MY VOICE REFUTES ME

to the memory of Ted Plantos and Shaunt Basmajian

My voice refutes me like the skin of an old enemy

I once honoured with scars that glowed in the dark

and there is no end of the cemetery windows

I keep hurling myself through like a planet or a rock

or a bird with a vertical horizon

stubbing its neck on the blue lazuli

of the freak sky that put its foot down

on the throat of an impossible freedom

and solidified into a mage of glass and ice,

a corpse in front of a crystal ball,

a rebel satellite defying its own ripples

trying to evolve feathers of fire

to get the voices out of its head

and fly where it wants,

probing what it will like a humming-bird,

or a mosquito with more than a taste for blood,

or a junkie tying off to shoot a movie. Never

let it be said that I didn’t go looking for myself

under every avalanche, after every deluge

as if the omega in the word hope

were a vowel that survived, not just

the last word of another expiring number,

the expansive amplitude

of an indecipherable nothing,

a kamikaze zero with explosives in the fuselage

that never hit anything

on the desperate way down to victory.

Like any human being I took my stand on quicksand

and drowned in my own foundation-stones,

dreaming of mansions fixed in cement

I churned from blood and tears and lime

in the hourglass of a deserted heart.

Abject and unabsolved

of my ferocious delinquency, my thoughts now,

as the suppositions of the years regress,

are more of the provisional nature

of moonlit tents, Saharan waterlilies,

than the time-defying antics of the pyramids.

I don’t want to last anywhere for long

where the fires aren’t a legend of stars by the morning,

or the wind isn’t the biography

of an infamous ghost-writer

who could drink an ocean dry

with just a single fountain-pen.

And I know there are those

who gargle their poetry

as if it were just another mouthwash,

a distillation of mint, pink-tongued poets

plashing in municipal bird-baths,

their haikus cleaner than fingernails

and a deodorant for every passion

that dews their pores with sweat, and others,

years after the protest, dynastic radicals

laying down dry bouquets

of predictable placards

like cardboard lilies in a graveyard

to honour the established dead.

Knights of the thumb, let them pull down their visors

like thimbles, and raising the lance of a needle

dangerously crochet the tiny exploits

of their pillowcase crusades in the stray threads of blood

they unbound like nesting birds

from the stronger rope of a wounded bell

that, night after night, lay its head down

on the hard stone of the world to die.

There are those who are born

to know the net, and those who were meant for the sea;

and then there are others,

though they made no larger waves,

sounded no greater depths,

discovered no further horizons than these others,

because their muse saw

beyond the obvious blossom of the moon

to the frenzy of life in her tides,

her true reflection,

startle the heart in their passing

like a field consumed by thousands of black poppies

on an island that rose in the night

to carry their name like marble

or a boy on the back of a dolphin

leaping like a liberated apostrophe

into the more intimate renown of a favourite constellation.

PATRICK WHITE

EVERY WORD TURNS AWAY

EVERY WORD TURNS AWAY

Every word turns away

shame-faced and a liar

when you try to say things so true

they could only be contaminated

by a mouth.

And the tree in your voice

may be its own guitar

and every flower of your breath

be rooted in stars like the wind,

and you can spend a whole lifetime

trying to say everything

as if words could exact living destinies

from the names on the scrolls of the dead

to save everyone, to save

everything that exists

from nothing

but when you’re done,

when the tree falls silent

and the bird has flown away,

everything, just as it is,

will still be left unsaid

and just as there is no likeness for the living

there will be no likeness for the dead.

It is the unsayability of the mystic theme

that runs through us like a road through a dream

or the poem in our bloodstream

that is the cosmological constant

that keeps on expressing us

like waves of its own water

though we go looking for ourselves

like empty cups

to fill the topics of our names

forgetting like the moon

that water is its own chalice.

Why kneel by the water like the moon

to drink from your own face

as if it tasted any different downstream

than it did when you were a cloud

high on the mountain

when you can taste

the facelessness of the sea in everything

if you drink deep enough?

And there are eyes full of wine

waiting to get drunk on you

that haven’t bloomed yet

and wells that your tears

are still falling through

like plumb-bobs and pennies

that haven’t reached bottom yet,

and deaths that are antiquely your own

you must rise from

like the hosts of the morning glory

to show the gaping bells of your irrefutable ghosts

it can be done.

Words have bad memories.

Words are troubled sleep and nightmares.

Words are dead trees in a winter swamp

that couldn’t wake a mosquito up.

Words are the ring of the gold on the countertop

that tells you it isn’t true.

Words are a snakepit of spraybombs

that go off like terrorists

on any average day

in the market-heart of the silence.

Words are wanted posters

nailing their own likenesses

to the crucifix of a telephone pole

to divert their detection like water

from the tines

and witching wands of the lightning

that seeks them out like humans alone in the open.

And if you try to say the unsayable

by smearing the view

with a new holy book

what have you said

that isn’t just more graffiti

scratched on God’s face,

or the vast scream of the dawn

just before you wake up from the dream

to discover you’re gone?

Words are the negative space

we use to delineate

the shapes of ourselves

when we talk ourselves

like water into fish,

like infinite, open-mouthed skies

that have winged their way into words

like autumn rain in the hearts of the waterbirds

that leave no trace behind.

Words are blind. And eyeless.

Words are boulders

in the throat of the impasse

when the mountain tries to speak

of things that last,

or mud in the stream of the valley

when it lowers its gaze like a poem

to whisper of things that pass.

Words turn the spell

on the sorcerer

and dangle him

like a participial puppet

from the strings

of his own grammar,

his own magic,

like stars in farcical cocoons

on the trophy-lines of his webs.

Why rummage through

the wardrobe of a wave

for something to cover your nakedness

when every time you go swimming

you can wear the sea?

Take a page out of the book of the stars

and keep words behind you

like seagulls in the wake of your shining

so by the time anyone can see you

that’s not who you are.

Words are living creatures,

words are all eyes and ears

as vivid and vital as yours

looking out from under the autumn leaves

like a flower pressed into a book

that gives it no meaning

that it didn’t have in the fields.

Ignorance doesn’t eclipse the light

and enlightenment doesn’t illuminate.

You may talk forever around it

but what’s the meaning of fire

or sit by the mindstream all night

making constellations of the fireflies

that come together like words

and there may be no separation

between the water

and the reflections of the stars

that ride it like long-legged spiders,

or between you and the earth

not so much difference

as a grass blade,

but what’s the meaning of water,

what’s the meaning of the earth under your feet,

what’s the meaning of that blade of grass?

Words speak for themselves,

not anything else.

Words are living voices

not harps in the throats of the dead.

A word is not a thought,

not an emotion,

not a stand-in for reality

not the verbal version

of the stem cells on your tongue,

or the eloquent fragrance of a brain

recruiting bees to chafe their pollen into honey.

You can spend a whole lifetime saying

and still not know what a word is,

a whole lifetime feeling

and not know what emotion is,

a whole lifetime thinking

and not know what a thought is.

Beyond appearances

that are not wholly

at the discretion of the depths,

nothing is the likeness of anything else

in the unity of their uniqueness,

the oneness of their oneness,

the mystic specificity

of many rivers

unspooling the mountain

to weave this infinite sea of awareness

into the myriad forms and tongues and waves of us

who take on minds and hang

like empty cups and water droplets

from the tip of a blade of star grass,

from our own hooked fingers,

the black crescents of the lunar triggers

that play Russian roulette with our heads,

and the dreams that fit us like skin

and the lean watercolours of our sweat

on form-fitted sheets

when our separation troubles us

like waves trying to say the unsayable sea

to islands that already flow

like clear diamonds

that have mastered the yoga of tears.

Everything’s like that

when things turn from solid to real.

Even these words.

Even in the fireflies

no one ever sees

deep in the well of the word,

even in the human heart,

the star, the rock, the tree,

in the smallest eye of water

that ever looked upon a summer sky,

the unsayable sea

of the whole of this multiverse

that sheds worlds like cool petals

from the sea mouths of the mind,

the life of everything

effortlessly exists

to explore its own weather

like water, to hold

its own life like a jewel

up to the light

and see everyone crowned

in a palace of water

whenever you say your name

to the stars

just to let them know

that you were here

as if you meant it.

PATRICK WHITE  

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

MEANDERING AFTER THE LONG THAW

Meandering after the long thaw

through whatever landscape my mind

creates in its flowing, karmically disposed

or not, I unscroll like emotional water

playing with the quick otters of my thought

and no meridians or parallels on the loom

that snares the stars in birdnets,

and no horizons, no ports

of arrival and departure,

no hellish red of emergency exits

out of the darkened theatre,

I revel spontaneously in the freedom

of not having a clue about where I am going,

and go off in all directions at once

like the moon on the waves

like light through the homeless abode

of the only place I’ve ever stopped like space

to admire the road without beginning or end

that leads everywhere and nowhere at once.

Thought-years away from my last death

and the nebulous rain of the sidereal breath

I took once and held forever,

waiting to grace my stars with flowers

when words don’t interrupt the silence like pyramids

and the desert is free to speak for itself

to itself about the flower

that flows like an eye through its depths.

One eye, being; the other, non-being,

and a third that is beyond both,

I don’t know what it is I’m looking into,

but I keep rising and falling

like a wave of my own seeing

casting shadows on the water

like the voices of the things I write,

the new moon like a dark coin

under the tongue of everything in the light,

and the valley voices and the mountain voices

and what they say to each other in the night

when they draw near to a fire

no one else is awake to overhear.

I may be a bull in the labyrinth of my own fingerprints

unspooling my blood along the way

so that someone else can find their way out,

an evangelist on the moon with my head in my hands

telling the stars not to fret

if they’ve forgotten the last prophecy

because eventually even the lies will come true.

My wild ass compassion wants to break the jaws of circumstance

that eat so many like thorns of the moon in the desert

when the cactus blooms and the viper strikes like a flower,

but I don’t send my emotions out to judge events

like hysterical lipstick smeared across the mirror

or let my thoughts stir the mud in the puddle

to make things clear to the clouds.

One meaning for the whole of immeasurable life

is facepaint on a clown that’s seldom funny

or a spiritual ideologue whose only expression of grace

is a frown like a knot in the wind

that dances all around him, abusively free.

But the life of meaning doesn’t need

a seeker or a teacher flipping pages like a weathervane

for the stones and elixirs and grails of life,

as if you had to struggle to attain what you already are.

The star in your eye. The tree in your spine.

The bird in your voice. The moon in your heart.

The wind in your lungs. The light in your mind.

The sea in your blood. The earth in your flesh.

It’s not hard to know who you are

when you’re breathing alone in the darkness

that sheds you like the oceans of the moon

and the manes of the lunar lions come undone

like white peonies on the flowing of the nightstream.

However you look at it, your nose

is the hypotenuse of a right-angled threshold,

your own personal event horizon

that’s crossed with every breath you take

and your skin is a contract with the world

that begins at the tip of your nose

like an available dimension of forms and events,

experience after experience

that keeps on happening all the way back to you

like the singularity at the bottom of a black hole.

But what’s the point of looking for yourself

like a black sail on a night sea

or erecting a monolithic I like an oil derrick

or a misguided lighthouse

to drill for light

when you’re already swimming through it

and the world is arrayed clearly everywhere like eyes?

Everything you see; everything you can be

is the expression of everything else.

A star gives birth to your eyes and water

organizes you like a neighbourhood

and a genius of mud lays a scarlet cloak

of flesh and blood across your shoulders

strong enough to uphold the earth like a head

and space readies itself like a sensitive room

where you can stay up late to watch your eyelids bloom

like waterlilies coaxed out of hiding by the full moon.

PATRICK WHITE

I REFUSE

I REFUSE

I refuse to persuade any emotion to a poem

like a horse I can lead to water but can’t make drink.

If it’s a straitjacket it’s a straitjacket.

When its a wet suit it’s a wet suit

to go swimming with stars in. Tea leaves.

Yarrow sticks. Tarot decks. Incinerated match books.

I listen to a poem as if it were a response

to what I’ve said, and didn’t say.

I like the counter play of voices and mine

one among them, the whole tree full of birds,

and the chatter of black squirrels in the walls.

Midway between a car starting up and a stanza break

when I write, I feel like a thief that stole the prison

under the warden’s nose, and broke out through the window,

exhilarated by the bliss of getting away with my freedom.

I’m on an island alone with the moon.

And it doesn’t matter if I was marooned

or just washed up here like a wounded paint rag.

My spine is smoke. I drift tribes away from the fires

that send me like a message to the stars

without knowing what it is I’m going to say to them.

Until I get there like a crane-bag full of alphabets

and a couple of mystic words I’m keeping to myself.

Siderealized. Space speaks through its mere presence

like a field of unnamed wildflowers. Star clusters.

And there’s a solitude you can’t help answering

that gets deeper every time you open your mouth.

You stop fooling yourself about time the moment

it’s realized there is none. You break the bones

of the sturdy ladders of all-well-and-good-but.

You crush the fossils of the crutches you once crawled upon,

take off your spurs, turn your scales into feathers,

and the wind comes along and fits wings to your heels.

Things stop being solid and become real. So

when I write everything writes along with me,

every leaf that falls upon the river like a map

changes the course of the flowing and I let it

and every fallen tree’s got its hand on the rudder

and I say if not that way, where?

And the waves all answer in unison, here.

And even the loneliest guitar that ever sat under a willow

and thought of the home that wasn’t there to go back to anymore

can feel crowded when myriad words begin

to introduce you to their relatives by close association,

and shades in the closets of the chameleons

that rainbows haven’t worn in a thousand years.

You can see things through gravitational eyes

that telescopes have never dreamed of, and all the time

you’re lost at sea in a derangement of stars,

you’re pulling bodies into an empty lifeboat,

asking each of them as they begin to breathe,

if they knew where they were, because I’m sure

we’ve all been here before. And everyone

sat still as teeth in the mouth of a seagoing dragon.

Play. Full. Intensity. Sublime absurdity. Big Mind

full of chaotic potential, dark and yet to be the future

of everything, not exceptional perfections of lucidity.

Little Mind absorbed in playing with matches

that blossom in fire like the enlightened water stars.

Flare and dazzle. Ptolemaic translucency. The snow man

melts right down to his eyes in the heat of the picture-music,

peacock blues and greens of auroral acetylenes

and no one knows what it means, except it means deeper

than any answer could conceivably convey.

Here work is a form of worship, and the gods pray.

Mind is a gift. You just undo the ribbon of your chromosome

and let things out. Doves, dragons, and the occasional phoenix.

Or your own voice the tiger that wakes the valley up in the morning

with the roar of a vatic lily. The early breezes stir

and the dew trembles like an amateur on a spider-web.

Constant beginner, how could there be a precedent?

An exploration? An insight into what wasn’t there

until you saw it flash across the waxing moon if even

for a nanosecond, the God particle that created you

without having anyone else in mind but you, the becoming

that always worries about the end it never reaches,

the mystic specificity of the unfinished paradigm?

If you don’t feel like an idiot from the very start of a poem

you’re not showing enough respect for yourself.

If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s a good sign.

You’ve left everything behind the next world doesn’t need.

And the memories will come of their own accord

like waterbirds setting down upon a lake, they’ll reflect

what they only are for a moment as creative as the past,

and then they’ll return like vases and urns to the mantle

to resonate with the stillness of objects, and you’ll be the one

that’s deeply moved. The fireflies and lighthouses

will see eye to eye, and things will come to you

and ask you why you’re crying, and you’ll them

because I wasn’t expecting you to show up like open gates.

And this is an aesthetic madness, a crazy wisdom, an antidote

to being afraid to get out of your coffin once you reach shore.

Here the word beauty isn’t the verbal fossil of the living tree.

And truth is a virgin sword that’s never cut anything

or slept between two lovers like a vow that can’t be kept.

Here you’re the hydra-headed genius of your own horror story.

You can grow heads upon heads until you’re delirious

with intellectual conception, and live in a snake pit

waiting to be bit back by your own black lightning,

or you can take the dandelion path of a parachute

the sky mends with patches of your own skin on the line

and land somewhere gentle as the eyelash of an unknown warrior.

The important thing is to let go. Even of the letting go.

Reacquaint yourself with the dream grammar of the dead

who’ve been gone for millennia from the bodies they left

before alphabets were born of man’s hatred of women

when the sun comes up and the moon fades like soap in the daylight.

Be the nightbird. Be moon. Be shadow and light together.

Include the unlikely similitude without judgement

into the pantheon of your enduring monument to people or the gods

and if someone tells you there aren’t any, make a few up on the spot.

Mermaid and witch, warlock and sorcerer alike,

all drink from the same well, but in each mouth,

a different flavour of life, mirages of blood, wine, and water.

Become the mirage and stop hallucinating

there’s a reason for everything they can’t discern.

There are eyes deep in a poem that are looking out at you

to see if you want to get close, whether you can intuit

the logic of metaphor whispering behind the door

through the keyhole on the inside, or you’re stuck

in one long periodic sentence like the logic of syntax

laying tracks across the continent like a ladder of cautious thresholds,

expecting to reach the sky, without any risk of falling.

Fall and you’ll find out you can grow wings on the way down.

Fall and the first thing you say will be the sound of bliss

freed from its cage to shriek in a language of its own

that surpasses the teacher like a sonic boom

that doesn’t sit at the feet of the thunder in awe.

Real freedom, the most terrifying liberation of them all,

doesn’t come up in an unkempt garden like the placard

of a flower that doesn’t know what it’s there to protest.

Reality? Illusion? Valley and crest of the same wavelength.

When you see the mindscape from the outside in

you’re cutting gems with your eyes. You talk about

reality and objectivity as if your were in a solid state.

When you write from the inside out, turn the starmap over,

the light around, nothing is more acceptable than another.

All facets shine. Even the abysmal inner spaces

that dwarf the heart into singularities that seed

the bottomless depths of blackholes that tunnel

like star-nosed moles into new worlds

like the other half of the hourglass of this one

seem no different than from here to the store for a loaf of bread.

Nothing’s lost, effaced, expunged, or strictly given up

right down to the last detail of starmud in your make-up.

The sea learns not to fear its own weather, and the moon

ebbs and neaps with the tides, and the fish thrive

in the way it edges the waves with the flash of a sword

it’s laid down upon the prodigal waters as a sign of itself.

The mystery is the mystery of the wonder

that stands before the beginning and after the end

of a poem that spans the mindstream like a bridge

that let’s you see your own reflection on the flowing

inseparable from the water, more indelible than

blood is to skin. Less significant than who’s standing beside you.

Or the fact that life is a river with only one bank

and no one’s going to make it across in their secret lifeboat

without hauling everything into their inexhaustible emptiness.

Once you stop trying to figure out the universe,

and explain it to the rest of us, you can learn to play in it

like stars without curfews when the crows come home to roost.

The worst is bound to you in inestimable measure to the best.

Gather up your sorrows like old manuscripts

and fling them like leaves out to the stars on the wind.

Put eyes in your weeping and follow your tears

all the way back to the ocean that gave you them

and said water shall see, in the depths and the heights,

the whole of me as the mystic ocean of awareness

that eclipses the blossoms in the black mirror of the mind

to show you the darkness is not homeless

and no more than you can stain space with your blood

does it need to be washed off in the stars like Aldebaran

or our footprints in the red tides of the Pleiades.

You’ve held that tidal pool up to your face long enough now.

The lobster claw like an amputated crescent of the moon.

The grey nacreous dawns of Chinese-silk harder than porcelain.

The evictions of seashells like empty fortune-cookies

and koans with nothing more to tell, the nervous fish,

the dead starfish that jimmied the locks on the vaults of the clams.

O shore-hugger, when have you ever not felt discarded

by all those things you never took a risk upon

for fear of losing what you know and being washed out to sea

into the greater danger of being vividly alive beyond?

You may live in a marine cemetery but you know nothing about death.

You think because the mirror’s broken it stops shining?

Because your missing a claw, you can’t be made a constellation?

You live among your cupboards and empty cups

like craters on the moon, and your eyes are full of wariness

the sun’s going to come out one day, hot and intense

and you’re going to evaporate or there’s going to come

one overwhelming wavelength that’s going to steal the pot

like a man gathering money with both arms in poker,

and, just like that, you’re gone. And what are you

going to do then, cling to the mountain tops like snow

for fear of falling, for fear of the echoes of your calling

sweeping through the valleys below, looking for you,

like eagles and sparrow hawks for something running away?

What a waste of good birds. Step out into the open.

Spread your own wings like Cygnus or Aquila.

Encompass what enlarges you by conceding to it

as if they were your own inimitable spaces you were

flying through with prophetic serpents in your talons

as you raise the lowest up like homely bread

to manna from heaven that tastes of the stars that leavened it.

Spare the scalpel of reason a swordfight with the thorn

of your heart trying not to spill blood out of season

because you’ve declared a holy month on the moon.

And don’t try too hard to impress nothing

with the poetic depths of your vacuity, as the world

rushes in to fill the spaces between one lifeline and the next.

There’s a sacred emptiness in the heart of everything

and it’s built a temple out of the ground of your being

to receive your gifts like flowers and stars you lay upon the stairs.

And there’s nothing from black walnuts to unified field theories

to explain this phenomena that isn’t also the noumena

of your own mind listening to a voice older than your ears.

There’s a shining in the least of things that could dazzle the stars

were you to take the blinders off your life,

that carapace off the heart of the world turtle you stand upon

like the cornerstone of the cosmic eggshell

that’s been free of the encumbrance for fourteen billion lightyears

like a gift that gave itself freely away like an inexpressible secret

in the private lives of the wistful mirrors that reflect it.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE ARE MASKS

THERE ARE MASKS

There are masks I will not wear,

backstage wardrobes I won’t dress up in,

lives someone else can star in,

fires that will never feather my voice,

or sweep the shadows

from my palace of ice and eyes,

faces that will never hang like fruit

from any bough of my being,

daggers I won’t bury in the wounds

they inflicted like mouths

the tongue has been cut out of,

dignities of desire

that will not circle the roadkill,

my wings linked to the foodchain.

My heart will never labour

like the ox of a bell under a yoke,

though I plough the starfields;

nor will I fill its rivers

with leeches and eclipses

and let it sip the blood of others

to nourish my own lust.

I will not smudge the clarity of my heat

with greenwood, not sacrifice

the hawk’s eye for the ant’s,

cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.

I will not eat the days

like spoonfuls of my own ashes,

a martyr to my own orthodoxies,

trying to be true to a creed of fire

that moves underground like a root-fire

in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame

smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,

trying to put itself out with its own tears

for the best of reasons,

for lost earrings in a coffin.

Anyone can see

you’re a raven worthy of silver

who’s roofing her wings with tin,

an urgent orchid with flare

trying to bloom in the shadow

of a nightshift toy factory.

Your wingspan

should be measured in horizons

from dawn to dusk; and you

free to ride your own thermals,

to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter

under the door of the wind,

to take the hood off your sky

and explore your own vastness,

all the bridges you built

to lie in the shadows

of the burning cherry trees,

true to your own emergency,

true to your own fingertips and eyes,

the impulse of the serpent at the gate

who whispers to you like skin

when the candles go out,

who comes to you like water to a witching wand

a root-god to the poppy

that shudders with black lightning

to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,

to drown in the black rose

of an exquisite oblivion,

naked in a moist parachute that blooms

like a smile you’d thought you’d lost.

The butterfly can’t be

stuffed back into the cocoon,

the bird back into the egg,

the pearl back into the grain of sand

that grew a palace

out of the tiniest foundation stone.

Fire is not a flower of ashes

that sheds its petals twice

There are roads that disappear

like stray threads of hair

over our shoulders

even as we walk them,

every step farewell and arrival,

as time yeasts the envelope

with crucial stars that make things happen,

the wheatfield of an autumn letter

in the loaf of the hollow mailbox

rising like dawn out of a dark mouth

over its own harvest.

You can’t live forever like a sentence

balked at the fang marks of the colon

you can’t remember biting you.

Because life is not punctuated

any more than space,

things will follow

the promise of the serpent’s tattoo

to die back into life,

the black lioness

of your passionate constellation,

not a nun at the stake

of a forbidden lust to live,

but a new moon at the opening gates

of the parenthetical secret

between two crescents.

Are you afraid

to let your life graze like wild horses

on the grasslands

of your own transformations,

do you desecrate a greater law

to obey a smaller;

would you tie your last lifeboat,

your last island full of moonlight

to the sunken pillars of a wharf

that aged like a palace,

an endless prelude

to a book of farewell

that collapsed under the weight

of its own hesitation

to read itself to the end?

Even now your foundation-stones

are turning into quicksand

and the abyss

of what you must jump into

to follow your wings

out of the barnyard

opens like a mouth

trying to clear a wishbone

or a song from its throat.

Are you afraid

to give up your collection of hats,

those skies and overturned nests you walk under,

a hawk behind chicken-wire

for a bough in the wild

without a return address?

I want to hear the nightbird sing

that dazzles the serpent

with the joy of her own being,

slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell

to seize her in the dark rapture

of his amorous coils

and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,

the secret oceans of bliss

that lie hidden

in every drop of blood, every tear

that falls from the thorns

of the black star that burns like a rose

in the mouth of the dragon

that is waiting like wings

at her bruised heel

for her to wash off the old mythologies,

naked in the eye of the rain,

and mount the taboo and eclipse

of her own repealed desire

and fly from the graveyard firepits

of the grounded comets

praying for a match in hell

to light the pyres of their own cremations.

Ill omen or good,

the brush is loaded with red,

with roses, blood, fire,

and the sky is primed

like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.

Staring will not paint the apple

you want to bite into,

install the serpent like a voice

in the tree that tempts you,

run the fingers of the nightwind

through your raven hair like a mad pianist

trying to tune your keyboard

to the crazed scales of the full moon.

If you want to dance naked

under chandeliers of black cherries,

alive enough to get away with yourself

don’t turn your eyes to glass

and scan the heavens

like the small end of a telescope

to see if you can spot your own approach

like an astronomical catastrophe

that will burn the house down,

the matchbook flaring of a coffin

that docks like a death-boat

to take on a cargo of ashes;

but lay down one stroke of paint,

risk your own interstellar spaces once,

leap like a wounded dolphin

from the wave of the mirror once,

and life will strew stars in your path

that will awake the dreamer

like gardens in the furrows

of your salted fields.

You will stop living

like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

before the blaze of your own hunger

for heat and light

and run like a sudden thaw of honey

from the frozen hive

that wants to ride its own melting

like a forge pouring out the hot metals

of the enchanted swords

the dark magicians plunge into the stone

to sort the jesters from the crowns.

PATRICK WHITE