I CAN FEEL MY PHYSICAL ENERGIES TWEAKING THE WORDS

I CAN FEEL MY PHYSICAL ENERGIES TWEAKING THE WORDS

I can feel my physical energies tweaking the words

like birds and dragons waking up, my voice

a hive of dopey bees, my eyes, a hangover of stars.

My heart is syncopating its keyboard

to a flash of rhythm riffing like sunlight

on the waves of the lake exorcising its ghosts

as the waterbirds emerge out of the fog

like low flying lovers looking for their reflections

as a place to land. Have you ever noticed

when birds are swimming in a mirror

they always make a bow out of a fletched arrow

with an S curve in their necks as if

there were an unseen archer over the next hill,

target, arrow, bow and flightpath in a musical unison

of migrating violins from further up north

who stayed to winter here where it’s mild by comparison?

This is the magic, and the mystery, the exuberance

and the joy, the black ecstasy of the blood

deepening its own enlightenment shedding its cowls

for a carillon of bells that sound like hollyhocks

with something to celebrate, though it isn’t necessary

to know what it is. The fountains come and go

like dolphins coming up from the depths,

breaching the surface of life to breathe again.

The eclipses have come off like the hoods of falcons

I trained like words to sit on my wrist to show the doves

how to write a more intriguing loveletter

with a little blood on it like the seal of what you meant.

I set them free for good to write what they want.

My mind is trying to create a cosmos out of

an inchoate windfall of bliss that’s slowly

beginning to cover the planet in an atmosphere

that supports life symbiotically as if every note

of its resonating leitmotif had to be heard

like a hummingbird in a thematic context of larkspur.

I don’t need to understand myself. What fool

goes looking for the sun with a starmap?

I elaborate the light like an astrolabial star catcher

that doesn’t care where this is. I’m not

echo-sounding this radiant mantra of a shipwreck

for lost treasure I can haul up from the bottom

of a wishing well. I’m living the aftermath of a dream

that whispered the Pleiades into my ear last night

as if the night were pouring its heart out into a shell

the way every river is gathered up by the sea

like a suggestive line of poetry flowing

like serpent fire up the lunar thread of my spine.

My spirit’s mining diamonds in the eyes of shepherd moons.

I love to watch them thaw like tears in the heat of the heart

once it’s fired up like the urns of the ashes of the stars

in the furnace of a black hole glowing again like a halo

collaboratively shaped out of billions of transformations

going on under my eyelids like distant hills on the horizon.

My unattainable singularity is counterpointing the light

in a way that enhances it like neuronic roots of black matter.

This is the joy of a death in life experience

that doesn’t leave death on the outside looking in.

This is the rapture of life in the midst of death

waking up on both sides of the same threshold

like a bride being carried forth after she’s been carried away.

With every breath, I lift a veil, and millions of eyes are revealed

like the dew and the stars and the fireflies

that cling to me like a single blade of grass.

I am summoned like the fragrance of a black rose

to the strange beauty at a seance of the evanescence

like a childhood song it made up lightyears ago

full of the joy that ripens the sad apples of our sorrows

into a compassion for everything that must perish

to go on living in a universe that doesn’t forget a thing.

Where memories don’t grow old, and the prophecies

of our ancestral skulls are anticipating us

in the available dimensions of the future

wondering if we’ve changed much since

they first conceived of us arriving out of the blue

like the transmigration of souls in the bodies of Canada geese

rising awkwardly from the leftover harvest of cattle corn

brittle in the frosty moonlight of those

who are about to be born again like the Milky Way

shining like a patina of stars on its own ashes.

I carry on like the light on a long journey

exploring the history of the future like a nightwatchman

opening the gate of the lantern he’s just blown out

to trade his candle in for the dawn, releasing these words

I set free from the opening aviary of my voice like birds

life multiplies like my joy in being alive well beyond necessity.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEPER THAN A DREAM MY IMAGINATION HAS ALWAYS SEEN

DEEPER THAN A DREAM MY IMAGINATION HAS ALWAYS SEEN

Deeper than a dream my imagination has always seen

a pilgrimage of sacred clowns dancing against a background

of gathering storm clouds that seem to portend the end of things.

Wiser in their crazy wisdom than the insanity

of the irrational inhumans, braver than heroes

in the courage of their joy, their celebration

almost seems a protest against ineluctable fate,

but there’s a beautiful rapture in the sorrow that makes it art,

a subtle threnody in what they exalt without reservation,

gestures of a playful creativity more profound than doom.

There’s pink on the mountains of the clouds at sunset,

Naples yellow, pale tangerine, but offing to the left

the abyss of a threatening Prussian blue sweeping

like the cape of an infamous eclipse about to deliver

the coup de gras to the whole scene like the sacrificial bull

of the last moonrise trying to get up off its knees.

The grass is plump and damp green on a late summer day.

And there’s a girl with a hoop, not a halo, she’s dancing with

like tree rings jumping orbitals like ripples of rain

and she’s wearing a corny dress, but there’s a smile

on her face you’d think more of a wingspan

than an expression of ineffable bliss realizing

there was never anything more or less than this.

The whole procession is staggered along the ridge

of easy rolling hills like the longer wavelengths of time

that are going to get there just the same, but not in a hurry,

and I don’t have a clue what destination they have in mind

but I’ve always taken it as the sign of the liberated fact

they didn’t need one. No shrine waiting for them at the end.

But it doesn’t matter. The humanly divine is embodied

in the starmud of their own hearts, and it’s shining.

The apocalyptic millenarian imagination of North America

has always struck me as a kind of cosmic viciousness

that wants to call the fire down early to get even

with the people more inspired to love than they are

long before the sun has any notion of mythically inflating its lungs

with one last gasp of the earth’s evaporating atmosphere.

You ever wonder what a Puritan sees when he looks at the stars?

Meteor showers or too many flowers among the vegetables?

I’ve been qualified by love in no man’s land long enough

to wear bars like scars on my shoulder. And disappointment

never tires of telling me I’m ageing, and not to put

too much store in inspiration striking like lightning twice

in the same place on the far side of the lake

I swam across like a brain wave to get here.

Wasn’t it me who wrote life is a river with only one bank

and I’m not even standing on that? I don’t

underestimate the accuracy hidden under the deathmasks of despair

nor the translucency of hidden hopes disguised

by everyday human faces being swept out to sea

like eyelids of apple bloom that didn’t come to fruition.

I’ve bent my will like a ceremonial sword

no one else could ever pick up and use again

and offered it in tribute to the water sylphs

of my imagination like a blade of moonlight on a lake.

My insights have been disciplined in the black holes of my pain.

My whole soul’s been a dark monk in an observatory

on a cold mountaintop where I’ve lived with my solitude

cowled like an eclipse in the enormous silence of an abyss

radiant with stars as beguiling as the sky bound peers

of the earth born wildflowers in the valley down below.

Love can be a terrorist with a sense of compassion

or an angel with a flaming sword you mistook

for a spear of inexplicable ecstasy when you went looking

for someone to fill your hive with honey, but forgot

wasps don’t make honey, only the honey-bees do that.

So it’s tricky. Love isn’t the answer to everything.

Sometimes a little entomology goes a lot further.

Cocoons, chrysales, mustard seed sized eggs and trap door spiders.

Sometimes it’s wise to judge a book by its cover.

And maybe an urn is the inevitable end of the furnace of the heart

love is, and everyone is glutted by a bellyful of ashes,

but even a few chimney sparks of love are enough

to make the fire spread like a firestorm of stars

and deep underground, even in the most demonic, root-fires.

PATRICK WHITE

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

BURNING WORLD, TAKE ME

Burning world, take me, fold me in your flaming arms

and let me disappear into the unforgiving night.

Among these blind, here, in their black eggs,

eyeless birds who nest in their own ignorance,

I am the leper of light they drive out

with the stone of the moon, the wolf

with the mystic wound that will not heal until the last star

is born of the bleeding. Return me to the cold, brutal beauty

of your mineral wilderness, my bones on Venus

and my skull an abandoned planet circling the sun at midnight.

Let my eyes be the last of my tears to fall

and my blood be strewn like a gypsy scarf across the darkness.

Erase all trace of me as you do the path of the water-stars

who walk here among the dead like spirits from another world

intrigued by our passing. Pygmies in a circus,

cannibals and emperors all, leaping from thought to thought

rock to rock in the lifestream

to the applause of future funerals, o let them fade

like the idiot savants of last night’s dream, meaning nothing

but what they meant to themselves,

trying to jump their own distorted shadows.

What difference between the venom of the bee and its luminous honey

to these whose flaring in the vastness

was the kingdom of a match? At most

lightning on a water droplet shaken from a blade of grass.

Did they think the great fires of being flowed like blood

around their carbon hearts? Sweet world,

bestow your flowerless garden upon me and let me forget

the holy wars of their tiny gods against my solitude.

Didn’t they see, so full of themselves,

there was never any room in their arks and shrines and coffins

moored like lifeboats to the rotting dock

they built like a bridge to nowhere?

I never meant to be unkind or rise from the depths

in waves of light and blood that wiped them out

like the mythical monster of a shore-bound sailor

too far out deep down to be confirmed by their disbelief

or worse, their shallow faith. Leave them, undisturbed

to the shadows of things they trade in

like spiritual money. I wish them no worse, no better

than who they think they are, little prophets

inveighing against the purity of my absence.

The dark mirror is better, brighter, more abundant

than the poverty of their trembling reflections,

mere nothingness more tender than their lies.

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

Looking at the rain. Are you looking at the rain,

alone in an upstairs window of a small town

deserted except for the salt trucks sowing the road,

watching it freeze in the tarpits and stretch marks

of asphalt smeared by storefront colours

that try too hard like circuses and brothels?

And the people dreaming behind the makeshift veils

they can see out of into the dark, but no one ever in,

should the lights be on, and they’re not. Are you

embracing yourself like a stranger in your solitude

by acclamation, no one to challenge who you must be?

And the sky glowing as if there were a fire

in the distance, you cannot see beyond

the looming rooftops, subliminally infernal,

marginally dispersed auras of infra-red

that fell off the flat earth of a pre-mixed palette?

I imagine you keeping your pain to yourself

like the secret name of a god you disclose to no one

for fear of them having power over you.

I imagine you trying to embody the whole mystery

of life within yourself like the improbable avatar

of all that’s invisible within you like a ladder of thresholds

the light has yet to cross. Not a god or goddess

but a mystically specific human being who doubts

the divinity of her own uniqueness. Once for everything

means no two alike, but the air is saturate

with comparative metaphors in the absence of stars.

I imagine you remembering sporadic lovers

you were hurt by, children who abandoned you,

parents who tried but could never really understand.

Doors you slammed in anger as if you were

turning your back on yourself like a red sportscar

that kept breaking down by the side of the road.

And how you decided to go the rest of the way

like an indeterminate leaf on your own mindstream

once you decided you weren’t a map to anywhere

that wasn’t as evanescent as you were at cartography.

Three hours from dawn and you’re still a seance of one.

You summon lonely trains like mourners

hired for a funeral. Who’s dying? Whose

deathmask are you paying homage to

by obeying the protocols of artificial respect?

I can intuit the sundial and the sanctuary

of the walled garden your heart keeps trying

to bloom in like a poppy in winter but you neglect it

like a small fire that’s pleading with you to tend it

instead of letting it bleed out like a hare in the snow.

I want to console you. I want to undo the daisy chain

of razor wire you’ve wrapped yourself up in

like a gift to someone you think deserves it

as a mockery of everything you once cherished

but if I were to slowly emerge out of the void

into the room like an enchanted island you could be

the Circe of, you’d change like a chameleon on the spot.

You wouldn’t be yourself in the confines of your loneliness.

You’d keep chanting the prophylactic mantra

of a Greek chorus in a satyr play as if

you’d just seen a hungry ghost rise up,

a deux ex machina through the creaking floorboards:

I am not. I am not. I am not. When, of course, you are.

So let me ease your fear by appearing

like a star you can’t identify by its shining alone

through a clearing in the clouds at your window.

Let me empower you like a firefly

of the first magnitude, a mandalic insight

that inspires you, because you’re weary and bored

of your colouring books, into making up

an original constellation of your own

that doesn’t show up on anybody else’s starmaps

but vastly improves your disaffection

with the the outlook of the ashes of the zodiac

you keep in the urn of a see-through telescope

like so many burning bridges you’ve crossed

like an albatross with an arrow in its heart

arcing across the sky, martyred by a curse

on the long, cold, barren beach of your windowsill.

Be Circe awhile and throw your pearls like a full moon

before swine that used to be men you couldn’t turn to

for nautical advice when they were shipwrecked

on the same shore you walk in isolation now.

Believe in the power of your own madness

to work wondrous transformations at either end

of your modes of seeing that are the lore

of blind poets, and the legends of your shining

more creatively intriguing than the war stories of Helen.

If all is lost, you don’t need to compete

with winning anymore. Paris throws the apple away

and says to the three goddesses, you choose

among yourselves. This is not a creation myth.

PATRICK WHITE

WHITE NIGHT. UNHOLY SOLITUDE

WHITE NIGHT. UNHOLY SOLITUDE

White night. Unholy solitude. Big flakes

pillow on the windowsill. A pincer of dream anger

with its claw on my jugular like a clothes peg

I want to throw down at somebody’s feet

like an iron gauntlet just to watch the parasites squirm,

the hypocrites, the frauds, the uncrucial demeanors

of the literary slugs leaving slimey contrails

like snotty scars on the mirrors that hold us up to nature

and think we’re all soiled in the midst

of so much magnificence, by the trivia

that sticks to them like the garbage they’ve

picked up along the way rummaging through the refuse

of other people’s attempts to garden.

Too cold out for the gypsy moths to swarm the trees

in the mystical clouds of unknowing they make

careers out of, teaching what they’ve never tasted.

The Luna moth and her fire, the butterfly and her flower,

that I can abide up to a point, but self-appointed experts

on the malignancy of their own ignorance, it’s

everything I can do from burning down their house radioactively.

Time mellow me. Wisdom teach me to level off

at the speed of light so all these bugs can be frozen

in amber paperweights, toads snakestruck on their lily-pads,

when time stops and I can put the future behind me.

The snow ploughs snarl over the pavement.

I’ve got to get my mind on other things.

The majesty of angry lions is squandered on flies.

I’m not agrarian enough to want to be planting skulls

like crocuses in the killing fields. These demons

don’t know how to act my age. Don’t think

of Jesus when he lost it on the moneylenders.

Don’t think of the Zen masters who said

poor hole-dwelling devils. I know what

you’re making your living at. Then beat them

out of the zendo with their horse hair hossus.

I’m trying to live up to the best of my delusions

concerning spiritual imagination as a way of life being poetry

the way water is fish and the air a flurry of birds.

Whenever you see scales turning into feathers

you know there’s a snake nearby getting ready to fly.

Evolution has as active an imagination as I have.

And nobody, as Dogen Zenji said, likes a real dragon

but what’s that to the dragon compared to the effect

it’s going to have like two days of intense heat

at the end of May, on the tiny jawed blackflies

back-biting a flamethrower that just got woken up

from enlightenment in a bad mood on Okinawa?

God give me the patience to bear myself

like a tuning fork in a snakepit trying to establish

a little harmony among a lot of dissonant wavelengths

hissing in the background of the choir

like snowflakes on a furnace burning holy books

on the pyre of Savonarola at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

If Luther got to throw an inkwell at the Devil,

isn’t it only fair the Devil gets to throw one back

like a black hole at a lot of bad writing once and awhile

or even as a reasonable compromise between

taste and compassion or the truth and pollution,

a partial eclipse? The scariest thing in my existence,

a blank white page, the obstructionist angel in the way

that says, No pasaran, thou shalt not pass.

You just know you’re going to walk away like Jacob

with an iambic limp, and you’re never going to win

or pin that kind of intensity down, but this is the point,

you’re never going to walk away from the encounter weaker.

You can only lose to your own advantage.

And the bruises, the scars, the wounds that never heal

where your heart was pierced by a spear of bliss

you’re never going to get over, your bloodstream

efoliating like a rose in heat for the rest of your life,

that’s the kind of language you can be proud of,

those are the sacred syllables you can address the gods in

as if they spoke the same mother-tongue as you.

If you turn the light around, get yours eyes off

of whatever they’re glued to in front of you

like flypaper buzzing with bad genes helically twisting

on a snakeoil chromosome rising to the music of their flute,

uncharmed, to get their wings off the page.

I’ve got a message. The medium is the messenger.

Not the message. That’s just one petal of the whole flower.

A drop out, if you will, of everything that’s being said.

Seven waves of water don’t make a housewell or a Pierian spring.

Bright vacancy. Dark abundance. Listen to yourself

when the wind is cooling the white gold of the wheat down

like a loaf of bread cradled in a tea towel, when

you’re a widespread famine in a seven year long abyss.

Listen to yourself like an empty silo when the wind

is trying to play a tune like a drunk who remembers

something from his childhood, by tooting it out on the rim

of a hollow bottleneck. That’s a real mantra.

A true shibboleth. That will get Ali Baba and his forty thieves

into the cave quicker than you trying to pick the lock.

If the hucksters want to be tricksters or sacred clowns,

the ultimate angle, if you need one, is to be real,

be the thing itself as if it never existed before you.

That’s a kind of respect for yourself when you realize

nothing is confined by an identity that isn’t a good guess

or a pineal projection mythically inflated on space and time.

There’s more poetic potential in being absolutely nothing

but what you see before you as your own mind arrayed

than there is a muse in the actuality of what you’ve achieved.

All the haikus are pointing at their homelessness like autumn leaves.

The messenger is formless. With big ears.

He sings like three hands clapping in the dawn,

the wings of waterbirds getting off on their own applause

as if they didn’t need the approbation of anyone else

to do what comes most naturally to them, a native joy

like breathing and seeing and flying in a sky

their minds bent over them at birth

like the sky goddess, Nut, bridging heaven and earth.

Poetry isn’t made like an aqueduct. It’s exprerienced

like water being poured into its own absence

like a mindstream, not a waterclock, as a means

of giving time something to listen to at night

to remind it like a love song that its temporality is eternal.

Mystically specific. Blind, brilliant, divine

and infernal. Lightning signing the rain when all eyes

are upon it like a flash in the pan for a very few moments.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

The snow a silence whiter than last night

and the sky, a red violet. A mysterious rose.

As if the night were blushing at something said

that wasn’t meant to be disclosed.

I feel cramped without the stars, embedded

like a hibernating frog in my own starmud,

my bloodstream reconfigured as the thin thread

of a red alcoholic thermometer, though I don’t drink.

Nocturnal solitaries huddle their way through the night

like dark comets past the unwary mirrors

of the nightwatchmen working on their novels

as if nobody were watching. I people the abyss

with my life and let my mindstream decide

where it wants to wander through its own timelessness

as if the past, as well as any future I could imagine

could take the lead at anytime from compliance

with the present, and it wouldn’t make

the least bit of difference. Three waves

of the same oceanic awareness. Three talons

open like the triune esoteric crescents of the moon

and one hawk blooms like a poppy in the snow.

My imagination isn’t a cry I follow

deeper into the woods of a hidden mindscape

as if it were mapping my eyes like stars

it had never seen before and was wracking its brains

to come up with names that made it feel less homesick.

It is me. Like a nightbird is the child of the wind.

Like a song whose dark secret is a longing to live.

Like the heart of a stranger is the hearth of his homelessness.

I am the evanescent foundation stone of my own fire.

Like the moon, a lantern in the arms of my own journey.

I gather the fruit of a rootless tree and it tastes

like the voice of the sun and the moon waxing lyrical

as the water and light of the alpha and omega

of sacred syllables, with the third extreme

of the earth in between shining in the middle intensity

of the three wise men in Orion’s belt

just before the dawn pales the seeing-eye dog

of blind Osiris blazing like an underground root fire

set below the treeline of cedars ageing on the hills to the west.

I remember the lovers I carried both ways

across the thresholds of a burning house,

and what I’ve made of my sorrows are wildflowers

that bloom for a night in a garden that tends to itself.

If my children are lost to me as they are,

I don’t ask my imagination to explain why anymore.

I let it drink its fill of compassion from my heart

like a bottomless well deeper than the stars are high

and I leave my door ajar for the dead who still call me friend

to come in, whatever the hour, as often as I open it

to the apparitions of the living I greet like dream figures

who have just stepped into my intuitive vision

of not needing to wake them up until I do because

as I keep repeating like the riff of a mantra on a blue guitar,

mark one jewel like the third eye of Venus in the dawn

and they’re all marked with the same morning star.

I invite the darkness to enfold me within the pages

of its imageless book like the godhead of the great void

revealing a story that keeps growing in the telling of it

as the mindstream changes the tempo of its narrative theme

from a pulse, to the merest fragrance of a melody

expiring like the last breath on the deathbed of bird-bone flute.

I am all skulls. I am all shepherd moons. I am space

that exculpates gravity to bend and relent at a black mass.

I refuse to imprison my enlightenment in a church

and get by with finding my way by a candle

that casts as many shadows as it illuminates.

I put my hands up over my eyes like the wingspan

of an eclipse over a full moon, instead of folding them

like birds roosting in a dark wood, praying for light,

and the stars that fire the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

grow brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what’s can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE