EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

EVERY LEAF, EVERY PAGE, EVERY POEM, A PATCH

Every leaf, every page, every poem, a patch

that’s been ironed on to a leak in the mindstream

I’ve been watching from the stone bridge on Gore Street

while the Perth Water Tower stands astride the Tay River

like a Martian colossus out of the War of the Worlds,

its reflection wavering like the dissipating wavelengths

of watersnakes as the moon ascends like a pearl

above the ragged willows pouring their hearts out

along the shore where a long overhanging veranda,

an iron stairwell and several backyards end at.

A commingling of poetry and prose, I’ve got

to walk several miles out of this sleeping town

before a Zen cowboy can take his spurs off in the wild

and wrestle his boots like sections of chimney pipe

in exchange for a pair of winged heels that can fly by night

like an autumn waterbird. Let my life flow on without me

like a spinal cord I’ve been hanging on to

like a rope I used to try to climb up to heaven on

like serpent fire entwined around the axis of my backbone,

on the flip side now, an anchor chain of chakras

tied to my body like a lifeboat my heart isn’t in anymore.

I lament the dry paper that became of the orchids

and waterlilies, the skin of weathered women

or an aging snake that slipped out of itself like a condom.

Autumn in my earth mind, I’m consoled by the stars

gleaming through the leafless trees of my emotions.

The whole forest floor, a sodden library underfoot,

trying to get to the roots of things like etymologists

reverentially deciphering the cartouches of dynastic words

that were once as common as the Huron all through these woods

until smallpox, the Jesuit, and the decultifying schools

that savaged their magic with white, and taught them

to turn the other cheek to the dark side of the moon,

brought on an onslaught of the Iroquois who finished the job

a few beaver pelts, an arquebus, and Champlain

in a war canoe, without really wanting to, had begun.

Somehow their ghosts in the birch groves

make everything seem more human to a trespasser

that responds more like a guest at a seance

than the host of the exorcism that drove them

from their lands. The moon’s not a swan

and I’m not laying traps like a snapping turtle.

Nothing heals here, but the wounds seem more manageable

and death isn’t a dirty secret sequestered in a hospital.

Everything out in the open you can even

have sex with the stars and nobody’s eyelashes

are going to fall off like a haystack of pine needles

that blinked once too often at what they couldn’t believe

they were seeing without their death masks on.

I like the symphonic chaos of the place as life

over writes itself like wild grape vines climbing

a trellis of deer ribs like the palings on an unhinged gate.

It’s really just a matter of taste what you prefer

to furnish your solitude with. I like to spend my time

in the company of things suffering the same fate I am.

PATRICK WHITE  

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A FEELING IN THE HEART THAT OVERWHELMS THOUGHT

A feeling in the heart that overwhelms thought.

Can the stars feel our pain like distant neurons?

Thorns blunted in moments like this, the hands of time

almost folded in prayer like the wings of a nightbird

whose lament has seized the air with something

so sad and true, everything that lives,

and everything lives, can sense it,

even though they can’t think it or say it.

The vigil of sentience is arrested by the same

mysterious note of suffering that binds us to everything

in the courage that it takes to live it beautifully

by burning with insight to flower compassionately

in the midst of the heretical flames of our own damnation.

The presence, the friend, the blaze, an affable familiar,

enlightenment or an expedient delusion of an hour or two

when pain isn’t the personal possession of anyone,

and a vision emerges that supersedes empathy

when even the demons cry alone for things they can’t explain,

too deep for tears, though they’re never far away,

when a kind of peace overtakes you from behind

and there’s heart break in the clearing of the clouds

and you know you haven’t lived humbly enough

to see it without fear, but you open your eyes

and look anyway and they’re seared

by the dragon of awareness looking back at you

as if you could feel every mystic detail of hurt in the world,

time past, present, and to come, all at once,

a bolt of black lightning splitting your bones open

like an oak to expose your heartwood to the stars

as if the scars just fell off a chronic wound that never heals.

And there’s no injunction behind this devastating insight

into the pervasive depths of the grief that must be endured

as one of the terrible conditions of life if for no other reason,

and reason’s always a small guess, than to live to be aware of it

and try to love one another better than we’re capable of.

To fail at what we’re trying to attain from the unattainable

because there’s no love in the acquisition of anything

we can get our hands on in a world of forms and dream figures

that are always passing away from us like roads

that leave us walking alone with the moon

for our only companion, wondering where the others went

who used to chatter in the trees like homing birds

about whether you were a threat or just another lost soul

going anywhere in the defeated hope that he might be found

even though what he seeks is doing the looking

and there’s nothing retroactive about our eyes

that can creatively repeat the immediacy of our seeing.

Eternity wounds the children of time like wild flowers

at the end of autumn, and the harvest dance is ruined by death.

And whenever and whatever we celebrate, it’s as much

of a protest singing through our tears like light

in the false dawns of our candles and chandeliers,

as it is a party. If we act happy, maybe that’s half the proof

we were born to be, even alone at night in the woods,

saturated with decay, trying to convince ourselves

all passage is the prelude to the renewal of a recurrent dream.

And may it be so. May it be imaginal and necessary.

May delusion always be the cornerstone of enlightenment

and the impact of meteors always splash us in diamonds

like the tears of the fires of life that don’t wash off.

May what’s already been given to you always outweigh

the reward of what you think you laboured for

so your gifts perpetually exceed the limits of your just deserts,

and the praeternatural walk beside you like the dark sage

of everything that remains to be known but can’t be

until you learn there’s nothing to master in the stillness.

In the silence. In the essential grammar of the abyss

which is us trying to express ourselves like mediums

of our own minds with these nouns of sorrow, verbs of bliss

of the whippoorwill, the hermit thrush, the barred owl,

the starling and the mockingbird singing without meaning

anything to anyone but themselves like an artist or a child.

The heart of the petty is always a compass needle

Zen-duelling over the proper direction of prayer

as if it were swinging a sword over your head,

but among those born demonically blessed enough

to be self-defeatingly great in the name

of a few noble absurdities they’d prefer to live than explain,

this feeling that flows through you like electricity

through a glacier, that fills you like a silo of suffering

is the spear head that’s embedded in the starmud of your heart

you can’t pull out and you can’t push through

given there’s no exit, no entrance on the enclosures of life,

whether it be a secret garden, or a famous grave,

or you just want to be let off your leash like a playful dog

to chase the nurses like gulls on the terminal night ward,

or not cry out in pain to prove you’re a Mongol of the soul,

this emotion that makes you feel so empty

in the light of the truth of the enormity of the pain

that’s been overcome by life through the agony

of everything that’s been endured for no one’s sake

to vitally accommodate the unassessible transformations,

of sentience adapting to its cruellest mutations,

and so surfeited with it all in the shadow of a lie,

this is the birthmark of that counter intuition

that makes life worthy of being lived against the odds

of ever being able to justify it to yourself or God, the zeitgeist

or anyone else in need of a proxy or a paraclete

to moderate the human divinity that’s been bestowed upon us,

at the very least, by virtue of our suffering

and the unknown voice in the void of its release.

PATRICK WHITE

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