition in you

like self-inflicted wounds square

in the third eye of your own infertility.

There used to be hunters wise enough to know

the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift

not something they ripped off like a petty thief.

Now when they catch a whiff of you coming

it isn’t a hunter they run from but

that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death

that clings to the skin of an undertaker

who moonlights as a serial killer

in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLONDE SHOCK

THE BLONDE SHOCK

The blonde shock of wild sea grass from New Brunswick.

At first I thought it was your hair.

And tiny beads of iridescent peacock seeds

as small as the myriad hopes of a poppy

she’ll come again

that fell out of the envelope

into my coffee

as a muse of patchouli oil

inspired the air like an Egyptian temple

tending to the rites of Isis

when the moon’s in the nymph phase

of her ancient seduction.

And a drawing of a rainbow phoenix

in the form of a flower

and a money-order for five hundred dollars

to paint violet horns

on the black inverted star

with its plinths open like legs

giving birth to helical vines and snakes.

A symbolic tattoo

that means you

that will hang like a flag from your spine

down your back

as a sign of whose country it is

should anyone ever get lost.

You’re right.

You can’t draw butterflies.

But your darkness intrigues.

Your light is true to its star.

Space bends around you like water.

And there’s not a chained tree

in the whole of your wilderness.

The gates of your rivers are open and free

as the salmon who jump them

conjured out of the sea

by the siren who sings to them

like a journey of things to come

at the end of the long way home.

Love breathes life into death

and even on the fly

love is the prime circumstance of now.

And I feel the gold of your harvest in every seed.

And there’s no scarecrow with a sword

trying to defeat the ploughshare

it was born from

like the moon as it moves

like a white horse

through a wounded valley

looking for its lost rider

somewhere out there like the wind.

I’ve been blinded by squalls of stars before

the sphinx blew in my face

and I have felt my eyes

evaporate in the blazing

of certain fireflies

who could read the braille of my face

like elegant fingertips of light

deciphering the writing on the wall.

And I’ve lived through it all like space

whether I was a celestial snakepit of passion

with a mouse for a heart

or I was blowing kisses

like the petals of bruised flowers

into the grave of an enlightened starfish

passing by in a deathcart.

And sometimes the geni gets his wish

by rubbing the lamp on the inside

and asking the night to need him

like water needs a fish

like fire needs a tree

like air needs a bird

like earth an unpoached elephant.

I’m not a species bent on martyrdom

to any cause lesser than the love

I aspire to

and I won’t burn my eyes

on insincere candles at a black mass

or the votive fires of delusional crucifixions

that yearn without conviction

for a better infancy in their afterlife.

Things have been tough

but I still go to bed at night

with the door wide open

as hope to folly

to catch a thief

that might put the moon back

she stole from my window

like the coin from my mouth

I had hoped would pay for my passage.

And I’ve been given up

like the sea gives up its dead

like the ghosts of old cliches

to the voice of a new medium

and I’ve discovered

that love isn’t the forensic history

of a mystery that can be cracked by the truth.

It’s apocalyptic lightyears beyond both

like a prophecy

uttered in the secrecy of your solitude

that can only be overheard

with your eyes.

And there is no age in it

no youth that leaves the stage

a wiser happier skeleton

no shrines to spring

no pyres of autumn.

It isn’t the beginning or end of anything

that wanders in a world of forms

like a road with all the answers

to questions it never stops to ask.

Love isn’t a lost cause

looking for someone to take a risk.

And it isn’t the silence

it isn’t the singing

it isn’t the longing

to be pulled out like the lucky straw

in a random draw among exiles

to decide who should go first.

It isn’t a thumb in a plum pie.

It isn’t the kiss that lifted the curse.

Or a lifeboat on the moon

that overturns like a blessing

that only makes matters worse.

And it would be unforgivably spacious of me

though I have loved long and intensely

to say what love is

when it wings its own immensity

like a nightbird of blood

that sheds its hood

to fly among the stars

like a fire feathering its own solitude.

But if I were to say anything

I would say

love might be a mighty sword

drawn from a dark ore

tempered in secret waters on the moon

enfolded like time in space

like a worldly loveletter

in a cosmic envelope

with a return address by the sea

that keeps faith with its prey

by giving its word to life

it’s not the expedience of the slayer

or the obedience of the slain

not the exaltation of joy in death

or the mystic terror there is in birth

that calls the lightning down

to make the weathervane crow at midnight:

I have tasted the light on my tongue

like the tine of a new direction.

A dragon sheds it skin

like the ashes of a spent fire.

And the serpents of desire

dance to the flutes

of a lyrical resurrection

like words that take

their meaning from us

when love’s the native language,

the grammar, the muse, the voice, the silence

the playfully profound way the picture-music

hides like a Rosetta stone

that doesn’t want to be found

like a key to the meaning of everything

when we’re what it’s trying to say.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU KEEP LOOKING

YOU KEEP LOOKING

You keep looking for meaning in a world

you say hasn’t given you one

worth living for

and you’re down and disappointed

and all that red passion

that used to burn like books and leaves

has turned as mystically brown

as the background of a Rembrandt painting

or gone up in smoke

at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Now you’re a copycat Savanarola

in a faculty lounge

trying to turn God back like the Renaissance

for behaving like the Medici.

You used to be a little on the teachy side

but now you’re boring and preachy

having settled the whole issue

of what you’re doing on earth like a fist.

You once went looking for the point of life like a grail.

Now you plunge it through everyone’s heart like a spear.

Like the terrible angel at the garden-gate

to prove you’re sincere as fire

you’re ready to kill anyone

who likes what they see in the mirror

that never wears the same face twice

when it looks at you.

The truth is

since you’re fond of the word

you never found a meaning big enough

to accommodate that Delphic python of an ego

that’s kept sloughing you like skin over the years.

You were always too big

for any chrysalis or cocoon you ever crawled into

and the greatest miracle of transformation

as far as you were concerned

is the shape you took in the womb

like the pearl of the moon

from a grain of dirt

at the bottom of a seascape.

What unified field theory could ever contain you

like some cosmic Houdini in chains and locks

twisting upside down over a snakepit of thoughts

trying to think your way out of the box

as if you were the ultimate escape-artist

and could pour the universe out of the universe?

Even space wasn’t enough of an embrace

to hold you

and now time’s given up on you as well.

Eleven dimensions were never enough

to take your measure.

You wanted to be the golden Buddha

that wormed its way into the heart

of an enlightened rose.

The blackhole in the heart of the galaxy.

The exception that became the rule.

But you never understood

the candle of life that burns within us all

sheds more than one petal

over the course of a lifetime

spent gazing at the flame

fixed in the seeming stillness

like a flower that blooms in fire

every two thousand years

you can’t look at with the same eyes twice.

You never understood that when you look at things

long enough with an open heart

and an unbounded mind

they estrange your eyes

into new ways of seeing.

They bring you into being

like a star turning in its own light

or dark jewels of anti-matter

to see what value

you might place on them

when the gem looks through its own eyes

into the radiance of life without an appraiser.

But the flaws in perfection

are the laws of a fool

or to secularize a mystic dictum

the same eyes by which you see them

are the eyes by which they see you.

Two dunces on the same stool.

One a myth of origin

that got lost in its own meaning

chasing its own tail to see where it begins

and the other the head of a reform school

for black matter

absentee without permission.

Two abnormalities

looking for reality

in the corners of the human condition

that baffles it with the clarity

of a hundred million books

giving private lap dances

in sheep-eyed sylvan nooks

for the savage wolf-popes

with shepherd’s crooks

whose greed is the meaning of prayer.

But the universe whispers itself

into its own ear like a secret

even it couldn’t keep to itself

and everything in existence

from starfish galaxy to solitary night bird

cherishes what they’ve heard

each in their own awareness

not of the word at the beginning of things

as if things were created out of choice

but of the voice behind it

that sings freely to each alone

in the silence of their solitude

like a fountain-mouth of light

that lavishes the world on everyone

without intention or design

as if everyone were privvy to the same mind

and it were thinking out loud

in the picture-music of colours

you can only see

before the arising of signs.

That’s why it looks empty and dark

beyond the blazing billboards

of your highway paradigms.

And for someone like you

who prefers to jump into snakepits

to ask for directions

when the whole world is free-falling

without a map or parachute

through a bottomless abyss

without any sense of up or down

it must dwarf you the same as it does

a featherless bird breaking out of the egg

like a new universe into a nest of flying serpents.

Daring says feathers

and falling takes flight

because it’s in the nature of the abyss

to heal itself like wounded water

when it bathes in its own light

like light and stars

or snakes in the talons of eagles

the lowest of the low

raised up to the highest of the high

like a constellation

when they suddenly realize

in the annihilation of opposites

how dragons win their wings.

You ask fraudulent questions

and expect honest answers.

You try to define what you’re seeking

even before you look.

You stir the starmud in the mirror

to make things clearer

but you still end up looking at things

with dirty eyes.

And out of the darkness

like bats to burdock

blinded by that porchlight of a mind

you keep on all night

in a frenzy of insects

your thoughts are glued

like kites that flew into the powerlines

or flies into a spider-web

of sticky views

on how to keep it together

like a shepherd of clouds

trying to pasture the weather

in the starfields of a mountain sky.

You want to be the mystic arachnid

with fangs like the moon

and radiant elixirs for toxins

you can cook in a spoon

without flagging the fit

with a pennant of blood

that puts its cosmic armour on

and shouldering its lance like a syringe

tilts at the windmill of your arm

like the meaning of Don Quixote

lost like a peduncle in the ensuing phylum

of a species that went extinct

for refusing to adapt

to a reformed chaos theory of evolution

flintknapping the future fossils

of an improved Stone Age.

You keep thinking

if you roll enough rocks up a hill

like Sisyphus

you can build a fortress

or the Al Hambra

or the Taj Mahal

or even the Parthenon

but things just keep coming down on you

like an avalanche down from the world mountain

into the valley of the kings

where the mummies wait for their afterlives

under pyramids of quicksand.

Only a fool would spend a whole lifetime

trying to learn

what he already knows.

In order to understand such a thing

one must be such a person.

Already being such a person

why bother to understand such a thing?

You’re trying to map

the stars in your genome

to find your constellation

like a long lost home

that walked out on you like a threshold

when you went a step too far

and added yourself like a big capital I

to the beginning of that tongue-tied alphabet

that made profound spelling-mistakes

in your amino acids

the moment you started

to proof-read your protein

for punctuation marks

that were too big-hearted.

Vicarious mind!

Faecal pile and pit.

Snake-eyed jewel

at the bottom of the dung heap

that schools the fools’ laughter

by ignoring it

you can keep on looking for a kissing-stone

in a hail of Leonid meteors

that keep knocking you out

like a dinosaur

that takes it on the lip

like a quick jab

from an under-rated mammal

or you can hoard water in your humps

like a camel on the moon

that moves through the cool of the night

in a caravan of shadows

trading with the desert

toward ancient oases of ice

that taste like the frozen tears

of the ballroom chandeliers

that gathered like stars

to take advantage of the night

by twisting your words

like a speech impediment

that whispers like the sea in her ears

at a dance

for club-footed glaciers.

But you can’t wriggle out of the universe

like an anaconda in thin-skinned panty-hose

that’s just swallowed itself all the way up to the nose

like a mystic condom

playing it safe

down on its knees

to make cosmic contact

without contracting an unforgivable disease.

And there are dangerous cave-bears

that live at the back of your mouth

among the skulls of your ancient ancestors

and bones like bad omens

so you won’t find much shelter there

to keep the fire alive long enough

through the long night ahead

to finish the painting

you were working on

without saying a word

that would discolour your voice with a meaning

that won’t be discovered for years

long after your words have moved on without you

like the common language

of a migrant tribe

in the direction of their spears.

PATRICK WHITE