SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, LYRICAL, TENDERLY HEART-FELT

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt

like a child reaching out of its innocence

to test a bruise that used to hurt

but now has mellowed into a wild flower

with just a touch of local colour.

Wild irises among the breathless willows

along the shores of the Tay River

adjusting the catfish to its flow

like underwater weathervanes

and it’s summer on earth

and the sun ripens like a tomato

on the inside of your eyelids

and the hum of the dragonflies

buzzing your ear like a flight control tower

lulls you into a narcosis of physical well-being

when even an hour of being so at peace with life

as it is, was, appears, ought to be or not,

the distinctions are as unreal

as water consulting a nautical chart,

and even time stops judging things by its first impressions.

Something easy, inclusive, and true as it needs to be

without going to any special efforts.

Just to lie back in the fresh summer grass

and wish you were a white horse

with a black star under your forelock

that could graze upon the young blades

that smell so much like cool green peas

and stare into the endless cerulean blue of a sky

with an eye for antique clouds

the burgundy-tipped brushes of the birches

are scumbling a little alizarin crimson into

just to warm things up a bit.

I want to see wet mammals

gleaming with water and light

sliding down a mud bank back into the river

otters, muskrats, beavers,

and forget all about evolution

like any other corporate utility

that can wait to be paid.

The turkey-vultures and the red-tailed hawk

circling high overhead without disturbing

a feather on their wings

when they’re riding their thermals for the sheer joy of it,

like kids sliding down a bannister

that find the most fun in what

there’s the least purpose in

and even less reason to question.

I want to look upon life

as if its only secret agenda

is as it always has been

hidden out in the open

for everyone’s eyes only.

I want to let my mind

sprawl and cluster as it will

like the waterlilies in lieu of stars

giving illustrious astronomy lessons

inside the dark planetarium

of the abandoned beaver hut

on the far shore

that’s just as big a mystery

as the disappearance of the Mayans.

For the moment I don’t

want to go anywhere a maple tree

wouldn’t grow of its own accord

whether it made it through

the first few winters or not.

Listen to the leaves on the aspens

lapping like the small waves

of an incoming tide of shadows

as the afternoon slowly withdraws its assent

like a hand from the hand of a sleeping lover

to reveal your sacred absence when she wakes up

like the best gift you had to give her

though she’d never dream

of asking for so much.

Powder-blue eyeshadow on the damselflies.

My spiritual dakini dancing voluptuously

making Hindi hand gestures of light

that flash off the backs of black watersnakes

that roll with the waves

like a melody to music

your whole body hears

like serpent-fire roaring through a chimney

to clear its throat of birds.

Enlightenment might be akin

to galloping on a horse through a busy market

without bumping into anyone.

There are enough fools who doubt it

to convince you there must be some truth to it,

but here where the red-winged blackbird

sings from the dead branch

as often as the green bough,

the deathless insight is effortless

and ignorance and enlightenment

are just the front and back doors of bliss

in this house of life that takes a worm

and turns it into a Monarch butterfly

or takes a landscape

and turns it into a state of mind,

a dynamic equilibrium among opposites

that stand before each other

like a man before a mirror

without one asking the other

which of them is real.

Not as I am but as it is

is true of everything in creation

from the atoms in a lost osprey feather

on up to the superclustering of black holes

like voodoo dolls in the hearts of the starfish

who gather in covens to sacrifice their light

to the darkness, making a ritual

of the natural order of events

emerging from the chaos of a random universe

like a school of fish

or the flight of birds

or even the improbable concourse of these words

when they all swerve the same way.

Reeds in the river.

The hair of the willows.

A human who seeks peace in a low place

down by the water

and lets his thoughts go along

with the flow of things

like the main theme of a waterclock

with a heart and a bloodstream

discrete enough to ignore me for a while

as I drift like an empty lifeboat down the Tay River

like one of my unmoored poems

whenever I am whatever it is

standing in the shadows of the answer

that’s been liberated from the slavery

of responding to the question that belabours it.

We are consummate nothingness.

The metaphoric vapours of a drug we inhale

like the fragrance of white sweet clover,

distillations and elixirs of the moon

we drink from our own skulls,

semaphoric fireflies waiting for the stars

to answer back, shapeshifters

bending space to the shape

of our momentary cosmic minds

to have everything fall into place prophetically

like wild grapevines into bottles of dated wine.

Go ask the water if a reflection

standing on its own two feet

like a mirage of stars in the desert cold

of the upper atmosphere

waiting for someone at a wishing well

is any less real than one that’s lying down

to look up at the passing clouds

until it disappears like a mirror

that doesn’t inhibit them

into whatever they’re the image of

in a fraction of sunlight

on the wing of a blue heron

startled into flight by something

on the far side of the river.

Mesmerized by the mystic specificity

of the extraordinarily ordinary,

one dandelion in a wild raspberry patch

overwhelming it like a tsunami,

the fate that must have befallen

the one-legged gull

I gave bread to here last summer

favouring him above all

to humanize the radical impersonality

of the randomly accidental

that did this to a bird

without purpose, will, or meaning,

I sit here among these,

my senses attuned

to the vagaries of consciousness

as they’re beaten off like crows

by nesting sparrows

or keep a journal like a leaf

that set out young to explore the river

like a water god that went looking for water

and found it when he came upon

what remained of himself and cried

when things went oceanic

as if it had happened to someone else.

Something beautiful, lyrical, tenderly heart-felt.

Two ruby-throated hummingbirds

hovering over a bouquet of daylilies

like single quotes.

PATRICK WHITE

SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

SQUALLS OF RUSTY LEAVES CLINGING TO A TREE IN WINTER

Squalls of rusty leaves clinging to a tree in winter

like the pages of a perfectly bound book,

the memoirs of a fire that refused to go out

like the gypsy scarves of the poppies,

dry, rattling, skulls encrusted by the firepits

of their own laurels. So many of my generation,

the sixties, the fabled seed beds of a dead revolution,

the distant thunder of a creative firestorm

that flowed back into its watershed like a black snake

after the lightning struck the sacred tree.

Cratered, pitted mantles with thinning atmospheres

on the surface of rogue planets still looking

for that one mystic star they’ll orbit

like comets with their greying ponytails forever

if they ever find it. But don’t be too quick to judge

the heart of the original nightbird on the basis

of a fading echo with a long way to go yet.

Just below the surface of the reflexive symbols

that have worn out the knees of the shrines

and devotees who made peace signs

instead of the sign of the cross, just below

the volcanic islands of the scars they’re marooned on,

the effusive swords of their edgy insights

cooling out in a tempering sea of awareness,

there’s still a hot, magmatic core of dragon sages

dancing in the ashes of a dead furnace

that approached them like a matchbook

that thought it was the peer and master

of their ageing green cremations at a rain dance.

Don’t throw cold water on a dreaming wolf until

you’ve checked its teeth to see if it snarls

with the broken crescents of a waning moon

or the turning world has kept its pencils sharp

as the point it’s about to make for enlightenment’s sake.

Even in my own heart, I can hear the pathos

in the voice of the wolf shaman calling

the few who remained faithful to their prayers,

like a savage muezzin in the mountains

of a brutal solitude that knows what hour it is.

If it grows dark around me even as I write

that doesn’t mean I’m editing myself out of the light.

That’s just a sixties way of conjuring the stars to come out.

Who hasn’t stood in the starmud up to their necks

in the infinities of the chronic rapture

of a sixties think tank of one very spaced-out brain

cauterized by bliss burn? The generations lie down

one upon the other like layers of sediment settling

out of the turmoil of their sky bound puddles like new skin

on cosmic river bottoms, today’s cambium,

tomorrow’s heartwood. Dark absorption lines

around the eyes of an emission spectrum. Black

calendars scarred on the vulture femurs

of the bird bone flutes of Archaic Indians lying

in their graves by the Straits of Belle Isle.

Takes a while, but it perpetually happens.

It’s going to happen to you, just like that

medieval clique of skeletons said. As we are now

so will you be one of these mystic bagladies

or homeless revolutionaries out trying to trade

the whole wardrobe of the emperor’s new clothes

for a few rags of retroactive fashion. The duff

of the autumn leaves collaged into wet albums

on the forest floor of radicals returning to their roots

one last time before the snow falls. The setting star

doesn’t shine any less brighter than

the new debutantes of lucidity rising in the east.

We ran before the storm awhile like birds

that delighted in the riot and the madness

of its creatively destructive, dark energies.

We burned cities, trying to make love not war.

We gnawed through the chains of the anchors

of moonboats in the ports of lunar drydocks

even as we jumped ship like rats on friendly terms

with the dragons of the Chinese zodiac.

Civil rights, anti-war protests, feminism efoliate,

this time with thorns, ecological paracletes

intervening on behalf of the pimped-out earth,

water, air, earth, fire, four poor girls

whored in the stables of the corporate flesh market,

and a sexual revolution that broke the locks

on the stocks of the witch-hunting Puritans

who burned the bodies of women like candles

fearful of the lunar power of their own housewells,

fierce hypocrites who thinned the blood in their veins

into the formic acids of nettles and ants,

into the vicious beginning of their one letter alphabet

of red ink that kept sinking deeper in arrears to God

because they lived their lies like pincers on a lightning rod.

Major regret. No work revolution to undo

the immorality of enjoying what you do for a living

instead of accepting it as a purifying karmic scourge

for the evil and the guilt of having been born

to hard labour on a chain gang without parole.

It’s sixties just to point out that the Upanishads say

work should be a form of worship, or in Zen,

a do, an enlightenment path, or closer to home,

a begging bowl. In the aftermath of the cosmic cocktails

of chemicals for herbivores with poetic sounding names,

the apocalyptic spirit went supernova and the remnants

of the excruciating ecstasy came up like a moonrise

of manic mushrooms that shaved their heads

like magic monks in a cult of future afterlives.

I saw the maharanis kiss the serpent on the head

and get away with it. I’ve lapped the marrow of music

out of the fossilized bird bone flutes

that tried to charm the snakepit and got bit because

music hasn’t got charms to soothe all savage breasts.

Over now. With this proviso. No star ever

says farewell to its light however far

it travels from its original fountainmouth,

wavelengths away from the first flash of insight

like the continuum of the wind, or space and time.

Things may be diverted by gravitational third eyes,

and, yes, so many have imploded on themselves

like black dwarfs that yesterday were fireflies of the spirit,

and others brood like dark ore deep within themselves

over secret motherlodes of white gold

that glows like wheat in the moonlight

in the wake of a silver plough sowing stars

in the furrows of their terraced brows

that are timed to germinate long after they’re gone,

gone, gone, gone, altogether gone beyond.

Lucidity surprised by the lengthening shadows it cast

like a rookery of crows in a psychedelic sunset.

Chimney sparks by the moody cresosote of old fires

that aspired to the stars like nightbirds

caught in their own throats when the darkness

overwhelmed them with the unattainability

of the best things in life to reach for

like brilliant failures with an artist’s nostalgia

for a lost cause that went into exile voluntarily,

some like asteroids of the Orphic dismemberment

of a whole generation, some like hyperbolic comets

fallen from their dark haloes turning once around the sun

like tracers following the flightpath of their own ricochets,

and some, you’ve seen them, emanating

from the invisible radiants of well-thumbed zodiacs,

like the lion and bull gates of meteor showers

that can still thrill the marvellous children

with the fireworks of their creative immolations

as another generation shrieks in glee realizing

their own freedom in the high jinx

of the sacred clowns and amazing lunatics

blooming in orbit like wildflowers protesting

the way the earth passed every day into night

without opening its eyes to the wonders of itself

strewn in its path like the tarnished haloes

of moondogs we once reached for like brass rings

that gored us like matadors on our own horns

as we bled to death in an eclipse of roses

in the magic ashpits of their oracular thorns.

PATRICK WHITE

ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP

ELEVEN SEAS OF AWARENESS IN EVERY DROP

Eleven seas of awareness in every drop.

Eleven doors in a see-through water palace

that doesn’t cast stones at the first glance

at the mirror, but flows around them,

the airfoil of a waterbird, the radiant wake,

the long coma of a prophetic skull

plunging into the sun like the dead

waking up in a parabolic orbit once

every seventy-six years. Eleven dimensions.

Seven of them deaf, dumb, blind and mute.

Vertiginous mind at the crossroads

of interpenetrating worlds that pass

right through each other like galactic ghosts

at the intersection of a seance in all directions of prayer.

Mind watching like a cat on an upstairs windowsill.

Alert as still water. Eye of the needle in my gaze.

Jupiter startling over the garish windows

of the eerie, closed shops in wedding dresses

that try too hard, through no fault of the light,

to wash the greater brilliance out with a paint rag

of suspect colours. Alive. The big contention.

How hard everybody strives to establish that

as the one indisputable fact they’ve accepted

by convention. When you can look upon life and death

in the same breath, as two eyes of the one seeing

your indifference might have finally amounted

to something sacred I’d advise you to immediately transcend.

I’ve looked deeply into sanity long enough

to have gone creatively mad three wolf gates ago.

Freedom and bliss have amalgamated like Egyptian gods

on the pschent of the pharaoh. Upper and Lower

traffic in Nubian gold mines and salmon.

I’m standing in the doorway of the new moon

when she opens her eyes in the dark like an eclipse.

When I’m not encumbered like a hill

Sisyphus keeps rolling his stone over like a tomb,

as if it were up to him the sun came up each day,

I like to let my mind wander like a stray thread

of the Milky Way. I strum on my spine

like a bruised guitar in the corner, trying

to come up with a bridge to the chorus

of a new string theory that might help explain

why I act so much like a cosmic membrane

with a broken ear drum. Creatively playing in agony.

Can you give an existential basis to a delusion

like the foundation stone of the moon

to the reflection of the Black Taj Mahal?

The only precedent I know of for the meaning of life

is to make your own. Paint a masterpiece of fire

with your little spark of life. Let it go off

like the collateral damage of the Big Bang

when two membranes kissed in hyperspace

and no one had any idea of how far the light

of all that dark energy was willing to go

just to shine like stars in the indigo nebula

of the wild irises with cool petals as soft

as the skin of an old woman’s eyelids

being woken up from the dead like a dream

she just can’t get out of her heart for the rest of her life.

It’s the becoming, the unfolding, the transforming,

the changing, the burning of the starmaps

like industrial secrets so you can reach out

for what you see in the dark like unattainable fireflies

and by touching them, burn your fingertips

so you can refer to your scars as proof that they’re real.

Think the vision’s ever complete. You’re as dead

as a fly up against a pane of glass. The cat

will push you around like a comma that couldn’t

find its place in the foodchain of a long, ongoing

periodic sentence as incommensurate as pi

in every ripple of rain that falls like a God particle

on your oceanic grave. See how the moon

when you turn your eyes away shape shifts into

the wavelength of a radiant watersnake on the lake

playing picture music on its scales like a crazy keyboard

trying to keep its eighty-eights straight?

See how lovers assume there are no strangers?

PATRICK WHITE

MY FERAL KITTEN, RIPPLE

MY FERAL KITTEN, RIPPLE

Ninety days old, a triune of months, three

crescent moons of darkness in your eyes like daggers

plunged into the heart of the full

since you first opened them in the wild

and I encountered them on Facebook,

a daughter of Bast, looking for a home,

female, unneutered, seeded with fleas.

Did a fisher get your mother, your siblings?

I took you from the arms of a friend

who passed you on with your furnishings,

a new litter box with a cowling, two buckets

of cat gravel for a bathroom, a granary bag

of kitten food and your former name, Smokey,

because you were grey. A.k.a., Ripple,

after giving Wavelength some thought,

because you’re striped like the frequency of the rain

in a puddle of starmud. Growth rings in the heart

of an ironwood tree. And names have power.

Though I’m tempted now I know you a bit

to call you Bad Ass. But then you were scared,

fragile, trusting as I grasped you like a cloud

and put you on the passenger seat of the car,

all the windows up for fear you’d squeeze out

like a tube of toothpaste if I left them open even a crack.

You sat in the back windshield as I looked at you

in the rear view mirror watching everything pass,

and didn’t claw me to death in a mad panic

to return to everything you’d known. Gracias.

I’d lived with three goldfish and the sprites and goblins

of my imagination at three in the morning

awake in a deserted town for too long looking down

at unpeopled cement. I yearned for an affable familiar

I could touch among so many invisible things

mourning like a lonely train whistling into the distance.

A passing whim of synchronicity and you showed up

out of the wild, out of the ether, a hand warmer

on a cold night that had nothing to do with the weather,

a synteretic spark plug of life, a shepherd moon

in my planetary solitude, a comet of folly

in one long, endless, periodic sentence of life

bent hyperbolically like a hairpin around the sun.

Tinder box and straw. You go off like a firecracker

with whiskers, bounding down the hall

after a paper ball you trap in mid flight

like a fly to the outfield you claw from the air

like the first crescent of the moon in the window

waxing sure of itself. Your nerves are a bird net.

Your instincts haven’t had much of a chance

to serve you yet. You stalk tiny spiders in the bathtub.

You’ve won savage encounters with the toilet paper.

And you’re a torment greater than a spider mite

to the houseplants that don’t like playing

jungle with you as if you were training a bootcamp

to one day face the real thing like a potted plant.

I can box better than you, but in the first rounds

you got in some nasty cheap shots that drew blood

but now we’ve moved on to switchblades

and fangs like the syringes of a snake

that bite deep into the drumsticks of my thumbs,

you’re a ninja or a hashashin apprenticed

to the Old Man of the Mountain walking

like a voodoo doll down a path of needles and thorns.

You’re a cougar, a tiger, a lioness. Frenzied energy

a celebration of life to you, a fevered dance,

and there’s a big wilderness in such a tiny heart

you’re the lonely hunter and I’m always

this sickly wildebeest of a poet playing

the part of the prey come down to the watering hole

of the toilet in the heat of the day

like a missing link in the foodchain. If we

ever get out of here and move back to the farm

I’ll let you have one litter of cubs on the bedspread

just to say you did. I’ll let the root fires

burn in you awhile so your hormones

can blister in the mystery of birth without

the eternal sky shepherding the flight of the full moon.

You’re a fishing lure. Your cuteness hides the hook.

You focus like the Zen mistress of a spring-loaded,

four on the floor, rubber burning, stick shift about to explode,

only your tail, only that little nervous twitch in your tail,

a dead give away some fly at the windowpane

is about to get his like a terrorist from the karmic drone

of a cosmic cat goddess about to come down on it

like the Leonids wreaking havoc with the sabre and scythe

of the question mark that characterizes the radiant

in the the pyx and precincts of your sphinxy constellation.

Feline familiar, purr box, fur ball, burdock, velcro, spur,

Freddie Kruger with your switchblade fingers

doing needlepoint with porcupine quills,

you nuzzle up to me like a cloud around a mountain

and as often as you climb up, I bend down

to put my hand like a candelabra into a tree shredder.

If Kafka’s right, we all lie in the lap of a vast intelligence

but it doesn’t pet me the way I stroke you

as if I were first violin in a string band on a streetcorner

playing music on your melodic fur. And there were birds

with the fingers of surgeons perched on the staves

of your whiskers like semiquavers tickling the ivories

of your vertebrae like the keyboard of your spine.

You see the possibilities of hunting and fun in everything.

You’re not much of a knitter, and if you were a loom

I’d think you were a spider on acid, given what

I’ve seen you do with a ball of twine. But was there

ever a weaver who tied themselves up into so many knots

she needed an air traffic controller and a flight path

to land a flying carpet in the hall? Or grounded herself

like a bucket by a well entangled in morning glory vines?

You turn over on your belly, stretched out like toffee

and you’re white as a snowdrift someone

threw a scuttle of ashes on. Brave little creature

I love the way you take everything for granted

you depend upon when you’re not in the mood

to pander away your solitude for a medley

of chewy seafood treats. Wish I had

the same kind of hunting magic you do

or were half as charismatic as your iconoclastic voodoo.

You listen to a train in heat howling

like an alley-cat in the rain far across town

as your ears flare like distant echoes

of the Sydney Opera House with tufts of fur,

and then you look at me to see if there’s anything

to be afraid of, and I say, maybe later

but not right now. Better off scaring the fish

for awhile. Soon you’ll learn to burn and sting

and sing for yourself. Purring’s lyrical enough

for the moment. That hypnogogic mantra

you keep chanting to yourself like low thunder

on the event horizon of your strategic windowsill

your eyes half closed in Zen meditation

wholly at peace with all your afterlives,

enthroned in this, your latest incarnation.

Lady of Flame, Eye of Ra, daughter of Isis,

snake-killer, stone of alabaster, sister of the falcon,

spirit of the moon, protector of the sun.

Have you ever heard the purring of a human before?

I roll this poem into ball, throw it down the hall,

watch you leap for it, hang in the air a moment,

legs fully extended, a constellation, Orion, I think

just as it’s setting in the west twisting like a gymnast

to land on all fours like a gyroscope with coil springs.

I lay an osprey feather on your stairs. A medicine bag

stuffed like a scarecrow with catnip. My devotion.

My black leather office chair scourged

like a martyred flagellant by a cat o’ nine tails.

This red starmap of puncture wounds on my hands.

I name the third new moon of your lifemask, Ripple,

and by the fierce divinity of the first clean slash of light

that opens your eyes like sacred syllables

of yellow topaz in the night, no doubt, no doubt at all

in this man’s pantheon, whatever name I address you by

you’re the beautifully counter-intuitive cat goddess Bast.

Touchable amulet of the intangible mystery,

I stroke your skull like the belly of the Buddha

for joy in our prosperity, fire and ashes,

victory and defeat alike, the scythe and the wheat.

My hand glides like a lifeboat down the length of your spine

on an incoming tide. Your eyes close

like waning crescents of the moon as a seal of assent.

And for the moment I am wholly included

within their cosmic parentheses withdrawing

their lunar claws, gentling their staples

like the casual intrusion of feline sphinx music

into the tumultuous repertoire of my silence

listening in solitude to the evanescent stillness of the ages.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING

THE MORNING AFTER EVERYTHING

for Luke Cochrane

Saturday morning rain in Perth

and things seem as intimately far off and strange

as the new maps of water running down the windowpane.

No birds on the black boughs of the November trees

and black mirrors in the empty funeral home parking lot

and on the other side of me

the stalwart bloodbrick of a wet church

that looks better in the nicotine lingerie

and dusky seaspray

of a single yellow floodlight at night

that can’t get it up to be a lighthouse.

It would be a lie to say that I’m not in love

and happily alone, but I most wistfully am,

as I excuse myself for being me

and put myself off like the small death of another way

I could have taken to get back home, but didn’t.

November’s an orphanage after the last kid has left

and I’m sure there’s an ancient chthonic wisdom

under the duff and detritus

of all these slick, leechy leaves

that the earth has applied to herself like a poultice

to draw the violets and worms out in spring,

but right now my mouth is not a wound

with anything deep to say

about things too deep to be said

and there are memories of women and friends in my head

sleeping like keys in the bottom of a drawer

that I have saved for when the day comes

to open the flowers and doors

that I’ve forgotten,

all the soft sorrows that rime the radiance

of the halo around a black hole

haunted by these ghosts of light.

I am absorbed like tears in a tenderness of grey

and there’s more healing than thorn

in the cool aloe of the air

moist with a seance of emotions

that gust lightly around me

as if yesterday were merely a fragrance

hovering over an eye of wine

like the dust and smoke of today

that bottles its purity like water.

Sometimes love passes like a glacier over you

and there are runes and scars and striations on your skin

and lakes and craters and eyes the sky fills in

and the sun comes out like an exorcist

and you feel like you’ve been baptized in ice

or tucked into the crevice of a wailing wall

like a baby mammoth, or an unanswered prayer

and you try not to care

that you’re a freak of your own evolution

trying to clone yourself out of the museum into a zoo

and that all these people are staring at you

like a missing link between the parentheses of your tusks

that have unhinged you from the gate of time

you once swung on like your next breath,

and if you were asked about the extremes of mercy

you would say, without hesitation, death.

Sometimes it’s that hard to accept

that nothing that happens here, including death

is ever over, and that the absence of something or someone

doesn’t mean they’ve ceased to exist

like footprints that lead down to a river.

Because we all live the same beginningless beginning

that is the once and forever of this universe

even if it should call itself home occasionally like an eye,

we go on living and dying each other alone

like an extinct species always asking the time

when the moonlight burns like lime in a grave

and then, once more, absurdly never the same

riots of flying fish leap from every drop of rain

that remembers the passion of the wave

offering itself in the life of every moment

like a jewel thawing, or an icecap over the eye

or the opening of a brittle window

to be scoped out by the nightwind

that longs like a thief for the sea

to gather him up like one of its belongings.

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

where the whole is sustained by every part

anymore than you can empty the human heart

that is renewed by its own exhaustion like a tide.

Time is always prelude

and death has never known when

to take down its sail like a tree in the fall.

And because things are never the same twice

and the road back is not the road taken

the world and everyone in it

just as they are, have always been here.

Things don’t come and go

like migrating geese ascending southward out of a field,

or things fallen returning to their leaves

because there’s nowhere to come from

nowhere to go to

that isn’t now and here

as intimately far as it is impersonally near.

Ask almost anyone who they are

and they’ll look down a well in a mirage

to haul up their reflection on a wheel

and insist it’s real

when they ladle their face to their lips

like the moon on dark water.

Or they’ll tell you a story around an unending fire

where the shadows are always truer than the flames

and the most illuminating themes burn like stars without names.

Mind is space and there is

nowhere inside or outside of anything

that is closer or futher than anything else

because everything is mind as far as you can be.

So I can stand here in my lengthening shadow

like a long departure

turning into the wind like a sail or a sundial

as if I were the last of my species of eclipse

and life were merely the long, hard discipline

of unmastering the art

of saying hello to the living

and good-bye to the dead,

or turning the telescope around

and saying good-bye to the living,

hello to the dead as I please,

but I’d rather shed myself

like all these falling maps to anywhere

that once arrived like the fleets of the leaves like me

on the shores of this rootless tree

that doesn’t let go of things for its own survival

but lives in itself like a stranger come

to the opening gate of an endless arrival.

I let the birds come and go, the apples fall,

the stars build their webs in my crown,

and grow like a holy road I take as my own,

like geese passing overhead at night,

or the small birds that come to me like voices

a moment here then gone

who taught me that it’s always dawn

because there’s no end of the beginningless beginning

and it may be a green bough

or a dead branch

you hop up and down on like the hidden notes

of something you’re singing

on the rungs of these crazy snakes and ladders

that long like flesh and bone in the night

for things they can’t see anymore in the light,

or fish dying of thirst in a fathomless pond

or a fire putting itself out in its own eye

or someone dying and someone else asking why

and the whole of creation left alone at home

feeling it doesn’t belong under its own sky

like this Saturday morning rain in Perth

the day after your death

that falls like a loveletter too late upon the earth

or the harvest moon of a delinquent heart

above an untimely skeleton

that can’t decide whether it’s a tuning fork

or a witching wand

looking for answers like water

under every stone on the moon,

the way we cry for people we think are gone,

but green bough, dead branch, Luke, same song.

PATRICK WHITE