WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,

you will not see.

What I wanted to give you,

you will not receive.

The wind may mourn your passing

like an abandoned dog

and the leaves of the silver Russian olive

may be baffled into silver

by the way you left the gate open

to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was

before you told me you loved me

like an arsonist in a wheat field,

a comet above the willow tree

that wept its way into autumn.

Go. I lay no claims or obligations

at your feet anymore than I would

try to smudge space

with the black rose of the night

that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.

You say ebulliently

you want to know passionately

the depths of love,

but like the fools before you

who blundered into the fire,

you’re only witching for volcanoes

with the tongue of a snake.

As well look for fishroads

under the dead seas of the moon

as follow the path you’re on.

And your beauty is no excuse,

your body no sanctuary,

your blackberry heart

no pilgrim to anywhere

you can’t stand in the light

trying on shadows like lingerie

in the mirror of the delusions

you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble

that has smeared the reflection of the world so long

you think you’re a planet with trees.

You’re a spiritual junkie

jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable

to animate the dust and galaxies

you have no life or love to breathe into

other than that little wind

you carry around in a bottle

in case you’re ever stranded

without an emergency exit

from all the lies you tell in paradise.

You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism

of your own unbearable insignificance,

and abase yourself prophetically

before the mountain of your own lostness,

hoping for a map

of your wandering in stone

that would authorize your confusion

as holier than the rest.

Lonely for converts,

you tell me I’m sure of heaven.

Just as lonely I reply

if someone like me

were to show up in heaven,

it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to

and how could the blessed

not feel cheated?

But you don’t get it;

you really don’t understand

that life isn’t an auditon of angels

and the black cartoon

you’ve made of yourself

to win a feather

isn’t a prelude

to the main feature

when the lights go out

and the ushers

who conducted the dead to their seats

evaporate in the aisles

and you upstage the movie

with your nakedness

as if God couldn’t see

the snake-flute of your body

dancing with serpents in the dark.

Lust alone would have been enough

to keep us together

but waking from your dream

of forbidden undertows,

washed ashore again

on your oracular island,

you kept trying to weld the right light

to the wrong shadow,

and eventually

even the most exotic futility grows boring.

You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead

of your aboriginal heart

in the toxic fires of your own undoing

and pointing it at mine

tried to deceive yourself into a direction.

And now you want,

now you long,

now you want to come back

and immerse yourself in the life

you once stepped over

like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.

You’ve suffered and grown,

you’ve wept and derived humility

from irreparable loss;

you’ve trembled before

the first, terrible intimations of the vastness

of the sky in your heart

like the virgin flight of a lost bird,

and you want to be given another chance

to surrender yourself at the gate

you once walked through backwards

so enamoured were you of your shadow.

And you promise the river your tears,

the moon your scars, me

the rarest of your orchids in the night.

But when I ask you

what the drunk was dreaming

you still look blankly around the room

as if everything in existence

were merely the baffled clue to your beauty

and the answer

something black and revealing that clings.

You still can’t imagine

how easy it is

to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.

It’s me that hurts. But without meaning to,

I’m bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.

A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink

before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,

to make sure it isn’t toxic. No goat skull in a well

of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.

What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell

and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit

it’s hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream

with your waking life, though they’re both just two waves

of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis

at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart

is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans

shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.

And I’m not as mindless in love as I should be,

though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled

from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon

as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances

along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,

I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries

eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows

pecking out their eyes like dark jewels

in a crown of thorns. And there’s a feeling

with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth

of an orphaned universe that resonates within me

like the poignancy of the embrace of one

of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears

with a star’s worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread

left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I’d

break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it

if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering

as I’ve heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,

just to make things better a little bit, if I could,

though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,

knowing among the selfish and indifferent,

a gift is a kind of minority protest

that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality’s just a truce people make with the way things seem

and what they don’t understand, a consensus

of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials

in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.

Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,

The chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,

but what it does, whether you agree or disagree,

is what moves me to underground rivers of tears

that flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory

to want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,

or smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.

To die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,

and the animals enter death as if they were observing

the protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours

but to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see

the labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring

extinction after extinction to express their shining in us

as if we were the content of the message

they sent on ahead of themselves and we can read

so much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it

like a child’s eyes, or the luster of a lover’s hair

in a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man

who smiled upon us because he knew he was younger

than we were, and the return journey

was better than the first because from cradle to grave,

he knew the beginning walks with us all the way

like a star through the leafless trees

that’s following us home at night down

one long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams

to one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.

To die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.

To love deeply and see what we’ve cared for,

unspared and squandered as if time had no more use for it

and there was nothing rare or precious that wasn’t rendered

more fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns

for the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming

who could ever claim they were who

they were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery

of what we’re doing here in the first place

trying to wake up in time to find out why we doubt

our own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime

to love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing

we’ve never met, to enlighten our disappearance?

What doorways of farewell must linger in us yet

for all the graves we’ve already filled

with everything we’ve ever loved, autumn after autumn,

like wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,

each trying to fill another’s bucket of emptiness

with the rush of their own blood

like the emergency exit out of a burning theater

featuring a seasonal re-run of the lies

we tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?

Yet here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.

Delivered and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity

like a darkness it’s already the ore of waiting to be refined

like stars emerging in the night, flowers

from the starmud of the earth and though

we have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves

that are capable of breathing in the light

of mystic atmospheres one planet isn’t enough to cling to,

most of us still candle back to the earth we arose from

like weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.

As a playwright looking back in anger once said.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion kisses the burn.

We get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.

The secret’s out in the open which is the best place to hide,

if you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.

Now you see it. Now you don’t. It sees you.

And you draw the blind. But the sunflowers

turn with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise

and in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished

like the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,

and there’s a scent of smoke in the air

that makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life

and how there’s even a palpable beauty in the passage

of the fallen leaves among our gravestones

that’s always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead

that can’t shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost

from the future, summoned to this seance of now

by a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars

light years before either they or we will even know we’re dead.

PATRICK WHITE

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS THEIR SKELETONS

TIRED OF SUPPLYING THE STARS THEIR SKELETONS

Tired of supplying the stars their skeletons,

or webbing them into constellations

like love-letters written in prison,

or dusting the hieroglyphics of their fossils

pressed between the pages of nocturnal shales,

looking for signs of original life,

this brevity of perilous confusion

that sits on a throne of fog,

its quicksand foundations

the filth of fanatics and fools, my skull

a paperweight in a laurel of razorwire,

and every gesture of purity, every

symbol, emblem and image of light,

every effort to labour for greener domains

heart by heart, just

another mode of murderous betrayal,

lipstick on toilet paper,

a bullet hole in a swan, I long

for the clarity of mornings that don’t exist

to assure me I haven’t wasted my life

trying to feather a human out of coal.

I want a future that isn’t already a ghost,

I want to know at nightfall, bloodfall, eyefall,

that the available dimension of tomorrow

isn’t just another stalling tactic of today, isn’t

just more vinegar

bruising its eyelids with wine,

the slash of a thin smile greased with cherries.

I want to know that I haven’t been planting

apple trees on the moon,

that somewhere in September on earth,

a bough bends under the weight

of a windfall of planets

wrapped in thin-skinned sunsets

ripe with sugars and seeds

ready to fall to the living root

of their own beginnings

like cupfuls of water and light

returned to the river I took them from,

but sweetened by the spirit

that cherished them like gifts

I made of the gift that was given to me,

this diamond devotion to orchards and oceans

and the wounded humans that walk beside them,

their hearts unharnessed like ploughs.

Tired of having my jaw wired before I’m dead

to the remnants of myself,

these reconstructions of teeth and vertebrae

in the puppet-master museums

that put the future on display

before it’s born, my heart

a black embryo in formaldehyde, a ghoul

in a circus of interrogative clowns

that conjecture on what I might have been

had I devoted myself like rain

to different bloodstreams, had I

not disavowed the old, cracked creekbeds

to make a river of my own flowing.

I want to sit down like a lottery

with a choirmaster in a cemetery,

with a gravedigger on the moon who longs

for the probable impossibility

of knowing how many legs are on a snake

as he tries to reinvent himself from scratch.

I want to sit down on the hilarious ground

at the end of a long apprenticeship

and laugh until I’m sick with certainty

at the accomplished absurdity

of recognizing my best work

in the last phase of a lifelong eclipse,

set like a jewel of coal in the corona of a diamond ring.

PATRICK WHITE

AS IF I HAD JUST LET GO OF SOMETHING HUGE

As if I had just let go of something huge,

the glacier of stars

that has been driving me

like an enlightened ox all these years

to grind bread from my darkness,

as if a planet fell out of a dragon’s mouth,

as if turning the mountain around

I were no longer the cornerstone

of a temple I were being slowly crushed under

in the name of an unknown purity

that clung to me like the last of a species.

I’ve been consulting oilslicks

and eclipses as if they were starmaps,

I’ve been downloading constellations

onto a heretical hard-drive

to upgrade my fate, trying,

though it’s like trying to spawn upstream

when it isn’t easier than rain

to detach from my subjective imaginings,

the billboards and the midways

and the golden chains I look so good in,

all the Venus fly-traps of my creative idealism,

the gambler’s pride I took

in witching for water in hell

with a seasoned branch of lightning.

I’ve been pouring myself out on the ground

like nightblood from a wounded dream for years,

like a rare wine that had the elan to squander itself,

to transcend its own visionary delirium

this side of the river

where the fires bloom and spread wildly downstream

like supple bells of paint,

tender intrusions of beauty,

and even love bleats like a judas-goat

roped to a stake smeared with fat,

and it’s no one’s fault

when two masks stop crying for each other,

trying to irrigate a desert on the moon

with a glass tear

or predict the orbit of a firefly with a mirror.

And it’s cold and alone

and profoundly insignificant

when you realize

that there is no ultimacy at the gate

that will greet you,

looking up from your weeding,

with a smile, no clarity

that can wash your eyes away like ice,

and no one to give a bouquet to

that isn’t already a flower.

Intelligence isn’t enough,

imagination falters.

The spirit constantly denuded of itself

like spring from the wind

eventually sees itself reflected

everywhere in matter like time

and comes to rest

like a waterbird on the moon,

the shadow of a door that always opens onto itself,

like a valley, or a god, or a pair of wings,

the next breath.

Those who don’t know

look for a meaning to existence;

those who do

gather the bruised fruit with compassion,

and tamp their eyelashes

around the impoverished root like tea leaves

steeped in the cool bliss of their tears.

The stars look down in wonder over them,

as if a rose could be a bloodstream,

and marvel that there should be such hearts in the world,

where the lighthouses

are stubbed out like cigarettes

in the eye of the approaching storm

and the pyramids turn to quicksand.

And the wonderful absurdity of it all is

it doesn’t matter who you are,

a river or a highway,

a spider in a poppy,

or the iron daffodil

of a parking meter in bud,

until you let go of yourself like a scarred bell

that isn’t a phase of the moon,

and open the eyelid of your stone coffin

and breathe yourself out like a dream

into the shadows of your afterlife,

until the pulse of your whole being

is a tide and a threshold

that sweeps over you

like a sky over an uninhabited island

you’re still a rumour in the darkness

trying to reverse the disgrace

of an infamous legend of light.

PATRICK WHITE

FIVE DOLPHINS SWIMMING OFF THE BOW OF MY FOREHEAD

FIVE DOLPHINS SWIMMING OFF THE BOW OF MY FOREHEAD

Five dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead,

glancing encounters with the moon that lacquers their skin.

I’m in a lifeboat under the full sail of a blank page

just to keep up with them, though I know I’m moving

into deeper night seas of awareness, too far out

to make it back to shore in time to make the curfews

of the lighthouses trying to keep the shore-huggers apart

from the salvagers who run down to the shores in a storm

taking over from the mermaids like a nightshift of scavengers,

who want to run you up on the rocks just as surely

by holding their lanterns out like the tinfoil constellations

of false hopes on the event horizons of precipitous cliff walls.

I revel in the glee, the ecstasy, the rapture

that doesn’t mean anyone’s coming to save me

of running free with my imagination for the pure joy

of living with it as the only known antidote

to the decrescent moon that had its fangs pulled.

I give my flightfeathers up to the wind off the sea at night

like a seagull to a sky burial that sheds them like apple bloom.

Mediocrity thinks that words are the sounds you make

like the names of things when you’re beating

on a hollow log of a muse. Amplified echoes

of a weak pulse. Thunder without lightning. Life

without water and blood. Sex without lust.

But words are living creatures with an integrity

and mystic specificity of their own that don’t need

anyone’s voice to animate them, because

long before anyone was born to stick them like fingers

and things of the world into their mouths,

words were speaking for themselves

like nightbirds in the woods, the shriek of the hawk

as it whistles by like an arrow between the talons

of its parentheses, the hermit thrush and the mockingbird

that speak in the tongues of words they’ve cloned from sound.

How else do you think the fox in winter,

following the pheasants tracks learned to print,

and then later the leafless trees taught it cursive script?

Sweesh-ka-ka in Kwakiutl means robin.

You can almost hear it on a green bough

outside your window in the spring when the crows

from their island rookeries are squabbling for squatter’s rights

with hopeful migrants from the south of winter.

You can hear it in the way a star splinters on a moonless night

like a chandelier in an ice storm. I don’t write

as if I’ve been talking to foreign ministers all my life

with urgent messages from an abandoned embassy in Babylon

that shredded all its clay tablets like papers

for my eyes only to keep them out of the hands of my enemies.

Words aren’t memos to feel something you didn’t yesterday.

Or the gravestones of dead metaphors to help you recollect

things you’ve buried in your past like a bone box of loveletters.

Abracadabra. Grammar is magic. Words cast spells on the stars

that turn them into bulls and fish. Black and white magicians,

witches, sylphs, sibyls, incubi and sorceresses

that can curse or bless the dancing ballerina on top

of that music box you keep like a secret aviary in your larynx

to jinx the silence of a false dawn with the sound of rain.

Can’t you hear the mirrors crying to be liberated

from the same old reflections on love you bare before them?

Words aren’t a collection of old shoes you’ve shed in a closet

full of skeletons like flesh and snakeskins

you’re never going to wear again. However long

the firewalk you’ve got to go barefoot if you ever want

to wear wings on your heels whose flightplans

don’t need to be measured by the width of your feet.

Words are demons. Words are wounded angels. Words

are drunks slumped three stairs up on the fire-escapes of hell.

Words are dragons that swallow the cosmic eggs

of sacred syllables trying to break out of their shells

like fledglings. They’re not the vicars of your moral life.

They’re not forensic evidence of how wonderful you were.

They’re not the yarrow sticks that wrote the Book of Changes.

They’re not a memory system for the absently-minded

collective unconscious talking in its sleep

elliptically to archetypes of the definite article. Isn’t The . . .

enough of a biography to factualize the fictions

and fictionalize the facts of anyone over the course

of a lifetime drilling wells into a watershed of mirages

to get to the bottom of things like a shipwreck in a desert

when it rains? Everybody gets wordy about things

they know nothing about. In the beginning was the word

and so on and so on sound begat sound, but what gets lost

in translation like the prequel of the lightning flash

before the rolling thunder, is the genesis

of the imagination playing by itself in the dark

like a blind child listening to the rain on the roof

crying its eyes out for things that can’t be seen in the light.

Comb, coma, comet, comma. Ball, ballet, ballistic, symbol.

The dead word in the living voice of the undertaker

as he combs the hair of your corpse, isn’t poetry.

It’s just another night light on in a morgue

without a midnight or a dawn to know what hour it is.

Don’t be fooled by the luster of the polished stone.

Or the transparency of the crystal skull. The dark ore

conjures more stars to the window than the candle lures moths.

You miss the point of your seeing altogether like a black dwarf

if you go out to look at Orion on a winter night

and come back in singing the praises of your lenses.

The gold of the rainbow pours from the ore of the storm.

You don’t need to bury yourself alive to mine it

or make a sluice of your tongue, a forge of your heart

to refine it. Or open your mouth like Crassus

among the Parthians to wear the corona of your eclipse

like a sun that shines at midnight, coal in a wedding ring.

Five dolphins swimming off the bow of my forehead like Delphinus

nudging a poetic sailor who jumped over board from Job’s Coffin,

or the Black Turtle of the North to the Chinese astronomers

on a nightwatch without an astrolabe ashore

as Nicolaus Venator from Palermo repeats

his Latin name infernally backwards in the dark mirror

of the nightsky like the alpha and beta of its two brightest stars.

PATRICK WHITE

Note: The poetic sailor referred to is Arion, the poet reputed to have been saved from drowning by a dolphin. Nicolaus Venator is the Latin name of the astronomer, Niccolo Cacciatore, which, spelled backwards, was given to the two brightest stars of the constellation, Sualocin and Rotanev, though, modestly, only of the fourth magnitude.

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.

Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.

Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.

I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can

toward some flowering of the mystery

I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.

My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,

yet it’s never known my name. My best feature

once you get pass the indignation and the anger,

compassion. And though love seems to me

the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself

as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness

even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames

and there was no where else to cross before the falls,

to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?

Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,

each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.

Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain

that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.

I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.

I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.

I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,

I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,

though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,

should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself

like a hidden secret that wants to be known,

I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror

that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes

of as many life forms and more in the multiverse

than you can see without being astonished by the beauty

of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock

pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,

whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima

of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,

and my spirit be no more than my own breath

condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky

where I write the name of someone I’ve never met

with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,

let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength

into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness

a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,

a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known

a long time ago that reminds you of someone

so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.

I’m not looking for someone to whine to.

I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five

so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.

I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.

After so many nights of laying my head

on this hard rock pillow of a world

that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades

I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.

The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.

I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how

to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods

where I always feel as a human it’s the first day

of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl

or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering

what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,

just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm

I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn

to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me

instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet

isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s

a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything

like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart

in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void

that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life

on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,

his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking

from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out

I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re

the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence

I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone

with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,

and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere

that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon

so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,

light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,

and you be the light by which the light is known.

Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.

Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected

they can’t help shining out of everything as if

no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,

and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.

Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss

of molecular indifference. You should see the tears

I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face

with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.

You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.

Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign

and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.

I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget

when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire

has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,

if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill

stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance

as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,

however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock

that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you

could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.

That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart

since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood

for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,

the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were

nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk

beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother

half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven

and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax

to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven

when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?

How do you return to your toy truck after

the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother

and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares

don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile

that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open

like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,

everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity

of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life

with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds

like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.

Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain

in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,

in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished

like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas

of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,

until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,

small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression

upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,

like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,

just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in

on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true

in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,

and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon

until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October

when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

PATRICK WHITE