WHAT DID YOU SEE JUST BEFORE YOU COMMITTED SUICIDE?

WHAT DID YOU SEE JUST BEFORE YOU COMMITTED SUICIDE?

in memory of Heidi Clow

What did you see just before you committed suicide?

Did the snake mesmerize the bird that used to sing inside

your rib cage, turn it to stone, dis the lyrics of its song

with a cosmic hiss that underwhelmed all other sound?

Did you die from the inside out or the outside in?

Was there a light that summoned you to the end of the tunnel

like candles on the hillsides of Blue Skies, or did you

step out on stage in the glare of a bare lightbulb

in an interrogation room where you finally answered

what you were keeping secret from yourself? I won’t ask you

to forgive the candour of this if it’s cruel. I’ve been

the kind of demonic fool the earth opens up

and swallows from time to time, so I know

death has its jewels as well as life and when the dark energy

expands your eyes like space, you can see them shine

like wolf’s eyes in the black mirror of a midnight lake.

And I’ve always found the brightest diamonds of clarity

that could cut through everything like the clear light of the void

in the darkest, deepest diamond mines of my igneous soul.

And I remember the cotton candy clouds of the pink angels

before I jumped from paradise, but that was so many shrouds ago

I’ve learned to keep my fire at a distance from inflammable hair-dos

that have been backcombed and hairsprayed too much.

I don’t graft a crutch to the tree of knowledge

and expect it to bloom. And even when the moon blossoms

on the dead branch, what fruit ever comes of it?

I don’t think you ever liked me much, but if push

had ever come to shove I would have thrown my weight

like the mass of a black hole on your side of the argument.

My heart was too much of a stump to efoliate

in the fires of spring and I was autumns away

from the gates of the garden you brought to the door

with flaming angels and untempered swords

that weren’t hard enough to fall upon yet,

but you were in love with my room mate for awhile

and I gave up my studio to the two of you

so you could both work the guile and wile and style

of your respective arts like alchemical spells upon each other

while I retired to the living room like a benign sunset

with a smile on its face over the darkening hills

to re-read Spengler’s Decline of the West

intrigued like a ghost at a seminar-seance

by the morphology of knowledge forms based on metaphors.

And I remember you coming over once,

bombed on Fireball Whiskey, grabbing the neck

of the half-finished bottle like an unexploded artillery shell

and falling backwards over a table into a large rubber plant

as you collapsed like a laughing inferno that bounced back

in adolescent tears as we picked you up like a circus tent

or an emergency parachute that didn’t open in time,

covered in potting soil, as you apologized over-crucially

about the slashes and striations that scored a painting of mine

I finally repaired years later with scars of pthalo blue after you died.

And I thought of you as a high wire act on your spinal cord that night

as I mixed the luminosity and values of the hues

on a palette that seemed like a small, sacrificial altar to you

of my grief and affection in the crazy wisdom of a human insight

into the nature of the tragic follies of love and life and how

we endear loss to ourselves like wounds, like graves, like flowers

we inflict upon the heart in such a way they’ll never close

because the sorrow is what binds you to us

like a rose to the thorns in our bloodstream.

And then all your friends came over in a squall of concern

as Spengler and I went and stood by the large bay windows

and looked out into a vast night we knew we’d never understand

as you poured your beauty and passion, darkness and doubts

out on the couch in a flashflood of tears and alcohol, realization and laughter.

Only ever saw you in passing after that and sometimes

you’d say hello back and sometimes you wouldn’t

as you seemed embedded in some kind of tempestuous trance

oblivious to the world as you danced around your own fire

deep inside, though I never thought it was any of my business

to guess what it was you were praying for or whether

you were firewalking a warpath into the military as I later

heard you did and thought how strange that such a dancer

should want to learn to march and even Spengler didn’t have an answer.

Or I’d watch you from the Perth Restaurant, strutting your stuff

up Gore Street like a model on a runway, range-finding

the effects of your cosmetics and high heels and auburn hair

on an encampment of your boyfriends absent without leave.

But I never saw you, rare for the young women of this town,

being led around by a donkey like an eagle on a leash

and by that I knew the intensity of your vulnerable independence

and the savage innocence of a passionate heart in the wilderness.

Then, I forget who told me, but in a single sentence, you were dead.

An ice storm had shattered the rose like a crashing chandelier

and blunted all its thorns like those stilettoes you used to wear

The dance, the strut, the march was over. Late frost

on an early metaphor for the springtime coming into its prime.

But I need to know, when you fell into the black hole

did it turn into the fountainmouth of a white one on the other side

of a whole new universe that hadn’t grown as old and blind as this one?

Teach me the signs so I can rearrange the stars in time

like new astrolabes and starmaps to keep the Milky Way

from turning into the Great Barrier Reef that rips the hull

out of the lifeboat of the moon as it passes over

the brain coral and starmud of other shipwrecked minds

that put to sea looking for salvation in the oceans of the rose

only to return like salvage from the storm washed up

on these isolated shores of haunted islands in the mindstream.

Unborn, unperishing, I believe we’re all here indelibly

because you can’t pour the universe out of the universe

or where’s it going to go, and since the whole is in every part,

that includes you and I and everyone in one way or another

eternally. Is it so, Heidi? Do we move like waterclocks

from world to world, our eyes evaporate into the light

because whatever form we take, fireflies or lightning,

we are, perennially, the shining of our own unique insight

by which the light is known by the light we cast upon it?

That we’re the light by which the stars are known

and those immensities in which we hold them deep inside,

as now we do you who have added yourself to the whole

so expansively we must grow like space to keep up with you

and the way we humanize the unknown, as the stars do

like lanterns entering a dark room, is to embrace it as intimately

as you have like the available dimension of a future

we’ve all been moving into like supernovas and galaxies

from the beginningless beginning of all things, tomorrow

like yesterday, here, now, as you are, and have always been

as if the history of seeing were the biography of the light

that blossoms in each of us like wildflowers in the starfields,

or in every wild rose, as you were, the incarnation of a passionate insight,

even in its passage in the autumn when the rosaries

of the Canada geese call as they’re crossing the moon

high overhead, transmigrating the souls of the dead

to the thresholds of new constellations hidden under our eyelids

like Venus in the Pleiades near Aldebaran just before dawn?

No death or birth in the moment, like time in a dream,

how can here and now where we all abide with the stars

and the planets and their shepherd moons ever be gone?

It’s night now, Heidi, back in Perth here on earth and it’s raining.

I’m watching the ripples in the puddles playing water like music

all up and down Foster Street from my upstairs apartment window.

And how the streetlights are dancing in their garish gypsy scarves

barefoot to the rhythm. As I imagine you’re doing right now

among similar wavelengths just out of reach of my eyes

Though I can see you so clearly when I see you with my heart

as I do the stars and the willows and the waterbirds

down by the Tay River when I stand on one bank of life

and look up at the other like the far shore of the Milky Way

wheeling like the girandole of the spiral arm of a starfish.

And though I thought of putting poppies and wheat upon your grave,

remembering you were a sailor back in my hometown,

and hope is a lifeboat that keeps us all from drowning in our tears,

it reminds me of you somehow, and I make a wish upon it

like the star of Isis the ancient sailors used to tattoo

on the left palm of their hands to make it through the storm

and had, somehow, come through the squalls of time like you

there in the heights, a water-sylph of the radiance

shining on like that star just to the right of midnight,

breaking through these clouds of unknowing, like Heidi Clow

looking down upon us all on the nightwatch,

whispering like the carillon of the rain, three bells and all’s well.

PATRICK WHITE

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

STUPID, STUPID WORLD FULL OF LIES

Stupid, stupid world full of lies, self-deceit, greed,

conspiratorial stinging nettles, leeching bills, vampiric,

cutting off the flow of things like tiger-mussels,

hillbilly hippies beating up their girlfriends on crack,

all these egotistic puff ball mushrooms with labial gills

mythically inflated by one night’s good rain

into albino planets, people who have more keys to heaven

than they have locks on hell, abandoned school bells

that go on talking to themselves like wandering scholars

light years after the children grew old at their perennial recess

and the moths and the mice and the mildew

keep putting out books epilogues after everyone’s

forgotten how to read the signs of their own decay.

Between the horns of the moon that’s been thrown

like a goat skull into the wishing well of my heart,

roadie spiders string my harp for me like false eyelashes

in the green room, and the nerves of the mirrors

are shattered into the frayed deltas of the ropes of hope

endangered elephants are trying to climb up to heaven on.

The thin-skinned blissed-out gardenias of Maharajji

are wilting under the eyeshadow of their Mary K cosmetics

as their rainbows grow vicious as vegan dogs

in a spiritual junkyard of razorwire and foodchains

that have overextended their supply lines like the umbilical cords

of kites and puppets and angels on the strings of arachnids.

Too pure for me. I’d be afraid of getting myself on their floors.

Tracking starmud in from the mindstream I’ve been floating down

from one neuron to the next, one town to another,

like the new moon of an origami swan in a scenic calendar

of apocalyptic moments in the life of a hand grenade

people keep pulling on like the handle of an empty fridge.

Count me among the Andalusian vandals of the delinquent dragons

who keep writing obscene truths in lampblack and terza rima

on the walls where the flamethrowers post their prophecies.

I was born to burnish gold. I was born to dry the eyes

of weeping diamonds. I was born to wire the rainbow bridges

with satchel charges of fireflies and lightning for demolition

so everybody can learn to swim through stone

like glaciers to the other side of their polarized cataracts.

And whenever I look at a house of worship built on quicksand

I’ve got to laugh like an avalanche of meteors

at the self-serving lustrations of their pretentious extinctions

as the world blazes all around them like a halo of inflammable hairspray.

I’ve got holy wars of my own to go to that won’t be disarmed

by the soft swords of their beeswax candles surrendering

to such a little flame of life at the tip of a limp wick

that trembles with every breath it takes like a feather in a furnace.

I see the mad dogs like arsonists with hydrophobia

frothing at the mouth for war, citing ancient conflagrations

from the burnt out scriptures of their sacred matchbooks

raving at the supernovas that ignore them like ingrown solar flares

that couldn’t stand up to a drought, let alone a forest fire.

What good is inspiration if it hasn’t got a detonator?

Or enlightenment if all it does is ignite a funeral pyre,

cremate a desire to live like a peer of the dynastic galaxies

you were born among with the silver spoon of a universe in your mouth

whether you use it to cook crack, take your medicine

like a human suffers an excruciating transformation,

or let the hummingbirds sip from it like syringes

flagging snakestongues of blood in celestial sugar water?

And all the warrior poets buffed like medicine bags

of talcum powder, and all the healers selling

batches of bad heroin like dealers to the high school kids

who used to steal their mother’s oxycontin from the medicine chest

so they could rail the yellow brick road like roadkill.

All the vates, seers and shamans consulting

prophetic pundits and polls as the critics

repeal the fate of the artist before she’s born,

cuckoos taking over the nests of better birds,

parasitic guests taking over the house of the host

as the journalists turn from objective observers

to political spiders weaving the webs they spin as the news

and the audience, breaking mutually consenting protocol

gets up on stage with Hamlet and turns a play into a talkshow

for the fifteen minutes of pop-tart celebrity left on their i-phones.

Originality that used to emanate from the roots up

like the light coming out of a dark universe

now seated like an air traffic controller in an orchard

like the wind assigning runways and instructions

on where to take off and land to a riot of blossoms

with pre-conceived flightpaths and well-known destinations.

Creative writing professors in the literary mills

grinding the grist for whole new generations

of mimetically enculturated oxen

to keep the wheels turning of a lucrative careers bank

that used to be the calling of the insanely inspired

too busy working in the visionary mines of their genius

looking for jewels of insight to waste their potential

on getting a job regurgitating words for baby pelicans,

masticating poetry into spiritual pulp fiction

or sipping them from other men’s mouths as if

spit were the nectar of the muse they’ve never met.

The real dragons, their spines lined with sundials,

really don’t care how many chapbooks you’ve published in a year

nor how many times per capita you’ve mentioned butterflies

just to ensure your fan club you’re still sensitive to beauty

or where you’re reading next like a matchbook

burning in the valley of Tuwa or whether your chimney-spark

expiring under the stars is an inferno of unignited creosote

caked in your throat like a callous of black matter

or the ore of the braille alphabet blocks you throw

like snake eyes in dice playing your randomness off

against the lottery of your autobiography copied and pasted

like a colony of red army ants putting your books together

like a folio of butterfly wings perfectly bound for the ant heap.

PATRICK WHITE

I'M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’M LEARNING TO DANCE WITH ECLIPSES

I’m learning to dance with eclipses

and the outmoded ecologies of the sword-rattling windows

weeping rivers of acid rain that hang

like the ragged lace of abandoned curtains

or the tentacles of protozoic jellyfish. My life

is a rock too hard to sweet-talk the larks and swallows,

and the wolf that came once a week

to teach me to sing underwater grew old

and died like the piano he was buried in at sea.

I don’t know what I want from the walls

I’ve designated heritage battlefields

with an array of awards and degrees

and the pitted impacts of meteor-coloured earwigs,

but everything I ask for seems to make

terrorists of the lamps

and the single moth

knocking himself out trying to crash into flames

against the vanilla fez of the shade

is two fanatics shy of immolation. What does it matter

my eyes have congealed into a still-life

with antique ax-handles, a menagerie

of scarred paint, the landscape of the moon

humped and bubbled in contaminated crimson,

I haven’t seen anything for disposable eras

I wanted to drink from a skull. While the shadows and ashes

discuss what they have in common, hoping

for a marriage of convenience,

the blue night sifts my constellations through a spider-web

looking for the penumbral tear of the last life I shed

longing to avoid this one

like black shoe-polish on the pillowcase of a swan.

Even the absurdities have looped into platitudes

and petty thieves have stolen

the mask of the mouth in the imperial mirror

that keeps telling me

I’m the slumlord of my own ambition,

the blighted rind of the moon withering in the garbage,

the sloughed skin of a serpentine condom full of stars.

And how am I to understand my loneliness

and the fools I deploy to deface it

except as one more yearning octopus

with arms like hollyhocks

trying to cross the highway without a line of credit?

I should be bolder, smarter, more mineral

than light, my bones recast in gunsmith plastic,

and my heart a leaking hand grenade, white phosphorus,

unpinned and ready to hurl like a violent dove

through the slutty dreamcatchers in the windows

of strategic brothels, I should stand up

to the apostrophes of Armageddon

and handcuff my voice to a pair of quotation marks

and send all my friends bouquets of radical placards

until my voice is released from isolation, my blood

from intensive care, my mind from death row,

and I’m paid all the back wages I’m owed for the use of my innocence.

When the wind decides to defeat the leaves with poison

and the charcoal women burn their tongues

like meat on the grill of their dinner-bell smiles,

their charms all smoke and cocktail tears,

I should have the metal to drop

depth-charges on the willow cruising the shadows for convoys,

and depose the cult of scorpions marching south

that tried to brainwash me into believing

I’ve aged like wounded shoes.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm

and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat;

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

IF I COULD CRY AGAIN

If I could cry again, as once I cried for you, if

I could saturate this dark fist of a heart that closed up

and hardened from that flower so long ago, trying

to hang on to the jewel, the pearl, the star, the eye of the issue;

if I could turn this stone rose freaked with harsh minerals,

back into that night you drew the blade of the moon

across the wrist of the bridge you were standing on, waiting

it seemed your whole lifetime, trembling

like a drop of shadow-flavoured water

from the tip of a spear of stargrass

for the wind to shake you loose from your agony,

a lost earring, I could put out this root-fire

that runs underground from cedar to cedar, person to person,

consuming its way without flame

through the long valley of the sorrows and years

where I buried you like a storm that had swallowed the hot sword

of its own lightning; I could affirm the black ash

of that night that has gone on dying in me ever since,

I could green it with daylilies and vetch

and the frog splash of lachrymose junipers beginning to rain.

I could stop meaning what I say when I say

crueller solitudes are born of the pain that’s endured

like a grave with no eyelid staring into the sun

waiting for eclipses to fall out of the light

like coins from a one-armed bandit

that gashed the vein of its motherlode

to die in a windfall of poppies, a junkie of luck,

than the strange loneliness of the losers

who cash their winnings in, and bleed to death.

I could mean something else other than heroin,

I could mean a new religion, a successful skin graft

of happier metaphors and cooler tattoos,

brighter constellations than the needle tracks

that loaded the deck of your dark zodiacs

with star-crossed lovers in public washrooms

tying you off with the spinal cord

you carried around in your kit. I could stop the bleeding,

I could put the fire out, I could look at your death

square in the eyes

and haul in a god to answer it

like you did me that last night

when I asked for signs of life

and you quoted maxims to live by from the razor-blade

revealed to you alone on your holy mountain

before you dumped on paradise

like a shovel full of dirt, a spoonful of ashes,

an avalanche of hurt. I could open my hand

and fill your absence in

with things that begin. I could scrawl

a reason to live on your mirror in lipstick

and marry you in our honeymoon coffin

behind closed doors

in a downpour of wedding rings

I stole from the dead.

O, baby, my lost one, my fire in the wood,

you could be my candle-holder

and angel-food for good

if only I could cry again,

as once you knew I could.

PATRICK WHITE

TACKING INTO THE EMPTINESS

Tacking into the emptiness

like a sail, like a lonely bird

grown bored with carrying love-letters

from tree to tree, star to star,

none of them with my name on them

or a return address

that wasn’t light-years out of date,

to amuse the wounded river of my flowing

I try to get outside myself,

exceed the gates of the black constellations

that govern me from within,

squeeze out through a hole in the fence,

through my pores, eyes

of blood, amber, pitch

weeping out of the pine,

trying to read through the page

with tears of fire,

leaking out of the tree, the pillar,

the plaster Christ that exalts the peasants,

an emotional blackberry

ripened by many nights,

seeping through a makeshift womb of jam,

trying to decide whether

I’m a miscarriage or a delivery.

I feel sorry for myself.

No one will miss me much

when the shadow of the last dragon

passes like a lifelong eclipse of the heart.

The infinite folds

of the hair’s breadth edge of my clarities

demanded blood, not pressed flowers,

and there is a special solitude reserved

for the Promethean thieves,

for those who dare

to spread their arms like a propeller

at the axis of the wheeling world.

I never stared at the playbill

of a cancelled sky for long

without trading my scales in for wings.

I cared dangerously for people

who took from the orchard like wasps

drinking from the bruise of my fall.

Their hearts were punctured

by sidereal omissions,

needled like a doll

into occult distortions of pain.

I will spend the rest of my life

learning not to care for them.

Their pulse tolled like the echo of a soggy bell,

souls and minds,

palettes and telescopes

who wanted it both ways

without really taking a look

to see how they broke

the harps of the longing between them

like the wishbones of impoverished peacocks.

I will master the heresy

of consoling their lovelessness with indifference.

I will apply poultice after poultice

of sensitive lies

to their gangrenous sunsets,

knowing the infection will never come out.

I will be the spirit of a bird

carved in rock,

and I will let the ores of my insight

lie idle in the earth

like the dream of a sleepless god

tired of hearing the universe go off

like an alarm clock that can’t be reset.

I am aging, I age, I grow remote,

I thaw like a bird in the sky,

an eye boiled like a grape

in the wine of its own tears,

and no one lies well enough

to surprise me anymore

with a face more original

than the masks it trades in,

and I’m sick of the knots and nooses of vinegar

that sour the shapely waters of life

by insisting the moon

is only a dead sea in a returnable bottle.

And there is a sadness in everything

like the memory of someone loved

walking away like a leaf down a rainy street

through the gleam of oleaceous carlights

and everything I have ever cherished

is a cameo of the void in a locket,

a portrait of an abyss

everyone is chained to

like a dog in a junkyard of delusions,

howling at the moon

smeared on a bumper of dew

that never put a dent in anything.

PATRICK WHITE

SMALL, WARM BIRDS

Small, warm birds of feeling,

a profound tenderness,

something to cherish

in the loneliness of being human

in these vast, cold spaces,

as I read your words

like poppies in my blood again.

What stars could I call upon,

what roses could I ask for their skin,

what darkness charge with radiance,

what ploy of dancing buddhas

could I summon

to let you know

you are all my sky within,

and the assent of my soul in the morning

and the bough of my homing at night,

that there is within me a blind fire,

an invisible flame

that consumes me in the ferocious beauty

of its unseen flowering

even in a flurry of faces

and the business tugging the donkey of the day

braying like a knot in a stream of wood,

and all the objects and forms of the world

are burning mirrors I look into to see

the black pearl of your mystic presence within me,

the iridescent lustre of your shining,

how you are a message in a bottle from ultimacy,

and a dark shrine of desire

that can wake the valley dragons

with the fragrance of your eyes on the wind.

I want to kiss your kneecaps;

I want to crush cool mushrooms against your lips

and feel my kisses break like bread,

I want to feel my mouth

blossoming on the nape of your neck

and my breath blowing across the shy wheatfields

of the softest gestures of hair on your skin,

I want to taste the silk

of the inside of your thighs

as if it were the flavour of an intimate paradise,

and approach your breasts like crowns,

and under a full moon

tenderly turn the sacred soil of your sex with my tongue

like a stranger in the doorway

of an infinite longing to make you shudder

like the void into light

with sexual eclipses on the back of your eyelids

that will fill you like a palace of water with stars.

I am the luminosity and shadow

of your green lamp that glows like the sea,

and my voice wants to bleed like black cherries

over the alluvial plain of your stomach

and touch you like a prophet

running his fingertips slowly over the pages of a holy book,

savouring the revelations

that throb like a pulse in space;

and there are storms that want to exhaust themselves

over the blue thresholds of your hills

and root their lightning in your body

like a tree of light, a new map of rivers

for your blood to follow back to me

like the echo of thunder in a well.

And all through the day

with its curbs and functions

I imagine the lilt of your fingers

on the rim of a coffee cup,

the cougar in the glance of your eyes,

the way you put a knife down on the table

like a smile without a script

and what it would be like

to circumnavigate the equator of your waist

with a rosary of kisses

to raise you like a sunken continent

out of your depths

and explore all your tides and passages

with the fervor of a dolphin in a bay of wine.

I want to be tangled like a kite

in the turmoil of your hair,

the night watchman of your dreams,

the one who notices

what no one else looks for,

the stone of the small grave

you sweep with your eyelashes

when the leaves of autumn

lie down with the shadows of spring

and the virgin windows of your tears

that no one has ever looked through

weep like glass over the secret root

of a flower only a child could see.

Beyond reason, gates, words,

where the bridges take off their shoes

to admire their feet in the water

and the waterlilies kiss the thorn

of the star that tore them like skin

and whisper ancient pollens to the night

softer than flour and saffron,

and everything I say to you

isn’t a wound in the light,

a mouthful of shadows,

a bell of water with a fish for a tongue,

fleets of butterflies

learning how to sail the oceans of the rose

like the keels and wings

of love-letters you can read in the dark,

I want to fold you in my arms like the moon

and pan the nocturnal urgencies of your eyes

for a gold rush of fireflies

in the all night boom towns

of a heart that struck it rich

digging a hole to bury its dead.

PATRICK WHITE