SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

SOME THINGS YOU WEEP OVER FOREVER

Some things you weep over forever.

Fathomless watersheds of infinite sorrow.

Others last as long as it takes the rain

to get a flower to bloom and perish,

with promises of good things to come.

Beauty cherishes a lock of wisdom.

Separation, departure, exile, severance, change,

since the womb, and a good chance earlier,

things coming apart like a mother giving birth

to the ghost of herself she gave up

to facilitate your coming forth upon the earth.

Here you are in the splendour of your mystic specificity.

And who knows how many lifetimes

had to be achieved and forgotten just as they were

so you could show up here so uniquely?

Point is. Goodbye’s always half of the greeting

and sorrow uses the same hand to hang on to life

as it does to let go of it with.

Our entrance is a back-handed exit.

We celebrate the seance and mourn the exorcism

depending upon which way the wind

is blowing our mother’s ghost in our face.

Out of sorrow was born compassion

as our eyes were born of the light

flirting with nerve cells, as the sky and the stars

adapted to our ocularity and soft-bodied animals

grew shells and thousands of scales like eyelids

and the Burgess shale became the communal gravestone

for millions, and all the new angels

were snow blind lab technicians in white coats

and the goddess who embodied life

in a ceremony of picture-music

became a particle and a Hox gene.

Do you see how it all transmorphs surrealistically

as it sings you to sleep in a dream of life

that fits the typography of your mindscape perfectly

like the skin of moonlight brushing up like a feather

against the skin of water, mutually realizing

the millions of waterbirds that arise

like oceanically enlightened emotions from them both?

I’ve heard the sea weep. The sky release the tears

that others pray for like rain. The earth groan in its agony.

I’ve sat at the bedside of dying friends

and said nothing the numbing silence

wanted to overhear whether it was wisdom or a prayer.

Here. Then it’s There. Now it’s Where?

We die into a mirror we can’t look into.

Or maybe when the light disappears

from our eyes here, it’s because

we took it with us like a star to see

into the abysmal darkness ahead of us

as we bring the future with us

like a perpetual myth of origin

that begins like a snake with its tail in its mouth

inconceivably where it ends.

One drop of blood from the rose’s eye

doesn’t violate the wonder of the child

that’s trying to live on in you, nor death

keep the iron bells of the elegy from ripening

like apple bloom born of grief

sweetening the clouds of their unknowing

even as the wind persists in blowing

what was once attached to us

like feathers to a bird away

as we make constellations of its evanescence

as if indelibility could slow down the rate of change

like the rear guard action of a retreating army.

Born to separate into more elaborate unions,

child of the elan vitale within you, Polaris

of all the indirections it took to find you,

the epiphanous life force that wears your body and mind

like the lifemask of a creative imagination

that has a flare for painting the world with its eyes,

but in all its works can’t find a similitude for itself

that suits it for the moment any better than you.

It’s a mistake to think that you’re the only one

that’s wearing your face, or a lack of identity

is your most cherished possession, or your sorrows

aren’t shared by the rubble of a thousand shattered pietas.

Celebrate death like a lunar fire dance at the entrance

to the creatrix of all exits. Truth can’t improve

the lack of things to a heart that’s only tasted

solitude and sorrow and clear cuts the crutches

on the mountain sides of all its legless tomorrows

hoping they might abide for awhile as trustworthy cornerstones.

Sorrow can be an emotional road

suffering from its own erosion. Tears

that were clarified by the flowing of their radiance

can turn into a festering stasis of ditchwater

if they’re left to stand too long among

the purple loosestrife and lost and lonely hubcaps,

deathmasks of the rogue planets that got left behind

when everyone went on without them

riding a four-wheel drive eclipse with three full moons to go.

Vehicular witchcraft. Or divine intervention.

Or the probable concourse of both,

the mind will nacreously secrete either

a black or white dawn of insight around it

to bury a thorn in a pearl of compassion

as things you couldn’t imagine the day before

flower out of a black hole like a blind rose,

and people fall away helplessly without life boats

like the rafters of an abandoned temple

better left to the birds than the prayers of the unfaithful

victimizing the martyrs of outrageous morphologies.

If sorrow ripens into compassion, the moon

enlightens the seed forms that orbit the core

of the green star of the apple and it’s chilled

by the stars of the night that turn

its taste buds into nanodiamonds

that can discern the flavour of the Pleiades

burning like a spice on the Silk Road.

If sorrow isn’t always a closed gate without a fence

trying to enclose a garden in an urn of ashes

it’s neglected like a cosmic egg for light years

trying to get over the disappointment

of finding the holy grail only to notice it was chipped.

If experience isn’t mentored by sorrow

deeper into the source of joy in life

that’s the voice coach of the exuberant birds

that are nine parts aubade and one part threnody,

and there’s frost on the windfall that isn’t stardust.

Set sorrow loose with an apple branch

to witch for wells on the moon

that have closed their eyes to spring in Aquarius.

By an overt act of sustained imagination

let sorrow root in you

like a wild grape vine

in the encyclopedic duff

of your last autumn on earth

then cry in your cups

as your tears turn into wine

remembering all the blossoms of the moon

that had to fall so you could taste

the moment of this sweetness

as if your own bloodstream,

its shadows and shining alike,

were a Gulf Stream of stars

that loved being swept away

by their own momentum

whether they’re photonically discharged

from a halfway house of decaying orbitals

like tree rings, birth marks, ripples and moon dogs

or moved by the dark energy

of their shape-shifting sorrows,

the ripening wavelengths

running up and down

the xylem and the phloem,

the ida and the pina,

the solar and the lunar threads

of their spinal cords like serpent fire

to reconfigure the world

through the third eyes

of their enlightened tears.

PATRICK WHITE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

IT TOOK ME LIGHT YEARS TO TRUST MY VOICE

It took me light years to trust my voice

to say things my thoughts had to catch up to

like the unrehearsed understudies of hidden harmonies

making their presence manifest in the way

their dark matter bent space and made the words move

into place like water finding its own equilibrium.

The discipline, then, was not to interfere,

but listen when the wind turns the Byzantine green

of the Russian olives silver in the turmoil of its passage.

To pour yourself out of the mirror like the tear

of a weeping telescope when the Milky Way

gets in your eyes like the smoke of a hundred billion stars.

Or the ghost of a summer radiance

summoned to a seance of mediumistic fireflies

trying to fill in the gaps on their spiritual starmaps.

Last night’s full moon has sliced off

part of its waning earlobe shrinking

as it ascends from cantaloupe orange

to a pitted plum of cadmium yellow value eight.

I’m standing in a gravel driveway outside a storage shed

in the industrial part of town, my back turned

to a floodlight in a riot of insights that act like

frenzied insects, and I’m looking for stars

through the feathered ribs and scales of clouds,

toned by a copper moon rise in a cool acetylene sky.

The moon is rising over the roofs of a parking lot

full of transport trucks, and the contrast

makes the view even more surrealistically poignant.

Intensely so when I spot Arcturus burning

solely on its own in an immensity of peacock blue sky

turning Prussian blue and indigo

over a garishly lit garage that specializes in transmissions

and smells like an abattoir of oily orchids

sacrificed like sacred bulls in garlands

on the altar of a pneumatic car lift

where eternity intersects time as history.

Twenty feet from the driveway

to the perfectly latticed wire fence

sequestered on a reservation of useless land,

a pharmacopeia of every weed that grows wild

in southern Ontario, huddled on the crest

of a bull-dozed hill fort in self-defence.

And in one quick swathe of the bush-hog,

stunted runt versions of the same plants

blooming like symbols of underground resistance,

common mullein, tansy, Queen Ann’s Lace, vetch,

viper’s bugloss gone out like pilot lights on a gas stove,

and the sabre cuts and slashes of the tall grasses

waving green banners from their slender masts

and unbroken aerials as fragile as a heron’s legs.

Beauty and utility in a coincidence of contradictories

where abstractions haven’t been multiplied

beyond necessity. The earth turns as it always has

and the moon and Arcturus move accordingly

as the Summer Triangle emerges from the cloud-cover

like the brain child of a birdwatcher

with a taste for myth and mathematics.

Perennializing events in a trivial frame of reference.

And just as the bugs have their communal rapture

in the light, I stand here alone gazing at the stars

trying to see my way into other worlds

by closing the distance with the intensity

of my overwhelming wonder and longing to know

if there might be some poet out there tonight like me

watching the moon rise over bucolic machines

and the space needed to sustain them

at the expense of the trees and weeds and wildflowers

as he’s mystically weirded out by the relative parity

of disparate elements in an impersonally unified field.

And he like me, Arcturus, the trucks, the weeds

and the moon among them, living the ambivalent beauty

of an eternity that breaks its truce with time

once and awhile, to adorn what’s been defiled,

and let unity come forth by itself to forsake the difference

in a voice of its own the storage units trust

like the sacred syllable of a lock on mundane things

alloyed like haloes and horseshoes of stardust and rust.

PATRICK WHITE

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

GET THESE GOLDEN NETS, THESE CHAINS, OFF ME

Get these golden nets, these chains, off me,

these dreamcatchers, cobwebs, suspension bridges

swaying like sticky spinal cords across the shoreless abyss.

I’m smothering under these pillows of sunset

you keep pushing in my face to soften

the impact of my meteoric heart

trying to induce a new species

out of my own extinction

that might accord me a retroactive purpose

for having lived like a root

in the dirt of their flowering.

More compassion spent on lies

than truths, the sun might come up

in the morning and pour honey

all over its head like bees in the dawn,

but it isn’t the same for active volcanoes.

Half the world waiting to receive

what the other half wants to take from them,

via positiva, via negativa, sure

all roads lead to Rome eventually

like most rivers make the sea

but haven’t you noticed the mystic path

is cobbled like a calendar with the lunar skulls

of birds and gurus all along the way

who mistook the windows of opportunity

in their third eye, for the real sky up ahead?

I know you believe time heals all things,

and day after day, this implacable pace

can be construed as some kind of advance,

and even the dust on the windowsill

will be redeemed as the pollen of windblown stars,

if someone would only give love a fighting chance.

May it be so, sweet one, but life isn’t

the agenda of the blossoms, it’s in

the corporate boardrooms of the roots

trying to put a good spin on death

like the propaganda of decay. But even

castigation has lost its joy in life

and the sages that might have saved us

yesterday, are muttering like madmen to themselves

in murderous alleys that end

in cul de sacs of laughing children

without any idea of how absurd

it really all is for them as well as the homeless

they stab in the back in their sleep

for ratting life out like the black plague of their dreams.

Even if I had no legs, I wouldn’t want to spend

the twenty or less autumns and springs of life

I have left, if that, walking on water with golden crutches

like the principles of the dilemma I stand on,

I stole like oars from a lifeboat on a shipwreck

that had no more use for hope. I don’t

want to cook the books of my cosmic home recipes

and make a diet a messianic way of life

that greets the moneylenders at the door of the temple

and feeds the people the tongues of doves.

I was born into life raw as a new wound.

The same insights that touched your eyes like fireflies

were runically striated across mine

by surgical glaciers without any anaesthetic.

A street gang flashing its smile

like an iconic switchblade of moonlight

trying to leave its mark on life like scar tissue.

I’ve seen diamonds on the fingers of adamantine saints

turn back into infernal coal bins of ungratified desire

as soon as someone blew the candles out like photo-ops.

I’m wary of good people these days.

I’ve mythically inflated the illusion of my isolation

up into a rogue planet of habitable solitude

where nothing’s ever wrong or right

but endlessly intriguing in an interstitial kind of way

like a fish that swam out of the sea

or a bird that flew out of the sky

to adapt myself to the inchoate spaciousness

of a new medium of transformational events.

I’ve jumped the synaptic gap

between the earth and the heavens,

like the sound of one hand clapping

at its own performance, the sonic boom

that ruptures the eardrum of the sky

like a clown shot out of a cannon

without a safety net to disqualify the risk.

Whether I’m Zen duelling in the snake pit of the Id,

or studying the logic of the lightning

in the mirrors of prima donnas putting on their make-up,

to let the trees in the open fields know

where it’s going to strike their nervous systems next,

I don’t cling to things like a bat in the burdock

or a monk enduring the earthly ordeals

of his immaculate detachment like spiritual velcro.

I live in a world without handles, where the atoms

free associate into elements of their own choosing

and base metal can as easily be seen

as the grey dawn of gold, rather than

the long, hard discipline of learning how to be

self-destructive creatively and calling it a sacrifice

to the new moon on the altars of occult learning.

I don’t sail my poems down river like

paper-mache swans in a labyrinth of locks

trying to make their way gracefully to the sea

without waiting for a gate to swing open

like a crane on a backwater loading dock.

I shed them like the blossoms of the moon on a lake.

I can’t dance to engineered versions of this lunar ballet

that can’t walk on water without

feeling vertiginously out of its depths

whenever the road leads through a black hole

like the easiest way around the mountain of the world.

Slavic enough to take the whole burden

of the integrity of pain upon myself

as one of the eventualities of suffering

it’s as crucial to live through as it is not to,

I still reserve the right to shake my fist at the sky

like an extra gang railroad lineman

at four every afternoon before I fling a shovel

like an inkwell at the decapitated sun,

all the fruits of my labour you shall know me by

surrealistically Sisyphean as the tracks I’m laying

keep on decoupling my thought trains in the wilderness

as if this were as good a place as any to jump off.

PATRICK WHITE

THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

THE VOICES OF DEAD FRIENDS, DEPARTED LOVERS

The voices of dead friends, departed lovers

aimlessly feather the night air like the fragrances

of wildflowers and burning guitars thriving in the dark.

I’m out to see the Delta Aquarids down by the river,

leaping like a man with faith in his precarious footing

from skull to skull like a chessboard of oracular rocks

keeping their heads above water like a half-hearted bridge

dog-paddling in its own collapse, trying to cross

the same mindstream they’re in up to their eyes

for a better view of the sky in the clearing on the other side.

Clouds of cometary junkyards in decaying orbits.

Placental remains of unilluminated afterbirths.

I delight in watching how wasted things shine the brightest

on their way down like blossoms of paint

flaking off the windows of heaven like rose petals

revealing these thorns that gore and slash the night

like matadors and meteors with razorblades

hidden under the screening myths of their eyelids.

It’s natural when opposites come together,

enjoining disparate elements into more enduring alloys,

it’s the clarity that seems confusing to the untrained eye

and chaos that foreshadows transmorphic reality.

All my aspirations emanate from the same radiant

like sudden cremations in the upper atmosphere

that disintegrate and flame out upon re-entry

like Icarian candlewax at the black mass

of a waning eclipse factualizing the omens

of its own self-fulfilling prophecies of subliminal descent.

All the matches I strike like fireflies

and phosphorus flower buds against my heart

are put out by the same bloodstream

they once illuminated like wild columbine

and the hydrogen blue of the star clusters

burning like irises along this highly siderealized river.

Meteors. Two an hour. Bayonets of light

making the rounds on the nightwatch.

The tree line blows through the open window

of the wavering lake like an old curtain

about to be shed like the veil of the Queen of Heaven.

Indigo the eyes of Isis. With a white wavelength for a smile.

Here where she gathers up the severed hearts

of the light’s dismemberment like body parts

she heals by leaving the waterlilies on all night in the morgue

and staring so long and immaculately

into the darkness like a lump of coal

for the third eye of a spiritual snowman

washing his hands of himself like a pilgrimage

weeping diamonds all along the way

like the excruciating tears we all shed

in the shrines of the black suns that rise at midnight

like broken mirrors from the graves of dead metaphors.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMEONE'S CUT THE TONGUES OUT OF THE BELLS TONIGHT

SOMEONE’S CUT THE TONGUES OUT OF THE BELLS TONIGHT

Someone’s cut the tongues out of the bells tonight.

Even the silence isn’t singing to itself.

The windows are generously tolerant of intruders

but I’m locked into the splendour of my isolation

empathizing with things I don’t love.

Full moon. Fruit moon. Moon of berries and grain.

I thought I’d be happier at this time in my life,

but I’m threshing a harvest of shadows

for having sowed all my wild oats on the moon.

I’m intrigued by the fragrance of occult raptures on the air.

Dark intensities that can only end in immolation.

Black roses that only bloom in fire. Mystic disobedience

that lifts the flesh and blood taboos off

whatever comes to it naturally

as a late night 24-7 convenience store

or the fire that started in the kitchen of the Chinese restaurant

three doors down from my apartment yesterday.

Late night moods. The mind dogpaddling in its immensities.

Heritage town standing down from its fieldstones.

No drunks on the street, and all those angry voices

I didn’t recognize, gone home to sleep off their disappointment.

I sit like an air traffic comptroller mindwatching

behind these panes of glass as Arcturus goes down

over the tar paper rooftops I poetically associate

with clouds, stars, seagulls and hand-held mirrors of rain

after a thunderstorm has shattered its reflection in them

like a love affair that wasn’t going anywhere.

Doing time on earth, but of little consequence.

The bank across the street makes me feel depreciated.

Ask me this moment what legacy I’ve left

for the half century I’ve laboured creatively here

and I’d probably answer indignantly, a garage sale,

then reassure you by saying, for a good cause,

and mostly mean it, and partially wish I didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE

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