OVER HERE, YOU SEE

OVER HERE, YOU SEE

Over here, you see, this is where I keep

a hospice for the strawdogs and voodoo dolls

that wander in off the road like spiritual emergencies

that have had enough of being used at sacred rituals.

I made peace between my blessings and my curses,

blew the angels off the heads of the pins

they were dancing on like the axes of uninhabitable planets

stuck through my eyes, the splintered glass

of wreckless stars it took more than light years of tears

to wash from my seeing when everything looked so painful

and the angels were grinding reflecting mirrors

to give corneal transplants to the way I looked at things.

Away with the blessings. Away with the curses.

The doves and the crows, the veils and the bars,

and the way some stars burnt like meteor showers,

chimney sparks, with the radiant of a welder’s arc

trying to repair the rip in the hull of my heart in drydock

whenever I scuttled it like the moon on a coral reef.

And this is the matrix of the lost and found

of all I’ve known and seen and couldn’t find

any other context for other than the artificial paradise

of this womb in waiting everything that hasn’t happened yet.

There are generations of orphans here

with toyboxes full of the enduring relics

their mothers left like endearing fossils

of a love that never came back to claim them.

Petrified butterflies among the sea life of the Burgess Shale.

I keep a place for them in my heart like a pressed flower

until they can root on their own, and bloom

like a star they can follow anywhere, and it’s home.

This is the dark closet where I hang my skeletons

like a wardrobe of mannequins that have worn

my skin from time to time like the flying carpets

of world-creating cosmic membranes blowing

shapeshifting bubbles into hyperspace like alternative lives

that occasionally pop on the razorwire of their umbilical cords

like prophylactic thorns on the miscarriage of a rose

as never to have existed, as Sophocles said,

is the best part of life, bar none. Whether you’re dressed

like a zodiacal king in the cochineal robes of the universe,

or wear the richer rags of a man who walks naked.

And you don’t want to know what’s in there,

but over here in this chamber next to where

the picture-music has a sound proof room of its own

when its rehearsing the silence of the mystery that beguiles it

like a lyric of blood in deep irreconcilable exile,

if you look through this little mica window

you can see the dragons glassblowing their tears

as delicate and fragile as the rain that falls

like chandeliers from a lunar watershed just below

the manic desiccations on the sun-baked surface

of a reflected glory that doesn’t come

with dedicated flowers devoted to hummingbirds

that showed them the sweetness of life in surreal replication.

And this water palace has a thousand rooms

with great bay windows and walls that can speak

of the great events of tragedy and bliss

they’ve witnessed discretely in a cosmic context,

hung with heavy velvet curtains of blood

and tapestries of loose ends the moon unweaves at night

into a million separate wavelengths of enlightenment

it will gather on a loom of blood into the narrative unity

of tomorrow when the tide draws back like an arrow on a bow.

But there’s one floorless, wall-less windowless room

ageless as eternity and bigger than the abyss

that’s lit by the dendritic candelabra of fireflies and stars

coming into blossom nocturnally like an apple tree

on a cold night in spring, I especially want you to see.

This is the doorless niche of my solitude I burn in like a candle.

This is the inexplicable emptiness in my heart

that’s learned to cherish the abyss with open arms,

not just as space, though learning that is wisdom,

but as living people and inanimate things, stars,

leaves, ants, wolves and windows expressing forms

to console themselves in the pervasiveness of their isolation

by taking a hidden secret and making it known

as the black waters of earth long for the moon as a companion.

And this is where I have enshrined your dark radiance

like a telescope in an observatory buzzing with stars

at the prolixity of wild flowers opening themselves up

like loveletters they received anonymously in the night.

This is the sacred grove of the silver-tongued silence

where the birds of insight ripen the fruits of their longing

like windfalls of jewels in the ores of the darkness like eyes

that have sweetened and deepened their seeing enough

to orient the Parthenon to the rising of the Pleiades

liberated like a flock of doves flying off everywhere

in the ubiquitous directions of prayer voiced by the light

of the sailing ones nursing the catasterism of the heart

risking a more enlightened suicide

by falling in love from ever greater

mythologically inspired heights in the depths

of my astronomical awareness of the shining that is you

as if you were the only mirror in the room I can look into

and see way more than the eclipse of myself

than I ever expected to.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT, THE DEEPER THE SHADOW

for Rebekah Garland

The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.

Shine. And anyone who can see will follow.

Just make sure the stars are real and not tinfoil.

You don’t need to know where you’re going

to be a good guide when you yourself are the path you’re on.

Shine. You’re the blue orchid in the Pleiades.

You’re the firefly in the skull that kicked in

like a bioluminescent emergency light

when the dead woke up to discover they had no eyes.

You’re the last candle dancing to the pulse of the dragon’s heart.

You have suffered and lost. Suffered and won.

Suffered and healed like wounded water on the moon.

Shine like a fountainmouth. Shine like a watershed

that can feel the galaxies swimming through it like starfish

whirling like Sufis at the crossroads of a black hole

like the navel of the wheeling world with the singularity

of a hidden jewel in it like the third eye of a lump of coal

shining out like a diamond of the first magnitude.

You can do cartwheels across the sky

as if your legs and arms were spokes.

You can listen for a voice in the abyss of time and silence

until your ears turn into radio telescopes

turning like calla lilies on a jinxed prayer wheel

looking for signs of extraterrestrial rural life

like pendulous Zen pagodas hanging like bird feeders

on the errant limb of a locust tree, waiting for birds.

Shine like a sword of fire outside the gates of your re-entry

from a long return journey of the smokey dove

that wasn’t sacrificed, but volunteered

to go see what happened to the crow that was sent out first

to witch for land with an olive branch of lightning in its beak

as a sign of the truce we seek with the rain,

we seek through our tears, we seek like the new moon

wholly reflected in every plinth of our shattered mirrors

of what appeared to be real, until, like hungry ghosts

we tried to grasp it and it slipped through our fingers

like an hourglass full of stars, a rosary of Canada geese,

a slaver’s neckchain made of gold like a Celtic torgue.

Shine. I know there’s a genie of blue hydrogen in your lamp

and you don’t need a nightwatchman to ignite it every night,

though I expect you’d meet up later at a seance,

like the creative medium of a spiritual adept at sensual silence.

But when you do, you fire up hell like a school furnace

as easily as you illuminate paradise with a poppy and a sunflower.

Shine. This is your hour. When it’s darkest and it matters the most.

Be a lighthouse off your own shipwrecked coast.

Be the many-petalled matchbook of a flower that blooms in fire

once every seven thousand years, and when the wind

doesn’t feed it anything but the milk and bread of ghosts,

I know you’ve got the ferocious courage

not to blow it out just because you can. Shine

like a wavelength ploughing the dead seas of the moon

like a garden it intends to plant in its wake

that will keep on expanding like the growing edge

of tree rings emanating like cambium from the heartwood

of a cosmic tree that never stops bearing fruit

even when it feels like a Pre-Cambrian tree in a petrified forest

under the Arctic ice of a new polarized ice age.

Don’t hide in the weeds and the shadows

of the star you were meant to be at this zenith

of your ascendency whether you’re peaking or at nadir.

Shine. And let me see if I can recognize by one star alone

what constellation you’re shapeshifting into

like a starmap with flightpaths and insights of her own

through the eye of the hurricane

in the crowns of the black walnut trees

where the nightbirds are waiting as autumn’s coming on

for you to show them how to make their own way home.

Be a lamp in the arms of your own journey.

Just as the moon that’s apprenticed like a sorceress

to all the phases of your beautiful, crazy wisdom is.

PATRICK WHITE

COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

COMING OUT OF A BLUE FUNK

Coming out of a blue funk, this seal,

under a sky thickening like sheet ice all day

has found an airhole it can breathe through for awhile.

Been wondering about my life. What

it’s been doing to me for the last fifty years

for the sake of poetry, for the sake

of pursuing an earthly excellence

though it hardly matters why anymore.

I used to have an answer on the tip of my tongue

when I was young and thought more

with my mouth than my heart. Less so now.

Time, death, suffering, love and the devil,

certain intense realms of creative bliss

attuned to the dark harmonies of hidden roots

that flow back like the delta of a river

to the watershed of a single drop of water

that got it in its head to do something big with its life

and turn something trivial into the sublime.

Did not the sun and the moon, the whole of the sky,

fit it like skin? And that was just the outside.

It would take more than light years to measure

the wingspan of the abysmal spaces within.

Even time would run out of itself

before it got to the end of anything.

My life in art has been like keeping a fire alight outside

in a rainstorm of tears. To see clearly

through windows that thawed in the heat

of looking through them with the compassionate ferocity

of a crystal skull poured out of a terraforming meteor impact

like a prophetic lump of coal, a diamond in the rough,

that refused to burn in the furnace to prove it had the right stuff

to shine like a star, no one could follow, on its way to somewhere else.

Not a sign post. Just a sign. Your eyes

once you see it, are never going to be the same again.

You won’t look at a starcluster like the Pleiades

as if you were waiting for the traffic lights to change.

You’ll take your three and a half pounds of brainy starmud,

like a meteoritic kissing stone, a falling star,

and run it through a diamond tipped bandsaw

and discover the jewel of life that’s been glowing

in the core of the ore since time immemorial

like a dna molecule wasted on space

that transforms the medium and the messenger

into a voice, free of content, that’s the whole of the message.

I walked out to this dark, deserted place, redolent

with the duff and detritus of life, the flotsam and jetsam,

where the half life of the rate of decay of my insights

into your heart, eludes being used as an atomic clock

to determine the agelessness of either of us.

I came out to look at the stars but I’ve been startled

by the photonic discharges of your bioluminescent fireflies

ever since I started looking up like a starmap to make sure things

were where they were supposed to be. One moment

you get in my eyes like the sandstorm of a mandalic power painting,

a masterpiece of the wind, and the next,

I can feel the intransigence of your vulnerability

dyeing your hair like a comet to attract the attention

of the sun at midnight looking for asylum from a black hole

where it’s third eye used to be.

You’re a mermaid on the rocks of Andromeda singing to a telescope

to look up to see how far its got to sink in an ocean of stars

before it hits bottom like a shipwrecked moonrise

gone pearl diving for habitable planets

that can say I love you and mean it like an atmosphere

it’s not going to lose again. Only in the Braille

of the scars on your heart so far, but I can read your pain

like the glyphs of an Aztec temple

I’m still clearing from the jungle of my indirections,

that recorded in imported stone how many times

it’s been torn out to please the gods with a kidnapped sacrifice

worthy of the priestcraft in the sacred abattoirs

of modern drug cartels when you’re too susceptible

to feeling too much, the same as me, when I’m thinking mythically

about what I’ve endured to be acceptable in my own eyes

that might shine across these aloof distances like a star into yours

that lights you up from the inside like an intimate familiar

whispering into your ear like a dream grammar of sacred syllables

that have liberated themselves from the syntax of the stars

just to speak subliminally in the same sign language as you

like the chaos of fireflies I see in the black mirror of my mindstream

bending space like the surface of a lake at night

where you can hear the echo of a loon ululating

like the wavelength of a mysterious love song

among these dark hills shapeshifting in the moonlight

toward you like a mirage of picture-music

emerging as something real in this wilderness of transformation

like a new constellation of fireflies I want to overhear with your heart.

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

It’s not enough to hinge a new door to your heart

when the house is built on flowerless quicksand

and the chimneys have acquired a taste for books;

poems are the birthmarks of stairwells climbing themselves,

of hawks and serpents boring into the corks of wine

to get at the heart, the passions, the dreams, the rage

of the vine that set out like a road that got carried away

and fell in love with the intimate strangers who took it home

and danced all night among the swords as if they were thresholds.

Born in the shadows of unbearable bells, early I found

they were bound to the cord of my spine, like the moon

among the kelp that oils its tides with the black sperms of creation,

and I learned to pull on their iron parachutes to ease

my harsh, hot descents into wingless, mute oblivions;

I discovered there was a voice beyond mine

that could gather and disperse, celebrate and divine

the secret weddings and deaths of the bridal ghosts that came

like castaway bouquets to the refugee altars of their torn veils.

And there’s an indelible secret as old as the eyes of the wind

that can whisper sand into pyramids, that won’t receive

the vows of the petty and clever who traffic in the shadows

of the great, wild dead who wore their battered crowns like fire.

Let them crib their poems on the back of another man’s eyelids,

real constellations don’t shine like this and the wells are mute

whose waters taste of fireflies; and there isn’t a river on the moon

that knows how to plead with the sea for a widow that mourns,

that knows whose prodigy of blood unravels on autumn’s horns,

or how the waterlily in the mouth of the dragon

is more dangerous than a shrine full of blind snakes.

Behind every name, behind every door with a brass threshold

is a man who was forgotten by his own violated treaties

with the indentured mirrors he consulted to cheat the lakes,

who comes up over his horizons like the solemnities of the moon,

looking for the pillar of his lost reflection in chunks of coal,

in the underfed crematoria of his sacrificial backyard fire-pits

in the lifelines of the empty hands he misread like maps of smoke.

Poetry isn’t an orphanage or asylum for the disenchanted,

though there is a deranged abyss under its relentless solitude;

not a showcase Colosseum for famished lions at a petting zoo,

though mauled minds and bodies litter the unwitnessed field;

there are no paths through its unanswerable distances

strewn with petals or thorns, no bridges or waystations,

no branches of hospitable trees to perch in for the night,

no dawns that can erase what’s been written on your forehead,

nothing that can blind you to what you were born to see,

no rain that can douse the squandered fire of the poppy,

though the messenger is smashed like a bottle between

the tide and the rock; the star, the candle, the nightflower

snuffed by the morning, the last breath of the deathless moon.

And you must die enough to not be there

when the world picks up a pen like an axis

to spin in the direction of its wounded inclinations,

you must not walk into the house wearing a face,

your breath on the glacial windows of the furious stars

full of secret fingerprints, love-notes, names,

you must be more conversant than a ghost on a bridge

or a rose, or an empty mailbox, or a road that followed you

to where the river turns, with shapeshifting,

with pearling a body around a syllable of sand,

with showing a galaxy its shadow in eyelids and eclipses,

with standing like a scarecrow in the cornfield

that shucked the cob of a smile to batter you with birds,

with lying beside the dead like a lantern in a morgue

as if your blood crossed the threshold for them,

with waiting in the earth a long time, a root

that conceals orchards in the furrows of its dirty hands,

a buried boat that unfurls the blossoms of its sails,

the starcharts of the blind moles that shine underground,

like a voyage in search of the rudder of your tongue

to pilot it safely out of the ports of the moon,

a flame, a breath, a feather you’ve cradled for years,

the small measures of belief in an oceanic grave

that enrobes the flowing in the wake of severed waves.

Be stone, or be space; the emptiness is the same,

silver ore, or the motherlode of a black hole,

let your heart pan the long rivers of the night

for what the stars value, jewels of life in the light

that can be grown like a menagerie of blood and tears,

the eyes of the blackberries, eyes of the radiant bee

on the flutes of the wind that plays for a handful of seeds.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

Don’t think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.

Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments

some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell

in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum

of all my failures, it’s a strange book to quote from.

I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,

but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity

and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,

defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.

You’d think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way

like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path

the rest of the herd doesn’t take much anymore

as they did when the more siderealized shepherds

used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,

would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy

left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip

to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun

as it’s going down like a mailbox at the side of the road

with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.

You can spend your whole life as preparation

for a moment that never comes. Some people

don’t want to catch up to their star.

They just want to follow it as far as they can go.

They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.

Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations

and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others

by their constellations or their urns,

I’ve had more of a precessional inclination

to scatter them like seagulls on the wind

just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,

each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music

or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony

living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.

Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to leave signs

of where I’d been as delusory clues for those

sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,

roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into

with more infinitely spacious windows

than there are condemned houses

in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light

than it deserves, and I like people that have been

sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass

that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.

An alumnus of the underground schools

for the occult science of new moons,

every moment of my life since

I’ve been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.

The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up

like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house

shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,

playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,

and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,

swaying like a river reed going with the flow

to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning

looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It’s the arrogance of consciousness to think

it’s anymore than an eddy in the mindstream

that’s got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness

it’s heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan

that’s got nothing to do with how things fall out.

The world turns and things are relegated

to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned

from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.

The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces

keep changing shape like the fossils of a man

who isn’t comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears

slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat

like heart-shaped morning glory leaves

steaming into the dawn

like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,

arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,

or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight

from the bottom up on the roots of the earth

as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles

to see the stars burning in the day

from the bottom of a dry housewell

that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount

of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss

of a message it’s waiting to receive

that’s already been delivered

like a star that’s strong and true,

but apocalyptically behind the times

as if one person’s past were another person’s present

and past and future and present

were all living co-terminously in the moment

like the triune identity of time looking three ways,

and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,

simultaneously, so when the wind blows

through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars

because I listen attentively to the lyrics

like a nightbird waiting for an answer

to its amorous enquiry, I know I’m not

singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.

My world’s been complete since the Big Bang

and everything after, the prophetic echo

of a future memory of cosmic events

that happened without me billions of light years ago.

PATRICK WHITE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN HE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,

maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,

the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here

but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair

even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.

I seek out this precarious granite ledge

shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat

with its thatch of moss and yellow grass

and this little patch of dirt, struggling

to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically

as if many others sat here before me

and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard

of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight

wading through the wild rice with their skirts

above their white, white knees. I come here

to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,

missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.

A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about

I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds

counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing

my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow

that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,

except for one firefly shining behind her veils

like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids

of a black velvet painting of a bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike

moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines

under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,

while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh

all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took

in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds

were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes

of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells

of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense

to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can

life heals its own absence like a wound in water,

like a mouse squealing in midflight above

the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me

with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees

to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls

on the walls of a cathedral wilderness

pioneered into the empty one-roomed

wooden churches around here where the flies cluster

like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.

And the pioneers have all been ploughed under

and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery

than the earth without black iron fences and gates

trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon

around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into

when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,

nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand

that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear

so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery

of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters

as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky

with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears

and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions

dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating

honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,

or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths

wolfskins on despondent shamans with

two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes

trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon

with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed

to the heartache and longing that can suddenly

startle and blossom out of the darkness

like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through

the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation

between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,

it only takes one to sing.

PATRICK WHITE

IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

IN CERTAIN MOODS I THINK LIKE AN ICE AGE

In certain moods I think like an ice age,

relentless, every insight, the glacier

of a window on the move that cuts like a diamond.

I’m not sentimental about baby mammoths

falling into cryonic crevasses for twelve thousand years.

I could gouge out the eyes of lakes, bully the mountains

like a mile high waterclock with its pedal frozen to the metal of time.

Something brittle and cold as broken glass in my seeing.

A clarity that burns like dry ice born without a personality.

I can still stand in the bottom of a snakepit

and see the stars like the fang marks of so many strikes

at the scared rabbit of my heart beating like a strawberry,

palpitating like the sump pump of a toxin

trying to drain the sweetest of watersheds

like quicksilver from the mirrors of my brain.

Sometimes I feel I’ve been harbouring

the skull and crossbones in the piratical bay

of a subliminal childhood that washed me up

out of a fire storm onto a more ferocious shore

of civilized savages that take their time eating each other.

I can see as supraobjectively as a reptile from the late Triassic

the asteroid that’s heading this way

to shatter the window of opportunity

like an atmosphere that doesn’t encourage

growth in a greenhouse, but doesn’t mind

genetically tampering with cell tissue

as if agriculture had given birth, not only to war,

but to a mutated child that would redesign her.

Too many nuances are left out of lizards and lenses

for me to look at the world through their eyes

too long. My third eye begins to crystallize like a jewel

instead of a black pearl of a new moon

on the tongues of the waterlilies walking on the water

like the pale flames of the constellations burning their starmaps

like passports to anywhere they’re not as homelessly here

as they are now. And there are strange viruses

that can be transmitted from telescopes in port

like heresy through the gullible angel fleets.

People begin to see that the crystal slipper

fits the darkness better than the light

the way a star fits the winged heels of the night

like the Great Square of Pegasus, or Albireo in the Swan,

Al Tair in the Eagle, or Vega in the Lyre,

as if one size for a shapeshifting universe fits all.

Time eventually sands the hardest edges down

like a dentist drill trying to put new crown on the pyramids,

triangular sun dials get rounded out into circular clocks,

and the conceptual sabres of exactitude, learn

to hesitate like humans as their mainsprings go slack

and the tension wears off at trying to insulate themselves

like referees from the vicissitudes and uncertainties of the game

by being more severely disciplined than perfection.

A saving grace I received from my mother

who would send me down to the Fountain Lunch

to buy her a True Detective magazine late at night,

I remember the elaborate ferns of frost on the window,

and spend the rest on candy, though she was down

to her last buck, like a tree with one leaf left,

she taught me how to protest impoverishment

with a flare and generosity that flew counterintuitively

into the brutal impersonality of its defeated face.

And the air full of gleeful butterflies torn up

like an eviction notice issued with a mythically deflated smile

on the deathmask of one of the nabobs among slumlords

sipping empire with their tea like the East India Company

that had a manifest destiny for themselves,

and the obscurity of obscene circumstances for everyone else.

Not a comet falling out of its black halo into the sun,

but a post-demonic clarity beyond symbols

like a fledging learning to fly

by transcending its own wingspan

into an abyss a universe shy of shining,

absurdly sublime and intensely insignificant

as a childhood is, when it’s bruised

by one too many atrocities early in the game

to really care whether it’s disappointing its despair

with a little hope, or putting a nightmare to shame

by pointing out even the clearest windows

have been known to paint themselves

the world they want to see when they look outside

instead of trying to see it as it is without turning to stone

when it isn’t interpreted like sign language,

unless, by some malicious stroke of luck

some delinquent eluding the neighbourhood watch

puts his fist through it

to enlighten his tantrum as the stars

come pouring into the vacuum

like a sea of tears in reverse

where the tide of affairs is always

worse for the wear of coming in

than it is in the ease of going out.

Providence makes a grand entrance

then heads for the exit refused and humbled

by this sinking feeling the stars get

even when they’re rising, though fire

doesn’t burn its fingers on itself

that doesn’t mean it isn’t being consumed.

Or if even so little as a single firefly

of inspired rage is glowing somewhere

across the hard-hearted tundra, that’s the end

of your eyes being scalded by an ice age

that’s been freezing and thawing them out since childhood

until your heart aches like a raw strawberry

as feeling begins to circulate in it again.

PATRICK WHITE