UP ON HEARTBREAK HILL AT NIGHT

UP ON HEARTBREAK HILL AT NIGHT

Up on Heartbreak Hill at night

with a 2.4 inch, 60 mm, refracting telescope,

a cat, and a journal of poems,

deciphering those immensities of sky

as if every star were the sacred syllable

of an inconceivable intelligence that explained

everything in light, and the light were singing.

Earth noises in the broom bushes and Douglas firs.

The air rife with the spirits of those

who had their necks broken here by a prison noose,

and had more of a right to be here than I did

who felt like an intrusive guest in their house

even though the darkness was common ground.

Eventually they learned to ignore me

as just another adolescent longing for eternal responses

to the expiry date on life and love,

and not one of them without a silent understanding

of what a star could mean through the bars

on the windows of their prison cells.

Up here on the hill I was a temple above

the imperial rhetoric of toppled garbage cans

expurgating on the fate of fallen empires

that took themselves way too personally in restrospect

than they did at the time, as if the wound,

even the children had to amend like a religion,

grew deeper and more volatile with age.

Up here, just the executed ghosts of perversity and rage.

The whisper of something beautiful

no one could smear, soil, smudge,

out of touch, though I caressed

the skin of the stars as if it were as smooth

as the lenses and mirrors I used

to watch the fragile radiance of how they danced

so intimately across the apertures

of my field of vision trembling before

their scintillation the way I used to make

some spiders vibrate in the morning

like sewing machines or the clappers on fire alarms

by simply touching their webs

as if all the strings on a Spanish guitar

were trip wires in a terrorist museum.

Light as the only liquid in a desert

for many dangerous miles around,

the stars were cool jewels of water to me.

I could almost taste them like the tartness

of wild blackberries on my lips, lemons,

the deadly nightshades of experimental girlfriends

testing out cartridges of new lipstick

the first time we kissed in the shadows

of the new moon behind the abandoned warehouse.

It’s impossible to see a star as it is

until it’s become part of your love life

or, at least, until you can learn to flirt with the light

like a firefly at the window

of this thirteenth house of solitude

where the homeless gather like an avalanche

of the misplaced cornerstones of condemned temples

that like the stars, are always updating their past

about things that shine, but don’t last.

If the medium is the message, and it is and it isn’t,

then seeing must be a kind of love as well.

I saw the stars through the eyes of the stars.

I felt the weight of the billions of years

there wasn’t even a one-eyed sea to look back at them

for intimate insights into its own impersonality.

Hard stars in the winter, soft stars in the summer.

Stars can see further into the darkness of the human heart
when it’s cold out for everyone and clarity

stops breathing on the mirror like evanescent nebulae

sensitizing the light to the chromatic aberrations

of the disappearing veils and crushed rainbows

synchronously aligned with my poetry at the time.

I could feel the passage of the stars

like migrating Canada geese in the autumn

the shamans read like rosaries in retrograde orbits,

an abacus of wandering planets, and one,

whose name was unknown

rooted in the ground of itself like a strange silence

that had whispered the world into its own ear

like the dark secret of light upon light

as everyone looked up like mirrors

with tears in their eyes as big as lenses

trying to overhear what was clearly not hidden

through the keyhole of a telescope up on Heartbreak Hill

when seeking wasn’t a way of avoiding what was revealed.

PATRICK WHITE

NOT WITH THE EYE, BUT THROUGH IT

NOT WITH THE EYE, BUT THROUGH IT

Not with the eye, but through it

easy to see all the pristine faults and flaws

in the immaculate mirror of the lake

that asks me to surrender my sword

as proof the scars on the mirage of my identity

were not self-inflicted or mythically inflated.

Sometimes the mind is nothing but a fraud of water,

a handful of starmud from the bottom up

with an ego like the snapping turtle of the world

savaging the plumage of the moon,

a wild swan thawing like an ice-floe

riding her own reflection downstream

like the pale fragrance of an elegant loveletter.

This place is the downgraded stuff of dreams

that animates the misfortunes of decay

with calendar-eyed views of propinquitous mortality.

Stakes of ghostly bones embedded like fractured trees.

Red ochre cedars like the fragile skeletons of filigreed fish.

Dozy limbs of basswood on the damp shore

pulped by a flesh-eating disease

like the hard heart of an old man gone soft

in the limelight of a circus of fungus on tour.

Not an outrage, but a lingering kind of odium,

this whole place smells like a human on its death bed.

Stealth in the indelible silence of the dead

undergoing their dissolute transformations

into the effluvium of the living in the wake

of their passage through life. What was

solid and upright as the rung of a ladder of oak

or the lifeboats of the oar-winged maple keys

before they went down with the ship,

good captains, all, with nowhere left to fall,

let’s its hair down like wavelengths and willows

and returns to going with the flow of things

like ice melting into water again, everything real,

with nothing to stub your toe upon

like the imagined intransigence of the world.

Wing of bat, eye of newt, heart of toad

and the perfect pitch of a virgin hummingbird,

mummified skin from the leaves

of the star clusters of borage sapphires,

the ashes of a poem that immolated itself

like daylilies that no one had ever cried over,

the unreasoned ennui of a seasoned wizard’s

attitude toward suffering to play musical chairs

at the periodic table and rise above the salt

where you properly belong enthroned like a dragon

on the skulls of your incommensurable ancestors.

Salt the earth and it will burn green as leaves

in the fires of life nothing can put out.

The axis mundi stirs the seabeds of the ocean

and visionary wraiths hang above it like rags of mist

summoned to the cauldron of the lake

like a seance to the endless first step

of an ongoing beginning that calls them out of exile,

like the lords of life from the last exorcism

they went through like the imperfectible ideals

of the wind sweeping stars and deserts off the stairs

of an underground passage burial

that aimed its spirit at the stars in Orion

but whose bones only made it as far as a flashlight

in the nervous hands of a grave robber

startled by his own amazement

at whose likeness embers in old gold

on the death mask that greets him like a twin of time.

Waterlilies blooming nocturnally in algaic scum

as if they were spreading their feathers

for any chance encounter with the stars

they’ve fallen in love with in their own images.

Stumps of the beavers, and here and there,

the occasional chain saw, I hear a man shrieking

in the tent of a field hospital trying to heal the Civil War

with the tools of neo-lithic carpenters.

I hear the crow barking orders to its officers.

Significance by association with the lost and fallen

bleeding out like flags on an abandoned battle field.

You fall through the cracks if you don’t jump the gaps

and the rest is just the history of electricity

prodding you to twitch like the puppet-master

of Giovanni’s frog prodded into leaping like the dead

trying to keep pace with the measure of their hearts

like lily pads wired to circuitous nervous systems

grounded in the silken muck at the bottom of things

that has settled like a peaceful sediment

over the useful refuse of our unsalvaged dreams.

The encyclopedic detritus of our arboreal souls

we keep recurring out of like cosmic eggs

in a deep sleep of inconceivable wonders to come.

Wingspans of the galaxies in the eyes of the seed-atoms,

I sow my thoughts and feelings like symbols and images

as far and wide as the Milky Way, the Road of Ghosts,

like an old farmer I heard of who went mad out here

sowing the deep woods, holding on to the tail

of a black bull that tugged at his heart like a new moon

or the harvest of stars in the wild rice fields of the Pleiades

adorning the horns of Taurus in a garland of light

so the wide-eyed native women could thresh them

into the bows of their birch bark canoes.

How long ago was that? Is there still

an Algonquin village around here somewhere

that didn’t surrender its gates to the urgencies of time?

Some memory smouldering like a fire pit under the leaves

that have written over the history of this place

like draught after draught of an autumnal lie ever since?

Did they ever come down to the water like me

to watch the moonlight ricochet off

the wet anthracite scales of a rat snake

sliding its S-curves back into the water

like a wavelength of darkness alone and homeless

in the occult palace of its black diamond eyes?

Did they feel the same chill of recognition

when it disappeared like a sacred insight

into an abyss of enlightened unknowing

that’s as boundless as the myriad infinitudes

of forms and events that arise

out of the creative destruction of the mind

efflorescing out of its own ashes, sunflowers at dawn

when the urns convulse like wombs,

and flowers imitate the garish rainbows

of our afterbirth like the palette of a masterpiece

that’s caught the ruin and renewal of life

in the enigmatic features of our photogenic minds?

Posing like mood-shifting chameleons

aurorally lifting the veils of a dark mirror

to reveal our own eyes looking back at us

when the night turns around, saturated

like ripe fruit with the mysterious sorrows

of being alive to witness our own windfall

like a rootless tree well-seasoned in letting go

of the orchards that once danced with the wind

in their wedding gowns, climbing up

this scaffolding of bones like a serpent of picture-music

helically winding up the stairwells of our vertebrae

like a thought making the rounds

of an unbroken circle of zodiacal skulls

like boundary stones in an unsustainable orbit,

all living things perfecting the simplicity of death

in the labyrinth of their own elaboration

by reducing it to an axiom of collaborative absurdity

then erecting it like a meteoric cornerstone

above the graves they dig for themselves

monolithically from the sky down,

one foot in the boat and the other clinging to shore.

I can hear the music of the spheres

in the hidden harmonies of dark matter

I’ve been listening to for light years

like a song with an impact crater for a sea bed

I just can’t seem to get out of my head and heart.

I’ve apprenticed my darkness to the mastery

of a dying art that might make the dead

a little more lyrically approachable

when the picture-music shepherds them

like black sheep born under a new moon

into the available dimensions of the future.

In everything I see and say and do here

I celebrate the emergence of the carrying forth

of the light out of the dark urgent with expression.

I say tree, stone, star, love, birth, death.

Lonely nightbird, or one of the frogs at night,

I make my sound like my mark upon life,

I add my eddy of light, the ripples of my fingerprints

to the flowing. As ignorant of where I come from

as I am of where I’m going, as homeless behind me

as it is ahead, there’s an expiring calendar

of tree rings in my heartwood, waning or waxing,

always seems to be growing. What has my tongue

ever been, but a leaf on the wind, or my eyes,

if not stars coming out of clouds? Delusion

or clarity, the crazy wisdom of the madly enlightened,

or sorrow looking for asylum in its own vulnerability,

the lab rat in a random experiment with genetic lotteries,

or my voice disappear like the homing bird

of a word in the distance flying toward

the violet hills that adumbrate the sunset in residence?

A physics of the heart, or the logic of metaphor,

two ends of the same sky-borne telescope.

Whether they’re eyelashes or my eyes

are sprouting wings for the journey ahead,

effortless effort of the absurd,

or a labour of elusive significance,

I struggle to celebrate the vital stillness

that animates the heart of all things

into being carried away on impulse

like water and love and life and light

or thousands of fireflies swarming the valley

after a storm of insight, trying to acquit themselves

like constellations in a chaos of starmaps.

PATRICK WHITE

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment

subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells

and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart

cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence

I once lived here along with everyone else.

Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,

this ingathering of everyone I’ve ever been

flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.

The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness

where everything is a symbolic event in a dream

trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.

Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.

Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs

to the source of their deception like unwanted children

though I’ve franchised orphanages all over my mindscape

to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.

Serpent’s tongues that have been struck by black lightning

humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off

like a lie they told God, they’ve been living ever since.

No piety. But a natural kind of reverence for the life of the mind

breathing me in and out of my body like a bellows

trying to boil spiritual gold out of my default metal of lead

as things begin to heat up like the tongue of a sword

on the anvil of my voice. And by that I know

prophetic heads are going to roll on the growing edge

of an imaginative insurgency nothing flammable with life

can resist for long. I know anything I say about this,

if experience hasn’t cooked you in the same cauldron

I was born in, will seem unpatently absurd, but then

so are thermals in the open fields just before sunset

and the hawks that ride them for the sheer joy of airing their wings

unpertrubed by what’s moving in the grass down below.

Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets. Space talks in tongues.

Everything that is lives and isn’t intelligent, but intelligence itself.

Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an order that’s lost

the rhythm of life trying to syncopate its heartbeat

to the unmusical paradigms of stone-eared preconceptions.

I see crows with rubies in their beaks as if

they’d just isolated the gene for symmetry.

In this miasmic swirl of images and wavelengths,

third eyes coalescing like starclusters

out of clouds of unknowing breaking into light,

and the shadows they cast no less prepossessing,

how uninhabitable I feel as a planet hoping the night

will prove me wrong and make all things

communicable and clear as a mother tongue

I’ve been speaking for years without knowing it

even when I exile myself like the sacred syllable

of a native son wandering the earth like a rootless tree.

And there, do you see that constellation rising

like a distillation of the starmud I’ve walked in all my life?

Doesn’t it make you want to dance under it with the wind

like a chandelier you’ve thrown rocks because it’s beautiful,

as if someone were standing in it like a window

with the elevated perspective of the Pleiades

shining down in equanimity upon its desecrants

as if by their fruits you shall know the luminous generosity

of a windfall of light that falls at your feet

as if someone were germinating star sapphires in your bloodstream

to give you something higher to aspire to

than just teaching fire how to swim through the blues?

Inside the allegory. The logic of metaphor.

Hidden harmonies in synchronous pictographic fields

that resonate like cave paintings with otherworlds

that are not occluded by the imposition of space and time.

The younger ore of the outer world smelted down

like imagistic strokes of luck into the visionary elders

that transform them in the fires of their imaginations

into the igneous bloodlines that pour out of them

like the mystic metals of swords descended from ancient stars

that can give and take life at the same time

in these homeless realms of sacred ambivalence

before the dark mother tempered the forms she engendered

in tears that broke like the waters of a docetist womb.

Things here don’t relate like thought-trains on parallel lines

that never meet, whatever the destination, they associate

like chords and keys you can hear with your eyes

and see with your ears in a synteresis of the senses

that wash up on the shores of cosmic, island consciousness,

all wavelengths of the same inexhaustible oceanic mind

that doesn’t make things appear so much as emerge

like species efflorescing into the medium they’re working in.

Alloys of light and earth. Hybrids of water and fire.

The sky calling its birds. The river its fish.

And the longing of time in the mouth of the earth

to call us out of the starmud and bathe us in the rain

gentled out of her atmospheric acids so as not to burn

the tenderness she lavished on us like eyes and skin,

a new kind of shining to enhance the radiance of the stars,

light upon light in the skulls of the unbegotten ancestors.

This is the morphological matrix of knowledge forms

shaped to the organs of perception like neuronic synapses,

enjoining efferent axons to the walls of nervous villages

waiting for the news of what they’re experiencing

from the abstract receptors of oracular impulses,

construing the world as a dendritic grapevine

tendrilled like Celtic silverwork throughout the mind

rooted in space as the closest similitude

to the emptiness that is the ground of its being

and the great commingled watershed of its subconscious commons.

The simpler the window, the cleaner the view

so I attend to my seeing like a nightwatchmen

attends to his own eyes like the glow of a lantern

warns and reveals the shadows of his presence in the darkness.

Eye to eye with the sky at either end of the telescope

things of the world are things of the mind,

cosmology the bubble-brained psychology of the multiverse.

And there are some nights, waiting for a poem

to bloom like a flower in the flames of my intensities,

I swear I can overhear from stars away

the exhilarated echoes of alien voices ruminating

on how we might have changed the gestural expressionism

of our shapeshifting, river-turning, morphotic souls in their absence.

Probable concourses of multiplicitous insights

into the jewel I’m turning in the light of my mind

like the sun and the moon at midnight and noon

when the measure of words is the wingspan

of whatever sky I happen to be flying in

like comets and birds and maple-keys

that have unlocked my heartwood and set me free

to blossom like an alphabet on a pilgrimage of trees,

to express myself like an inconceivable wind

with wings on my heels in the hermetic shrines

of this unearthly solitude, this estranged silence.

PATRICK WHITE

I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I LOVE THE WORLD THE WAY A MOTHER LOVES A DEAD CHILD

I love the world the way a mother loves a dead child

and sees its ghost everywhere.

I look at the stars and more and more

I see the disappointment in their eyes.

We waste each other like clear cut forests.

In the sacred groves where the priests

are the birds of death, you’re either

a chainsaw or a nail protesting a passion play.

Ever since the last lyric died an agonizing death

poems have become gadgets

in the hands of inventors without fingerprints.

No growth rings in the heartwood of a dead tree.

Tone-deaf door-knockers who write poetry

as a kind of white noise to drown out

the shrieking of the innocent in their crawl spaces.

Chronic renewal of one-eyed overviews.

Most people’s lives are just big enough lies

they’ve told themselves often enough

to believe there may be something to it.

Wounded earth, I weep for you like a slayer

weeps for the slain. You were not my mother.

You were my child. Nemetic humanity

raises its own assassin in paranoid despair.

Measure of the mighty in the power of a dam,

how easy it is to forget the omnipotence

of a drop of rain. It’s still possible to open

cosmic gates of the aviaries and let

all the winged horses fly free and riderless

like the silk paratroopers of the milk weed pods

or the albino umbrellas of smouldering dandelions.

But for the most part

beauty and truth lost heart long ago

and were turned out like fashionistas

on the celebrity catwalks of surrealistic irreverence

and now the peony is wearing the thorns of the rose.

I still go out at night far from town by myself

to amuse the stars with my humanity,

the dents in my shining, the legends of light

I turned into black farces of self-righteous fallibility

as if I had acquired the power to reverse

a diamond back into coal. The mourning dove

studies the occult magic of the crow

and the sacred clowns look for enlightenment

in their shame, in the irrelevant antics

of the painted tears that fall from their eyes

whenever they address themselves

like mirrors in a green room putting their make-up on.

Been in the tide of this night sea of awareness

so long now, I’ve developed a tendency

to round the sharp corners of the crucials

out into more spherically embrasive wavelengths,

kinder pieces of sand-blasted glass

to insulate myself exponentially from the details

as if a full moon were some kind of antidote

to its own fangs and the harvest wasn’t toxic.

But I know I’m only trying to divine my way

by white lightning on the moon illuminating a road

as wide as everywhere. And my childhood rage

is stilling tearing down gates and fences

around open fields where the wildflowers bloom

without starmaps, and the bounty of the earth

isn’t a menu that determines your place in the foodchain.

Poetry’s been the longest good night I’ve ever experienced

and life the deepest, most gracious bow

to all the people, events, and things I’ve ever cherished.

Not too hard to see the lowest common denominator

of all values has become a quantum mechanical lottery

and physics is just a screening myth

for what gets murdered along the way to the promised land.

Enculturated to our own pollution like fish,

though we swim out as far as the spring equinox in Pisces

to pour the universe out of the universe,

worlds waterclocking into worlds, still

after washing ourselves off in stars like water and sand

seeping into our graves like the mirage of an oil spill,

we’re still recognized immediately among the worlds

by the indelibility of our filth, having yet to learn

not to track our identity in after us into the house of life.

The ululation of the loons wailing like Arab widows

reverberating across the lake sounds more

like an angry plea, than a call to prayer,

but who could lament the immensity

of that kind of tragic absence in a single lifetime

without emptying their spirits out like dry wells in a desert

that navigates like a madman by the full moon?

When I was young, I opened up a night school

to explain what a human was to the stars,

but now my soul’s a lot more illiterate than it was

and it’s me that’s asking them to teach me to read.

Even if you look at it like a leather boot

that’s walked down one too many roads

not to feel the pebble of the world bruise its heel,

even though we’ve made a great mess of it,

it’s still a great mystery, yes? Give your assent

without hesitation, or the moon will know you’re lying.

The mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the Romans.

The bright vacancy in the dark abundance

of the ore of our unknowing. Even the hardest heart

bleeds like iron out of the sacred rock

transformed in the forges of the fireflies of mystic insight

into a sword of moonlight worthy of being

laid down upon the waters of life in tribute.

Even if you had to fall upon it more than once

to get the point before you returned it in gratitude.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LEAVES SLUICING THE RAIN DOWN THE BACK OF MY NECK

THE LEAVES SLUICING THE RAIN DOWN THE BACK OF MY NECK

The leaves sluicing the rain down the back of my neck

to put out my candle of serpent-fire

like an orchid in an abandoned house well,

lightning in its tears, thunder in the hollow

of its telescope when the white runaway horse

pounds its hoof upon it at four in the morning,

the muscled embodiment of moonlight made flesh,

the stars running to peer through their windows

to see what’s making that sound.

The sodden path down to the lake, rife with duff,

an Orphic descent whose picture-music

owes nothing to death, and the moss-pated skulls

of the prophetic rocks along the way, every precarious step,

the assessment of an omnipresent danger

that could kick the stool from out under your noose,

though you were foolishly hoping it might be

an Egyptian ankh, granting you long life

in an underworld where anything that’s violet

is the toxic shadow of an inconsolable grief

that laments that it had ever met the sun eye to eye,

and try how it might, can’t make a way of life

out of suicide. But I didn’t come here to grease

the hinges on hell like the wings of rusty birds

or desecrate the place with my omnipresence.

Once I realized the realm of the dead

is no realm at all that can be distinguished from the living,

I’ve returned to this underground river from time to time

where the roots try to take hold of my skull like the moon

as if it were their last chance at blossoming,

and my bones are scattered along the banks

like socket wrenches from a dead mechanic’s tool box

or a coffin that’s finally run out of things to fix.

This is where I come to return my harp of water

to a watershed of indistinguishable wavelengths

in homage to the source that handed it on to me,

a voice of my own, and there’s a bridge I stand on

no one’s burnt down yet, just a fallen log really,

but to me an overarching oxymoron that lets me stand

on both sides of the mindstream at once

to pay homage to a death I long to be worthy of

like a teacher my life is obligated to surpass

to fully honour her undisciplined transcendence.

Like water. A carrying away into a carrying away.

We couldn’t tell time if we weren’t all dying.

Eternity just a sundial that never closed its eyelids.

The wounded serpent of the waterclock bleeding out

like a human heart to remind us what hour it is,

what windfalls and harvests of the season of our soul

to leave in the begging bowls we place

at the eastern doors of our autumnal burial huts,

hoping we’ll see each other again, once are bones are dust,

like Canada geese returning in the early spring.

Some bring silver swords minted of moonlight

thrusting through the parting clouds

and lay them down on the water gently

like children they once cherished abandoned for life

as the greatest gift their hands had ever grasped.

I lay down this gift of a clear voice

that no fear or desire’s ever broken in like a wishbone

pimped out like tinfoil to the glamour of temptation.

Whatever storms raged in the crowns of its oracular branches,

this tree never injured any bird that ever sang in it.

I never hung my lyre like a dreamcatcher over the bed,

or used it to seduce butterflies into a spider-web,

dolphins into a bay of fishing-nets, nor yet

let its strings go slack like the pentatonic spinal cords

of a guitar that’s lost its nerve in the dark corners of life.

Nor did I ever refuse to sing what the dead asked me to

anymore than I did the living. Nor let the medium

intrude upon the message in such a way

the import of the song couldn’t exceed

the wingspan of the bird that released it

into the vastness of its interstellar longing.

Here the dead whisper their secrets to the waters

like coy sylphs of the wind flirting with waves,

and here where dissolution walks in the same shoes

as regeneration, and one step east is one step west

and though there’s a coming and though there’s a going

birth and death don’t know anything about this,

and Prussian blue the wet wind that’s been crying

about the sturm and drang of things to the broken pines

whose excruciations have become part of their character,

as if the haloes of the rain rippled through their heartwood

like the echoes of old engagement rings

from wide-eyed springs that have lasted for light years.

Death isn’t the derelict of life’s glory.

Just as peace isn’t the end of passage.

Mid-summer squanders as many flowers

on the capricious rivers of life as it does

the funeral bells of the fallen water birds.

And maybe that’s all these words are,

wild iris and daylilies lifting their skirts

above the flowing like troupes of gypsy fires

that like dancing to the flutes of their own desires

as they burn on the pyres of their floral reflections.

Who knows this late in the day, but maybe

I’m just trying to approach my own death

like an unopened gate to a garden

the way I did as a novice to love

when I couldn’t tell a larkspur from a hollyhock

nor what sign the star sapphire of the borage

wanted to be planted under like the Pleiades?

Anyway it pans out is ok with me, though.

I like it here where the waterlilies reset their sails

like redemption out of their own salvage

and after a long, grey day of funereal rain,

the clouds begin to clear around nightfall

and my eyes are seeded with the stars

of unnamed constellations of New England asters

that don’t conform to any known starmaps

I can follow genetically back like a fuse of dna

to the Big Bang of my first flowering into life.

And maybe I’m a mutant in the ancestry of death

that has always been the subliminal motif

of a symphonic life that wasn’t immune

to the picture-music of the celestial spheres

but I can’t help noticing how the bones of the muskrat

and the skeletal remains of the heron’s stilts

toppled by the stealthy fluke of a fox

all resonate like musical instruments

laid down in tribute on the roots of the trees

and on the sides of the paths that broke like melodies

on the ears of the dead who could taste them

like the tears of the moon on their silver tongues.

In this realm of radiant starmud in a state

of reanimating life out of its own detritus and decay,

I can hear their ghosts returning to life

like native atmospheres

returning to the songs of the lunar night birds

that don’t abuse their solitude with a sense of loss

without sweetening the music

with the ripeness of their silence

just before the grande finale

of their next windfall of transcendent whole notes.

PATRICK WHITE