IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

IS IT SUCH A LIGHT TRIGGER BETWEEN YOUR LIFE AND DEATH

Is it such a light trigger between your life and death

all you need do is squeeze the last crescent of the waning moon

with the merest of thoughts for it to go off? Done.

No more complication, at least, that you know of.

Or is this about crushing the rotten strawberry

at the heart of the vile world because

your mystic specifics keep being uprooted

from the ground of being like a unique weed

in a generalized garden where comas are preferred

like cultivated columbine to your kind of wild enlightenment?

I’m not going to talk to you like a piece

of fragile crystal, or a bull having a nervous breakdown

in a china shop, wondering if he should saw his horns off

to keep from doing any further damage to a chipped swan.

You want to let your hair down like the willow

of a chandelier in an ice storm, I don’t intend

to stand under it trying to hold you up like a mobile

of the solar system losing its grip on time and space.

Not because I don’t care. Not because

I’m an elder shaman of the sixties who had

a happier time of it than you. I didn’t,

though I wish you’d been there to have

your most hallucinogenic delusions understand that.

I won’t chrome the bumpers you get hit by in life

or buff the blood off to prove you can make

a meteoric success of yourself if you know

how to spin the first impact it made upon you.

Some things leave you lying in the gutter

like a crumpled doll or the late Triassic.

Life’s a risk. Death’s a risk. Avoiding either

is, too. I take one look at you in your plaid tan

and I see a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with a Sunni body

and a Shia soul trying to indoctrinate a day care center

into infantile acts of precocious terrorism.

You’re that old woman Muhammad who loved

women, perfume and prayer, warned

everybody about looking ahead to these end times,

who took a strong rope, like a spinal cord,

and unwound it into a million weak threads

until she found the silken trophy line of a spider

at its loom, she could hang herself with

like an anchor with no sense of buoyancy

or the plumb bob of a corpse fathoming her own depths.

Who taught you to play so seriously you

closed the theatres and scourged the brothels

with razorwire in a danse macabre of flagellants?

When you turn that deathmask over like the carapace

of the world turtle, whose face is it you’re trying to save

by recasting it as a cement portrait of a mime?

You’d look better painting it in moonlight on water.

The palette of your multi-coloured hair, a lure

on a fishing hook that throws back more

of what it catches than it keeps. Just for the fun of it,

exalting in the power of your magical absurdity

to enhance your charms like the spiritual eclipse

of a moonrise smearing Gothic mascara on your eyelids.

Meaningless, isn’t it? Are you devastated

by the stars’ sense of timing that they go on shining

like idiots with grins on their faces while you’re

burning black holes in your heart with a cigarette heater?

Clarity’s an art, not a failure of imagination.

There isn’t a star in the sky that doesn’t know the dark.

You just haven’t grown the eyes for it yet

or learned to turn the light around fast enough

to catch a glimpse of yourself making a death wish

on a falling star that might shock the disinterested fireflies

into realizing some constellations outside the zodiac

need more than fifteen degrees of separation

to stay on the bright side of things like a Tarot pack

with a positive attitude that lies every chance it gets

about the truth of things as they are at the expense

of living a two-eyed life without a prayer wheel in training

for balance. Poor planet. No moons. No fossils

in that Burgess Shale of asteroids you surround yourself with

ready to throw the first stone at yourself like a face

in the mirror of an orbiting telescope you can’t

clearly identify with unless it’s in transit by contrast.

Living isn’t a consolation for getting along without it.

And death isn’t a door prize a starting pistol

hands out at the gate for being the one millionth horse

to overthrow its rider and get out of the blocks way too late

to bet on finishing anything ahead of the pack.

Snake-eyes, baby, then seven come eleven. Things

happen in tandem like binary stars everytime

you throw the dice even in a random universe

that doesn’t enjoy listening to its own advice

it’s important to remember when you’re sinking like this

into one of those tarpits you bleed like black pearls

on a rosary of miscarriages without a new moonrise

heaven’s got an air force, but not much of a navy.

The abyss is full of elemental hydrogen dirigibles

that put their fires out like submersibles in the waters of life.

One torch up. One torch down. Like the dadaphors

of ancient Rome trying to synchronize the hinges of the New Year

like lapwings to the flight plans of imperial eagles.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

What I have become and did not intend.

Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?

Glum when I should be shining, bright

when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints

my constellations were. Still, I worked like a firefly

with the shadows of the insights I had to go by.

Some nights there’s not a dot of Braille

on a blind starmap eyeless in the east.

I try to stare these ice-age windows into thawing

in the heat of my vision but only an eddy of air

has been weeping along with the lament of my candle

like a stray thread unravelling the atmosphere,

a ghost at the loom of a flying carpet

that never got off the ground. Obviously, down,

I’m rooted like a flower in an urn of starmud.

I don’t fight the shadows. I don’t exalt the light.

I don’t try to embroider my death shroud

with finely stitched vetch. I don’t white wash

my nightmares with the upbeat needlepoint

of sweeter dreams than my prophetic skull can summon.

I offer my absence entire to the enlargement of a space

where the stars are growing further apart

and time is slowly running out of lovers and friends.

I don’t compare my ashes to the fires I could have been.

I don’t ask the lamps of my genies to preside

at the death of dragons. I don’t bear false witness

staring into the firepits of their eyes like niches

in a skull that can see better in the dark than I can

at the end of their wicks like spinal cords tethered to a flame,

something eternal that proved transitory as rain.

I have a seasonal mind. I take the weather as it comes.

Just past the winter solstice now, the days are getting longer.

Last night Jupiter and the full moon so clear

it cut my eyes like the facets of a jewel

in the abyss of a mystery that called out to my soul

with a longing that’s almost more than I can bear to hear

its voice is so impersonal, I’m alienated from the intimacy

of a solitude where I used to entertain a self

with how dazzling everything is when there’s nothing of value

to hang on to. Not an I. Not a They. Not a You.

I can swim like the comet of a Siamese fighting fish

in a cloven hoofprint of rain forever but heave myself

up over the gunwales of an empty lifeboat in any attempt

to save myself from drifting alone in the interminable depths

of another graveyard shift on an infinite sea of awareness,

and I drown like the moon in the undertow

of my own shadows looking for where I’ve gone.

I derive a strange joy from the pain I suffer through in life

like a risk I shouldn’t have taken, but did, and rejoice

in the counter-intuitive act of macrocosmic emotions

that my laughter is a mountain that can sing almost

as deeply as the bird drenched voices in the valleys of my sorrow.

The dead branch where the rivers used to meet

might break under the weight of my sacred song

but I’m not out witching for wishing wells

from the blisters of the stars on my lips to atone

for having tasted the light for myself to know

if it were sweet or acrid. Merely illuminating

or more convincingly fruitive. Bright vacancy

or dark abundance, or a dynamic equilibrium of both

for those of you still foolish enough to conceive

of yourselves as pilgrims on a middle way

mapped out by lightning no one’s ever set foot upon,

the journey’s that abrupt. A Milky Way of fireflies

signalling like ships far out at sea like the spiritual life

of shore-huggers burning their dead on driftwood pyres

that washed up onto the beach. The fire god

comes looking for fire and there’s isn’t a star

that’s out of reach. Make your oblations of ashes and smoke

and snakes will climb the burning fire ladders to heaven

like lunar spinal cords long before the elect of your matchbook

fake their way out of hell. Their candles snuffed by their bells.

Brutal clarities. Homeless thresholds. Unhinged gates

hanging on like the broken wing of a prayer

nobody bothers to close or open anymore

like the last exit out of the labyrinth of yourself

before you enter the starfields like an eye in the dark

to give the light something to focus on

like an over-exuberant loveletter from the wildflowers

wondering why they haven’t heard from you in lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE  

YOU'VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

YOU’VE BEEN GONE SUCH A LONG TIME

You’ve been gone such a long time.

Do the dead share their absence

with the hearts of those who miss them

or is the scope of the moon diminished

by its lack of a credible atmosphere?

After the flood, I believed in the covenant

the rainbows made with the disquieting day,

but late at night among the moondogs

I heard them weeping like watercolours

left out in the rain that washes their promises away

like false dawns in the third eye of the sea.

Where did you go? And why? Were you

a failure that went unnoticed? Did I let you down

in some unforgivable way and this is how

I pay by having to grow galactic to embrace you,

to close the abyss between us with oceanic forays

into time and space to say I’m sorry when

I feel you near, if I harmed you in any way

I wasn’t aware of, though never out of a lack of love?

Night after night, my heart drifts like a lifeboat

lowered from the moonset in the west

to look for you without a starmap to anywhere

only to be washed up on shore in the morning

as empty as I left. My waterclocks trying

to turn back time like a widow walk

around a lighthouse with no habitable planets.

It’s not the light of candles that I follow

it’s the wend of the smoke when they go out

that reveals the paths of the dead unravelling

like a road of ghosts dispersed among the stars.

My heart’s become a bone-box of your eyes,

your lips, your hair, your fingertips,

the nocturnal fragrance of the orchid of your sex.

I carry the ashes of your shining in a medicine-bag

around my neck in the indefensibly

dangerous human hope that one night

you’ll be attracted back to the relics you left behind

in a kind of sympathetic magic with the blind

so they might see you again, one last time

just to know that you’re ok with your disappearance

like a sundial at noon overwhelmed by its shadows

boarding the flowers up like coffins in a total eclipse.

It’s white outside right now. No topography to the snow.

Silt of the moon. A photographic positive

of the oblivion I don’t imagine you inhabit anymore

now that you’ve crossed the burning bridge

of your last threshold to make an indwelling

of the black hole you’ve left in so many galactic hearts

they’re wheeling like Sufis seeking annihilation

among the dust devils that arise at their heels

like the oldest messengers of the stars

to the mud we’re made of, some, clay bricks in a wall.

Some, dry creekbeds trying to decipher

their own crackling like pictographs

on the shattered ostrakons of a cosmic eggshell

someone got out of like the canary of a buried miner

to see how big the sky was when no one else was looking.

Is it bigger than pain? Is it the freedom of the forsaken?

Does it advance the cause of life to dance

even when you’re weeping over a purple passage

in a suicide note that was meant for your eyes only?

Can you see your reflection on the back of a mirror,

or is it enough that we abuse our tears for that,

lightyear after lightyear, trying to turn them inside out

as if the stars were always on the other side

of where we were for the night, looking out at the snow

making it all seem so irrevocably easy to let go

when you’re staring through an expressionless window

weary of trying to second guess the long view

of what you’ve had to live your way through anymore,

your grief a frozen nightbird in an aviary of razor-wire

entangling your heart in the strings of a harp

looping like the helical orbits of your retrograde descents

into Orphic modes of empty-handed, esoteric thought,

regardless of whether things eventually

come clear of their own spontaneous accord or not.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEAR I HAVEN'T GOT THE VOICE TO SPEAK TO YOU

I FEAR I HAVEN’T GOT THE VOICE TO SPEAK TO YOU

I fear I haven’t got the voice to speak to you

as gently as I would. Just a whisper shy of silence.

A star in the dusk of an oncoming nightfall.

I want to suggest an arcana of secrets to you about

the wisdom of life and love you weep for now

like a bruised apple on the ground that yesterday

smothered in bridal apple bloom. Your solitude

and the sorrow of that lunar wound that encumbers

your heart like a bell you keep pouring your life out of

as if it were bad wine, makes you a sacred grove

not any crow on the wing can roost in with impunity.

I’m a shipwrecked sailor and I’ve got the scars

of the moon to prove it. My arm’s been replaced

by the talons of a grappling hook, and the white whale

of the moon mourns for a lost daughter like a harpoon

that triggers a thorn of sorrows in the rose of my heart.

I know the taboo that surrounds a young woman

walking like the moon on the sea in an atmosphere

that’s never going to clear like fog from an ocean of shadows

lashing her heart like breakers of grief and confusion.

Presuming upon nothing is the fairest form of exchange.

Don’t raise me up from the bottom, and I won’t ask you

to get into the lifeboat. I don’t burn my tongue on the stars

as readily as I once did, and I’m not saying

that I’m not as susceptible to an injured lamia

with a snakeskin around her waist, drakaina Sybaris,

as I’ve always been, or I haven’t learned how to milk

one fang of a crescent for the sake of the antidote in the other,

that’s how many times I’ve been bitten. Slow

but thorough, I suppose. It’s been transformative.

And I know it’s weird encountering me way out here

in this abyss where even the most severely abandoned

can’t remember whether they’re exiles or not, but

I was summoned by that seance of razorblades

you’re trying to thresh the starfields with hoping

if you cut deep enough you might uncover a hidden harvest.

If you don’t act like a sparrow with a broken wing

gleaning seeds like the lockets of leftover gardens

I won’t speak to you like a scarecrow trussed up

for the occasion like a hobo that isn’t going anywhere

in a dead man’s suit. Abyss to abyss, I address you

with the greatest tenderness for what you’re suffering through.

Time isn’t going to heal anything. You just learn

to flow around it like a skull in the heartstream

like the beginning of a bridge you’ll cobble

like a hydra-headed lover in the course of time

trying to nurse your absence on the dark side of the moon.

Time isn’t hiding daggers like assassins in the shadows

of the sundials so there’s no need to fence with your paranoia

out of fear the same thing’s going to happen all over again,

because it doesn’t, if you don’t let your pain lose its nerve.

You can make a pearl out of the dirt that’s been heaped

on your moonrise like the luster of a black swan

out on the lake alone like the reflection of a new moon

or you can cover the orbiting telescope of your third eye

in the eyepatch of an eclipse like a falcon in an executioner’s hood

that can taste the blood of the dove like a rose torn on its own thorns.

I suggest you learn to befriend your solitude

so you’ll never be alone again without someone to talk to

like an intimate familiar that won’t lie to you

about the loss of your shepherd moons like beads

on a broken rosary of Canada geese bearing your dead away

like lambs that lay down with a mountain lion without a truce.

Those moments of bliss you experienced have not gone amiss.

They’re still shining like first magnitude starmaps to the past

as they were then, and as they always will be, indelibly

as the blue fireflies in the Pleiades that are as radiant tonight

through the keyhole of your emotional cloud cover

as they were when you left the door wide open to the sky.

Though your lover become anonymous as a defaced idol

whose magic wasn’t a peer of yours, the spell you cast

over each other like the dream-catching fishing nets

of the vernal equinox, are not cast out

by the meteoric ostrakons of the autumnal Leonids

trying to break the light barrier of their radiants

by throwing the first stone into a diaspora of shattered mirrors.

Some dreams disappear like the smoke of distant fires

or ghosts lifting off a lake like a prequel to the morning

and others cling to you for the rest of your life

as if you’re skin had been touched by the moonlight

in such a way your nakedness was robed

in the subtle weave of a silver raiment undulating

like lunacy and enlightenment on the waves

of an oceanic awareness of how far from shore you are.

You don’t need to hire a troupe of foghorns and lighthouses

to act as professional mourners and warners

not to ever give your heart away like salvage to the sea again.

And I won’t say you’re not the first mermaid

to get washed off the rocks she was singing on

by a passing tidal wave that deepened the lyrics of her song

and smashed her lyre like a wishbone that had lost its charm

on the lunar coral reefs she keel-hauled her heart on

like the maiden head on the dolphin prow of a damaged schooner.

Pain is a lot more mystically unique than that.

It’s a snowflake on a furnace that doesn’t repeat itself.

It doesn’t happen to you in quite the same way

it does to everyone else, or to each of them separately

like a river breaking into a million water droplets as it plunges

over the precipice of some unknown abyss within itself.

Separation, too, is a means of sustaining the delusory unison

of the discrete continuum we apply like screening myths

to the discontinuous narrative themes of our lives

as if we needed a stronger rope than our umbilical cords

to moor ourselves like barnacles to an avalanche of moon rocks.

I apply my words like a poultice of lunar herbs to your heart

to draw the possibility of infection out like a flute

the toxic arrowheads fletched with pentatonic scales

in the snakepits of a tone-deaf snake-charmer

that approached you like a young Medusa, long before

your eyes began to stare at the moon like a cold stone.

I come before the oracle, not in her crone phase,

but as a beautiful young woman I ask to prophecy

without the usual ambivalence, what walls she can hide behind

by launching her sorrows like empty coffins in the rain

she inaugurates by breaking Molotov cocktails of champagne

across the bleeding edge of her bow in drydock on the moon.

You, who are the shape of the universe. You,

who are the black madonna of the Merovingian Aquitaine.

You who fletch the arrow of wheat in the hand of the Virgin

with feathers of grain within the wingspan of the golden scythe

of the waxing crescent of the moon. Your longing

the muse of an empty silo. You, the creatrix of poems

that fulfil your deepest desire to be known like a secret

unto yourself like a messenger alone with her medium.

A man might offer you his hand as the measure of all things,

but how many lightyears have your fires burned

in the eyes of the Queen of Heaven with her gaze fixed

like a star on the palm of a sailor to keep him from drowning?

The one who wears the lifemask hurts the worst, it’s true.

The generalities of victory are chaff compared

to the mystic specifics of the lavish jewels that are uncovered

by the wind blowing away the ashes of the bed clothes

that once covered you in flames like a hot-blooded gust of poppies.

Queen Cassiopeia’s throne abdicated her arrogance and things

went circumpolar ever after like a jinx wheel of lapwings.

May I remind you, in a great silence worthy of a devoted heart,

you are a child of Isis, not one of her sacred whores,

however much reverence they accord her under as many names,

the stars flow in your blood as lucidly as they do in hers.

And there’s no mirror of tears in your ancestry that could ever

put them out like fire on the water shadow dancing with the stars

in the eye of a mystery that disarms everyone

with the unspeakable beauty of their enlightened scars

looking upon the sorrows in the face of someone like you

and opening their eyes to the real flesh and blood

behind the carrara marble you’re turning into

like the Pieta of their own souls forsaken like corpses

in their laps like wounded voodoo dolls they can’t

lift the curse from until you return to the living

like the black sail of a funereal moonboat in mourning

sidereally surrendering to the tidal ebb and flow

like the red algae of your own concupiscent renewal

washing you up like a galactic starfish

on the gleaming beaches of a biophosphorescent Milky Way

shining by its own light to illuminate every step you take

like the footprints of a young, prodigal goddess

returning from a long starwalk of celestial heartache.

PATRICK WHITE

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