TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

TARRED AND FEATHERED BY YOUR OWN WORDS

Tarred and feathered by your own words

or basted and rolled in stars until you were sugar-coated

on everyone’s tongues, you remain a stranger to yourself

just the same. Nothing further from home than fame.

Notoriety just another unconvincing disguise

for your emptiness. A deathmask that never quite fits.

I remember the day I gave away all of my books

like a life raft I’d built to get to the other side

of the sewer that aspired to be a clean mindstream

to a coke-bound woman who needed them

more than I did to sell for drugs. Book awards

I’d won as a welfare kid in grade school.

I let them go, I let them go, I let them go

like a dragonfly emerging from its chrysalis.

I wanted to see what was standing on the other side

of me and them. Rid myself of my compendious identity

by exorcising the library of its most infamous ghosts,

mine among them. I shed them like scales

of snakeskin that hadn’t evolved into the flightfeathers

of birds yet. A whole cemetery of well articulated gravestones

shelved like a jury of hung witnesses setting their own precedents.

After light years of isolated incarceration in the scriptorium

when the midnight sun burned within me like candlelight

and I was consumed by the blazing like a moth

going crazy among the stars, I wanted to live

under the law of my own imagination even if it were

to have none. Walk skinless in the world, clear

of the mummies at last, like a wild rose in autumn

carrying its own ashes in a green urn with the withered star

of a jester’s cap on top like another clown nobody

knew very well, least of all me. No inside. No outside.

No forwarding address that could haunt me like a bill

I owe to the past. No medium trying to find my own voice

among the myriads of those that I’d summoned.

A whisper of earth worms in the grass and a wall came down.

No more gates that ask you to abandon everything

when you leave your soul on the threshold

like the windshield of a spiritual vehicle with starmud on it.

The mystic turned inside out, happy to be earthbound

to a specific time and place. To see his own face

like a lifemask carved out of accumulated projections

like a hologram of the pineal gland when the third eye

is sitting for its own portrait. If you stare long enough

at anything, it will begin to look like you after awhile.

I stopped peering into the dark, looking for signs,

when I discovered I was the revelation I was waiting for.

Presence of mind. Hamlet was right. Awareness is all.

Ghosts in the mirror, pale fire to the blind,

won’t burn on the moon however you blow on the flames

like a dragon with a ferocious sense of compassion.

But ripeness will come in time like a windfall

of glowing embers to a winter solstice that longs

for the heartwood of what it remembers of the life behind it.

Dismembered like a wardrobe for disobeying the sumptuary laws,

I let my Orphic skull bob all the way

like a black walnut to any uninhabited island

that had never seen the new moon rise before.

I came ashore as if I’d just been keel-hauled

down to the bone on the hull of my own lifeboat.

And though I’d slipped my moorings, I was

still singing like the cries of the waterbirds lyrically

that knew of the long night sea journey ahead

I had yet to go before I was wholly beyond myself

and everything that was said that was worth listening to

after that, took on a life of its own hardly distinguishable

from what the dead thought they were going through.

I was interdependently originated by everything else.

In this desert of stars, I stopped chasing mirages of light

and started drinking real water from my own two hands

as if I were holding them up to the mouth of humankind.

The man or woman who knows, aren’t the ones

who understand. Until you’ve deepened your ignorance

of the mystery of life and your thought waves

are crashing in a rage of breakers against the sea walls overhead

you’ll never know the ease of those who drown and drift in it

like the unpredictable undertow of a black hole

draining the stars like water in a Sufi whirlpool.

You’ll remain a shore-hugger and all your crystal skulls

will cry themselves to sleep at night like tidal pools

cluttered with the relics of those who died at sea.

And all your creativity observe the protocols of salvage.

And all that light turn into a false dawn

scrying lightbulbs in a lantern as lost as you are

until it’s lit up by the fireflies and stars that shine

brighter for the wayward stranger, than someone

who clings to the path like the last

remaining wavelength of the blind

to see where they were going like an optic nerve

that didn’t have the axons it takes to wander off without a guide

through your own mountains and valleys

shaped out of the starmud along the banks

of your own mainstream in the course of time

like a waterclock passing the word around

like the Milky Way from mouth to mouth,

that we’re all drinking from the same watershed

as the dead with tears in their eyes, who took a different route

and those with stars in theirs that their tears just can’t put out.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

THE DEMONICALLY ENLIGHTENED SEE FURTHER INTO HELL

The demonically enlightened see further into hell

than the light the angel eyes see by. Who knows

a woman better than when you’ve lost her?

So I know the bliss of heaven as I know

the depth of the regrets of Pandemonium.

Both ends of the telescope. The vapour of the rose

and the smoke of oil fires throwing snakes

and black feathers on the pyres of the wildflowers

that shed their petals like scales. A white star

in the arms of a black hole it’s dancing around binarily.

The via positiva coiled around the via negativa

like the copulative way of day and night,

helical theta waves killing and healing,

changing their spin contemporaneously

in synchronicity with the charged starfields

in every creative moment we live here to shine

a light out of the darkness of awareness

we haven’t seen before. And I say,

prophetically hooded in snake skin,

this interim in the late fall, this fateful pause

in the roseate third eye of a galactic hurricane

bearing down upon us like diamond-edge blades

in a threshing field full of scarecrows

that incorporated the crop into the strawdogs

of their bodies, is the Age of Disappointment,

the bursting of the myriad balloons of the multiverse

blooded like roses hemorrhaging on their own thorns.

We grow older faster than we used to

trying to keep up with the pace of our longevity

fleeing from the light of the way things are,

one jump ahead of our youth, as if the ship

were abandoning the plague rat of time

by scuttling itself on the reefs of a foreign eternity

wearing the deathmask of the moon

that gapes down upon us all in shock

at what we’ve done to ourselves in the green room

like an atlas of shattered mirrors slashing out at us

in a frenzy of reflections that make things clear as blood.

Disappointment is the prelude to desecration.

And though we all hype our optimistic overviews

of the text to come, we haven’t seen anything yet

like the wind that will knock us out of our words

like the empty nests of the birds that had heard enough

to stop singing before us. The terrible stillness

of the first sign of a red alert in heaven

and the great silence that overwhelms

the air raid sirens of hell. And all

the opinionated lighthouses and foghorns

that made a career out of not taking their warnings

seriously enough, snuffed out and blinded

like the mouths and eye-sockets of prophetic skulls

in the decaying orbits of an avalanche of asteroids

taking their lead from the insurgent cells of shepherd moons.

A ravening species of life that eats itself

out of house and home like a cannibalistic planet

that lives off its own, gone antibiotically insane.

But even a total eclipse doesn’t cover the sun wholly

and the corona gleams through the valleys

of the lunar mountains like Bailey’s Beads.

And there’s even a dim halo around the rim of a black hole.

And among the condemned you can sometimes see

a begrudging kind of merit that shines out

of the slag and slurry of the excruciating transformations

of the ore that’s being refined by suffering and experience,

a black jewel that radiates dark energy

even in the false dawn of an unworthy afterlife.

Just below the scar tissue of the earth’s crust,

seven kilometers down in a diamond mine

blind on the coal road to the light,

thermophilic bacteria have regenerated life on the planet

after near annihilation three times.

So if any of us survive ourselves in this empire

of mineralized cells and exotic metals

out of our exuberant neurons what photons

of our bioluminescence might jump orbitals

and spread like foxfire across the scorched earth again,

casting the ashes of stars in the urns of the rose-hips

on the roots trying to cling in the cold

to some notion of spring that keeps their bloodstream

blooming in their underground hearts

like one of the more graceful arts of survival?

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN YOU'VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRCUCIALS

WHEN YOU’VE AVERAGED OUT YOUR CRUCIALS

When you’ve averaged out your crucials

and you’ve walked in the light and you’ve walked

in the shadows of things your eyes still taste of

though you’ve set a star as the moral compass

of your cloudy destination, and it’s following you

down a long stray thread of a road, the smart money

bets on doing some good in the world

you may not even be aware of, let alone

expect payback for as if you were doing business

not gambling on an intuitionally calculated risk

its probably better to leave a sweeter cachet to the place

for your having been here, chicory by the side of the road,

or wild orchids in the marsh, by the addition

of one flower more than to desecrate your life

with bitterness, resentment, the indifference of ambition

when its heart gargles with an inhumane antiseptic

to keep from being infected by the human in its bloodstream.

You don’t have to arrange paradigms of shining

into some kind of mandalic starmap unless you want to.

Giving something up isn’t the same as adding yourself to it.

Even if you foreknow you’re doomed to lose, total eclipse,

if you’re a real gambler, you lose with flare, like a solar corona.

You’re intrigued by the unfolding of the road you took,

the river you’re running, the rapids in the mindstream

you’re about to shoot down the middle in an inflatable life raft

in the spring run off of the waterclock of a reverential northern river.

It might be important to seek

the eventual forgiveness of the night

for what we’ve done to it, treating it as a reward

for breathing our way through another day in the light.

But the stars aren’t listening to the alibis

we’re whispering in the dark to our selves.

They labour under the cowbells of their own myths of origin.

But you can always do a little good in the world.

The whole place is wounded. No shortage of opportunity.

You can drive the ambulance back to the hospital.

You can be the atom that decides the outcome

of a cosmic event, so slight are the actions of the random,

chaos in action, it just takes one to light up

infinite time and space moment by moment

and blow it out just as quickly to enhance the night,

the pulsar of a firefly in a lighthouse of dark matter.

You ever wonder how many messiahs

have come and gone from the world

without ever once having heard of themselves?

If you don’t like to drink spit out of the public fountains

of other people’s mouths, though they exhale rainbows in the mist

maybe it’s time to taste your own to see if it’s sweet or not.

When things are real, not solid, nothing’s diminished,

nothing’s enlarged, because size is no longer relevant

in a world of wavelengths that have given up living like particles.

And forms are more provisional than cast in bronze.

Waifs of the air, maple leaves cast on the mindstream

covering their own reflections with the fans and hand mirrors

they carry like accessories to their own deathmasks.

Hard to make a wax mould of a dream, an emotion, or an insight.

The mystery of life isn’t an interpretation

waiting to be deciphered any way you like,

though you’re free to do this with the impunity

of a crossroad puzzle. Its silence is a deeper eloquence

than that, and when it expresses itself it’s as immediate

as starlight on water. Its spontaneity never hesitates

to shock us with the impersonal beauty

of a moonrise over the lake in a lunar flood of wonder.

Or some small act of love that’s denounced by the doer

as a foolish way to live against the odds, as soon as it’s done.

Everybody’s on death row here. No one gets out alive

or unwounded. Sparrows and stars and houseflies

pass freely through the bars, and the wind at night

whistles through them like the vocal cords of a harp.

Would it hurt to pass a cigarette through them

to someone in front of a firing squad of stars

or write a loveletter for someone who can’t read it?

PATRICK WHITE

ANSWERING THE WOLF

ANSWERING THE WOLF

Answering the wolf.

Its agony, my own.

Its long howl of irreproachable pain

enough to silence the mountains

with trepidation before something holy.

Desecration. A photo. Two dozen wolf corpses

pouring over the tail-gate of a pick-up.

The bounty of two happy hunters

kneeling beside their rifles

as if something had been accomplished

it would be worth telling their children about.

Hard truth. Here is a human. My species.

It can do this to anything that lives.

From blue algae to Auschwitz,

Uganda, Syria, Wounded Knee.

Whales, buffalo, Sabra and Shatila, the Amazon,

twenty-five million famished children a year,

an avalanche of wolves at the back of a pick-up.

Beyond wanting to know why

there’s this black spot

in people’s hearts and minds,

where sentience turns rabid,

where intelligence seems

the most inspired enabler of death,

where the wine of empathy turns into an oil slick,

how do you answer the innocence

of the wolf, the child, the old growth forest?

Life gets in the way of our enterprising hatred of it?

You kill a wolf. You kill a whole landscape.

You kill a wolf. And the moon marks you out

with an X on your forehead

for a thousand excruciating transformations.

You kill a wolf. And the rivers

will turn against you and bide their time

until you come down to the water to drink

from your own blood-stained reflection.

The sun will begrudge you a shadow.

The wind feel fouled by your smell

like dead meat in your own house well.

Even the maggots who will come

to your heart one day

like undertakers and garbage-collectors

will look upon it not

as the virtue of a noble enemy

but as an undertaking that’s beneath them.

They will not stoop to clean your body like a wound.

Wolf-spirit, wolf-heart, wolf-mind, wolf-mother,

even the white-tailed buck laments

this atrocity of psychotic caprice

that slaughters simply because it can.

I see the moon bare its fangs in proxy for these

and the stars dip their spears in poison.

And I will dance around the fire with you

mad with grief at this wounded eye of life

and smear my face with the ashes of a deathmask

to regret everything about me that is

pathogenetically deranged and inhuman.

To rid myself of the reek of those who could do this.

Do this to our own. Do this to natives.

Do this to wolves. Do this to the air and the water

they breathe and drink from. Do this ultimately

to themselves when there’s no one left to care or notice.

These kill to eat.

These eat to kill. You and all like you

who did and condone this, I ask you,

what will you do with the bodies of these wolves?

You never ravened for the meat;

was it their death that glutted your heart?

Were you compensating for some hidden impotence

giddy with the knowledge you could

extinguish life anywhere on the planet on a whim at will?

Were you urinating on your own wombs,

the graves of your ancestors because

you’re the illegitimate runt of your own myth of origins?

Are you angry at life because you were born?

Do you despise the rose and admire the thorn?

I see the narrowing in the eyes of the ancient taboos

you’ve violated like thresholds with your boots on,

bruising sacred ground without knowing

where it is you walk or the risk you take,

the danger you will encounter,

because you have been made deaf, dumb, and blind

robbed of your eyes, ears, tongue, heart, mind

insensate to what now lifts its nose to the wind

to find you when you least expect it

from the least expected quarter.

These you killed. You killed in the concrete,

and exonerate the act in the abstract.

These were blood, flesh, fur, bone, each

with a mystic specificity of its own,

wild, free, whole, intelligent, and communal

each the work of some unknown muse of life,

the spontaneity of some lavish genius,

the inspiration of the same dark mother

that never creates the same masterpiece twice.

These had seeing, mind, emotion.

These had been touched by the mystery of life

and in the shrines of the trees and the mountains

offered their delirium up to the moon

like drunks beneath a vacant window

singing to their own reflections. These

accepted their homelessness in this strange place

without doing it any harm as if

there were no other place they could belong to.

These were at peace with themselves and the earth

in a way you weren’t born with the courage to imagine.

These were alert and alive and quick with curiosity.

These were noble without lording it over anyone.

Were they executed for their innocence?

Was there not enough room in your cage

for their kind of freedom? Did you envy

an understanding they had among each other

you haven’t enjoyed once in the last twenty years

you stayed drunk as a gun lobby in a lazy-boy

staring back at the glass eyes of the animals

looking down upon you like a decapitated zoo

with the pity of the unaccusing

that anything that’s ever lived

could be so full of self-hatred,

so full of disgust at the inadequacy of themselves

in the midst of so much spontaneous sufficiency,

from blue algae on over to blue whales,

could be so estranged from their inalienable nature,

could be so vindictively blind

they’d rather shoot the eyes out of the stars

and finger the braille of the bullet holes

they’ve put in the side of their coffins

like a mailbox with a return address on it

than open their own and read the writing on the wall.

Does Cain still blame God

that his sacrifice was unacceptable?

The farmer! The farmer! Not the hunter?

The meat of the hunter not sweet to Her nostrils?

So you murder your brother

and then you murder the animals

as if they somehow let you down.

And in the death shroud of the dark mother

she sends a crow not a dove,

not the wolf, nor the eagles of Rome

to teach you how to bury the dead,

to teach you how to sow the earth you’ve salted

with meat and bullets and how they only bloom

and come to fruition in you

like self-inflicted wounds square

in the third eye of your own infertility.

There used to be hunters wise enough to know

the animals they stalked were meant as a gift of a gift

not something they ripped off like a petty thief.

Now when they catch a whiff of you coming

it isn’t a hunter they run from but

that sickly-sweet freakish smell of death

that clings to the skin of an undertaker

who moonlights as a serial killer

in the deathmask of a terminal disease.

PATRICK WHITE

NO MATTER HOW FAR

NO MATTER HOW FAR

No matter how far into the past the star travels,

plunging its white fingers into the expanding womb of the past

to pull its own damp head out of convulsive space,

it will never find a beginning, the widening cleft between two thoughts

opening like a mouth full of silence, a sluice gate of thick water,

a dark prelude, the first letter alpha breaking like an eye

out of the eclipsed envelope into a splendour of light

to hang its jewel, its drop of flammable water

from the incredible webs of the night,

to shine alone in the dark with millions,

the elemental heart of an abandoned lover. The void

became a tuning fork and struck itself, became

a nugget of gold and dropped itself into the world pond

sinking like a throne through a center of infinite haloes,

disappearing into the origin of its own undulant pulse,

a fish leaping out of the stillness of the mirror

into the encircling waves of its own event

or an arrow into the target of its own ripples,

or God lost in his own universe without a return address.

Where now is the desolate monkey

forced down out of the trees

to stand up in the high conquering grass to look for leopards

who first shrieked into consciousness

or sat down quietly on his heels

to ponder the odd blue stone of a thought he couldn’t grasp?

Where is he who has gone on expending himself

like the first violin of a tribal symphony

through the blind abyss of the blood all the way to me?

Is there a skull that lies cracked and quarried somewhere,

a fallen idol in a temple of shattered bones,

a small, mouldy moon clotted with earth

who was the first to become aware of himself

as a paling star who would be washed out

in the brightening flood of the following dawn? Did he glimpse it all in a flash,

as the seed contains the whole of the tree, the blossoms

the singing branches, the closed eyelids of the apples,

did he see in the lightning gap between matter and mind,

in the first atom of self-brained sentience

all the murderous troupes of civilization

that would walk out of that first step, that progenitive initial

that goes on unspooling the maple samara

of the helical generations down even

into the bloodstreams and wellsprings of the lines of this poem?

Did he see the continuum of his own beginning

moving outwardly in time like a viper

through the oceanic fire-wombs of a nubile cosmos,

the world serpent that would marry the world

with a rib of light? Did he see me as I am this morning,

elaborated in all directions like rain from his watershed,

trying to make lifeboats out of the leaves to survive

this oblique sliding into the depths

of my own gashed being, the vagrant omega

of a maritime disaster morsed between two sibilants,

like an egg between the forked tongue

of a torn chromosome, this feeble S.O.S. I’ve sent back

through the anguish of the years to find me, to find him,

to shut the eye of the circle, a tail

in search of a mouth that could create what it consumes

in a single breath, a single word wholly sufficient

for all eternity, unborn, unperishing?

And it is not enough to say that the peduncle

is lost in the ensuing phylum, the root in the tree, the tree

in the seed and the seed again in the leaves and branches;

am I given eyes and nothing to see, wonder

and nothing to be amazed by, the blue wheel

of a flowering heart and nothing to feel? Homage

to the fallen bell of my unsung ancestor, male or female,

and the way he picked himself up off the ground,

homage to his pendulous walking across the plain;

and the tracks he followed through the luminous mud of his brain,

saying his name with his feet; homage and compassion

for the brute in lunar shock

before the rising of the moon through the startled dark,

homage to the lightning and the firefly

that jarred him out of his uterine revery

like metal from the ore of a stone. Homage

to the horror and grief and genius of the huge hope

he buried in himself with red ocher and bird-bone flutes

like the bodies of his children under the fire and ashes of his cave;

I bring black cherries, wheat, and scarlet poppies,

I bring the immaculate weave of the starfields,

sapphires and silk, and the wisdom of the wind,

the passion of fire, the will of water, the beauty of light,

and the freedom of infinite space,

and I scatter the worlds like opal grains of sacred rice

over the wedding carbons of your baffled remains

and I fill the clay molds of the footprints you left behind

with the fleets and caravans and flights of mind

that were born of your bruised heel,

your circuitous pilgrimage toward bison and berries, you

the brutal mile zero of the highways through the mountains, you

the first drop of rain in the headwaters of the river, you

the first feather of empathy that danced to fly, you

the first prayer to divine the green valleys of an afterlife

where the silver gazelles came down every night

to the water’s edge, gifts of the great mother’s thighs.

Like a prodigal son returning to the boneyard of his cannibal parents,

without judgment, I bring you the sugars of a ripened mind

and the fat of my sedentary flesh

to gorge on as you wish. And though we shudder with progress

over the excavated skulls in the hovels of the homophagoi,

we unmarrow each other no less. So praise

to your broken, battered, disease-ridden body,

your muscled weapon and your withered breasts

that hung like oriole’s nests from a rack of bone; praise

to the beast master and savage cauldron of your mind

from which you drew the elegant visions of a predator

you charred at the end of your tunnels on lime.

This morning I practise the same art for the same mysteries

on the same dank womb-walls of efflorescent time,

following the spoor of these migrant histories

back to you. Faster than light I must outrun myself to regress,

and I come with poems and paintings and problems

and a forwarding address.

PATRICK WHITE

SCOURING THE PATINA OF TIME OFF WITH STARS

SCOURING THE PATINA OF TIME OFF WITH STARS

Scouring the patina of time off with stars

the way I used to grind pyrex plates

with varying grades of carborundum

down into telescopic mirrors, then silver them

with a vapour of aluminum to add

to the luster of their parabolic eyes.

Been looking into the darkness so long

I’m beginning to shine on my own.

Now from moment to moment

there’s as much darkness coming out of the light

as there are black holes sand-blasting

the hour-glass shape of this bubble of the multiverse

with firestorms of desert stars as I make my way

from one oasis to the next where the mirages

wander in out of the night to drink

from the reflections of their own faces

with hands cupped like the hulls of leaking lifeboats.

I don’t believe a life of delusion is any less painful

than a life of enlightenment, even if

your scarecrow self is finally standing naked

under a full moon that’s come to realize

that an orbit isn’t the same as an enlightenment path

that can loop back on itself like a snake or a shoelace

or the retrograde motion of Mars, without

wandering off the road you were meant to walk

because that’s the way you went. Give them both

sixteen ounce gloves and let reality

have it out with delusion in eternity

like two siblings of the same dark mother

trying to get some rest from the racket

after giving up on interceding

by putting some distance between them

light years out of earshot of the nightbirds

that have been longing for her return ever since.

Even the first bliss of the blossoming of illumination

grows sad if it’s not wholly shared like an orchard

with everyone as the wind turns around like a fist

flowering into a more open-handed approach to life.

Enlightenment is in everyone like a wavelength

is in a particle when no one is watching.

And if today you’re an angel in a coma of ice

tomorrow the diamonds will fall out of your dark halo

and slowly thaw you out as you get closer to the light

like a comet plunging into the sun like the vapour

of a bridal veil you’ve finally shed like a snakeskin

that had to come off like the white-out of the eclipse

you were living, to see the stars that were rooted

in the darkness within emerging out of your own starmud

like waterlilies and larkspur and the peony buds

of the remote observatories on cold mountaintops

breaking into life like planets at a suggestion from the ants.

Stations of our perishing, perhaps. Phases of the moon

topping my skull up again like the cup that she drinks from

with the crazy wisdom of the lunatic she takes for a companion.

First crescent after the crone. Death’s door left ajar

to let a little of the light out for those of us

who like to walk down long country roads alone at night

brindled by shadows, runged by black flames

like ladders of prophetic fire with nothing left to lean on

but the event horizons of their own imaginations

exploring the inevitable exits and entrances

of the passage of life like a waterclock of stars

descending the dark stairwells of the night with the maple keys

to the secret cellars where they age the best wine

by letting it stare into the dark so long

it begins to shine like a blind dream with a light of its own.

PATRICK WHITE