SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

SUPERSYMMETRICAL FLUCTUATIONS IN MY GOD PARTICLE FIELD

Supersymmetrical fluctuations in my God particle field

are oxymoronically balancing my asymmetrical

quantum mechanical relationship between matter

and antimatter into sacred syllables of sibilant sparticles

so I can go on living substantively losing my balance

by creatively annihilating myself against a background

of perfect harmony. Is it love? Is it poetry? Is it

the amorphous music of becoming someone mystically specific

with mass throwing its weight on the side of my humanity

by loading the dice with one eye more than the perfection

of my non-existence knows what to do with,

or is everybody playing the part of an extra in their own life?

Languid apples of knowledge dancing naked

to the wavelengths of snakes playing moonlight sonatas

on the plectra of their pentatonic scales as if my photons and photinos

were all blissed out by Liszt. It’s as hard listening to a painting

that doesn’t know how to sing, as it is to see

how an omniscient secret could hide from itself

until it wished to be known. But as every dragon intuits

it’s not an elixir if you’ve got a formula for it,

and when the universe wants to speak if it isn’t

talking to itself in its sleep, or trying to come up

with a poem or an equation to fit all occasions

like a unified field theory with a burning bush

for a voice box addressing an indentured prophet

in a desert gully, pleading his brother’s superior eloquence,

it’s mourning the ashes of books that were burnt at the stake

for interrupting the silence. It’s harder to break the rules

after you’re dead than it is to discipline your disobedience

to the greater challenges of rising from Pandora’s box

to the greater miscreance of not surrendering

your insights into life like real stars refusing

to give up shining for the sake of a false dawn

the roosters and the wildflowers aren’t paying any attention to.

The flower bows to the butterfly. The shadow

enshrines the sundial and the star reveres the eye

as a child of its own. Nothing could be clearer than that.

The opposite of mindlessness isn’t the death of intelligence.

And the complement to love has never been hate.

Hate wastes too much energy underwhelming

its own inspirations like a pornographer

with a home movie camera, starring himself.

A swerve of the God particle and love

one in seven times has no opposite to collide with

just to keep a preponderance of creativity in the world.

And the rest is just nemetic lust out for a good time.

Everytime you whine for a muse to help you celebrate

this little potsherd of eternity that keeps turning thumbs down

like an ostrakon at your exile, you shame the Big Bang

into believing that she wasn’t muse enough to keep you occupied

over the last 13.5 billion lightyears of your lifespan.

But I would tender, respectfully, of course, it’s not the world

but you that have lost your charisma. Your shabby sense of wonder

is wasted on a face like that, and your tongue talks

like an old shoe that’s never wandered very far from home.

Enlarge yourself like a plenipotentiary paradigm

your children will be able to look up to like a constellation

that refused to stay within bounds but coloured outside

its fifteen degrees of separation in a sexigesimal zodiac.

Reverse the spin on your mirrors once and awhile

and take a good look at yourself on the inside as if

you weren’t trying to build an empire founded upon

the quicksand of somebody’s else’s miracles. Who doesn’t

love dancing with the Persian silks of the aurora borealis

their flesh shapeshifting like lamias and snakes under their veils,

cyanotically blue moodrings turning the pallor of death

into the irises of a chameleon that’s learned how to paint

a supernaturally toned oil of whatever comes before it?

Do you see how enlightening it is to turn

the high-livers on the catwalks out in the street in homespun?

Get back to the the roots of things like the radical

you’ve always told yourself you were from the late sixties on?

If you’re not worthy of the madness, how can you reasonably

expect to live up to being sane? Nothing worse

than a careerist with the ambitions

of a prophetic skull in an asylum

trying to listen in on cosmic office gossip

like the afterbirth in the background hiss of the universe.

Come withering, come fire, come hungry flames of desire

that will apocalyptically transmogrify your limbs into a great forest

consumed by lightning into a flash of insight

that knows enough about annihilation not to light

a match in a black hole that’s teaching you how to see in the dark,

or, more recuperatively creative, resilvering,

as the progenitive dew of the moon was once reputed to do,

or moonlight on the Byzantine leaves of the metallic Russian olives,

parabolic mirrors with an aquiline view of the stars.

Get ready for this. It’s approaching as if it were already

behind you like the light you see from Al Tair tonight

is merely the shadow of what it’s becoming without you

knowing anything about it like a surprise birthday party

that doesn’t leave your tears singing in the rain among

the myth floods of Babylon crying out like uterine waters

breaking all around you for arks to lullaby your cradles

of civilization on a Turkish mountaintop that’s about

to put its forehead to the ground in an avalanche

of asteroids and shepherd moons surrendering

to their foundation stones like an unmastered ship

going down in its oceanic awareness of the Pleiades,

or a humbled man, who realizes belatedly,

at the drop of a heart, the mermaids were always

singing to him as if he could swim without taking lessons.

PATRICK WHITE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

SET UP FOR THE NIGHT, THE CANDLE IN ITS NICHE

Set up for the night, the candle in its niche,

Jupiter a long way from the moon by now,

cat and goldfish fed, my mind never is

but my heart seems to be in the right place,

smokes, coffee, heat, a loaf of whole wheat bread,

not quite Omar Khayyam, a jug of wine, and Thou,

but the bough is on the fire and I’ve got the Pleiades

to make me feel like a sexy astronomer

if the life mask I’m wearing isn’t convincing enough.

The moon’s off aloofly waning below the horizon.

There’s a commotion of ghosts below my apartment window

and the furnace is cracking its knuckles as if

it were getting ready for a fight. And I want to write

from the least expected quarter when you least expect it

in a space where my heart isn’t just another synonym for solitude.

Explore my mind in its omniabsence by handing out

free telescopes to the fireflies and asking them if they can see

two stars over at eleven o clock from the dim one,

the same thing I’m looking at. I want to

investigate the morphology of knowledge forms

among the mad, wholly absorbed, nothing left out, by my work.

That’s what I call it for the want of a better word

but most of the time it’s a kind of dangerous fun

that keeps me warily engaged on full alert

listening to a voice singing in a lighthouse

on the coast of the moon that laughs

nervously like a lifeboat at the weather.

Or Shelley in the Gulf of Leghorn. If I didn’t say anything

how could the silence know how beautiful it is

to experience the world as an aimless, drifting intelligence

at ease with itself as it toys lightly with elegant distinctions

that burn like paper boats origamied out of Zen poems

that come and go as they please like the moon in the window?

True excellence doesn’t rule like an aristocracy.

There are too many wonders in the world to be distracted by.

And there’s an hour. It doesn’t come often. But it never

fails to return. One disquietingly beautiful daughter of time,

lying down in the cool summer grass looking up at the stars

as if her whole body were vivid with light

as she savoured the ages that went into every single flash

of the beauty of her brevity. Firefly eyes in a lightning storm.

You can lie down nameless with her like a secret syllable

and speak in a voice older than words about things

you both know there are no answers to, and why

the shared sadness grows more beautiful the less it clings

to the lucid delusions we precariously cherish the most.

You can rendezvous with her at zenith on the hyperbolic arc

of a burning bridge or a comet that’s only going to come once

and your detachment’s a deeper intimacy

than anything you’re ever going to experience

with anyone in life ever again however hard you try

to rinse the ashes of the falling stars out of your hair for good.

On a cold night like this, even an eclipse gets creative

and she’s the crow silhouetted by a moon blossom

rising in the west of a dead branch still lamenting

the loss of its songbird as she leans down

low on the green bough of the east and suggests

maybe it’s time to get over your grief by learning

to sing for yourself. It might feel like confusion at first.

But at heart it’s an infusion of growth and compassion.

All relationships with a muse are illicit. Like blue moons

it’s not good to conduct business under. So you don’t.

And mundanity’s at a premium only a mystic could ill-afford.

It’s like taking the future for a test-drive before

the vehicle’s on the market. And at daybreak,

whether you look upon it as an entrance or an exit,

by example, living it, it’s much like mentoring a star

that always woke up too late to greet its own light

how to say farewell in the dawn and really mean it.

PATRICK WHITE

IF IT'S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN'T GOT A HISTORY

IF IT’S A TRUE RELIGION, IT HASN’T GOT A HISTORY

If it’s a true religion, it hasn’t got a history, it’s wholly

of the moment. No time for a teacher.

No martyrs, saints, apostates or heretics.

No Summa Theologica trying to proof-read the spirit.

Like a star, it’s always ahead of the light

it lavished on yesterday. It advances into the dark

like the root of a flower without nightvision.

The moment you say anything about it

you’ve flawed its silence with a lie. Like

the light of the star in its eye on a long road

after midnight, you can’t fly toward it,

you can’t run away. Whatever it shines upon

is true north, and the wind is its only direction of prayer.

Make a shrine of it, and it’s empty. Deny it

and it returns your voice like a bird in a valley

to a bough that lets you overhear yourself.

The world is construed from the absence of a self

like a mirage on the moon that doesn’t affect the tides.

If you want to paint the worlds the way the mind does

lay your brush aside, and watch what unfolds.

Show me a leaf that isn’t a masterstroke of your seeing.

Show me a starmap that isn’t a mindscape of your being.

Show me a book that isn’t trying to decipher the silence

as if you were written in code to disguise

the enigma of your unlocatable presence everywhere

without a sign of yourself that depends upon your magic markers.

The moment you say it is, this is it, and mistake it

for the foundation stone of a nacreous paradigm

for the new moon beading rosaries of black pearls

like the bright beginnings of a born again eclipse

you’re anointing quicksand with a desert of holy oil

and all the pyramids you took to heart, start to thaw

like the eternal recurrence of an hourglass that lost track

of history when it abandoned its perspective

for a telescope among the stars, no three alarm fires

to rush off to like a volunteer waterclock in scuba gear.

If you want to grasp becoming stop trying

to take a hold of it like like a hydra-headed snake

shapeshifting in the noose of a solitary question.

Stand away, let it go, let it flow like the wavelength

of a black river through the undergrowth of your sacred woods.

And don’t throw koans at it in the last moments

as it disappears, if you meditate in a glass zendo.

Every accusation is a confession and the karma’s

meted out in full immediately as your feathers

revert to scales, and opposites are conjoined

like dragons in cosmic eggs with wings

on both sides of their extremes such that

as it is above so it is below, a matter of starmud.

The earth in harmony with the light that shines upon it.

And you who are lost upon the nightseas of your own awareness,

whatever terrors of the deep sleep under your lifeboats

dreaming of bobbing their way to rescue

like prophetic skulls washed up on an insular beach

like green Japanese fishing floats picked like early grapes

from the vines of the nets your dolphins are tangled in,

what is there to fear from your own weather

that isn’t a reflection of the kind of love life

you’re deriving from an affair with oceanic notions

of keeping aviaries of kingfishers to quell the commotion

of the storms that pass through your life roiling

your thought waves with turbulent reflections

on the surface of your awareness rooted in the music

where fumaroles toot on the bottom of the sea

like the stops of a flute playing the dangerous lyrics of life

in different keys, making them up on the fly?

In an interpendent universe whatever your eye falls upon,

stars above, dragons below, versatile enough to reverse

the telescopic spin of your perspective of what’s high

and what’s low, anything you see is the mother of the matrix

even when you turn the light on yourself to discover

there’s no one there, just this creative absence, this

dark abundance that’s goddess enough to fill her bright vacancy

with worlds within worlds that unveil her immediate intimacy

as if she were telling the truth to herself like a secret that didn’t exist.

PATRICK WHITE  

WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

Watching mirrors on a catwalk

but none of them interest me.

Disembodied as a play without a stage

it takes time to know where to stand.

I take my heavy winter boots off

like two starless nights. The smoke

is wiser than the candle, but who cares?

Looking for the pure space, the little white square

the shrink told me she discovered

at the centre of my heart like an albino sunspot

but no one was there. Excruciating solitude.

Times, I swear, even death feels lonely.

Comes from looking at too many stars.

Looking for an intimacy so deep within the abyss

it turns me inside out like the eyelids of an orange

without wedging the full moon apart into segments.

The peers of my high school annual predicted

I was mostly likely to become a mad teacher,

a mad scientist, a mad poet, mad. Four careers

and I’m retroactively mastering the last.

It’s haunted me like the Sibyl of Cumae for lightyears.

I thought if I pushed the envelope

people would receive it as a kind of loveletter.

Peace in your soul you can always

live it like a dream when the craziness

gets out of hand but I was a firestorm

of sidereal insights in a lighthouse

built like an obelisk on lunar quicksand.

Sometimes you’re better off at sea

than landing with high hopes for your lifeboats

on some coasts. Wasn’t sure if mine were among them,

but why take a chance? I warned people away from me.

There were happier islands you could be washed up on.

Strange the life I’ve been living like a quixotic crusade

against all ideas and forms of art that lack compassion,

breaking up continents like loaves of bread

for the ugly ducklings and the mysterious black swans

that move through the water like the reflections

of total eclipses, just to diversify the species of my solitude.

Poetry has made a thematic habit of my discontinuity.

At the top of every totem pole I’ve ever carved

out of the forests of Vancouver Island I was raised in,

there’s a hidden nightbird with its wings folded

like a black dove perched on the axis mundi of my serpent fire.

The songs I sing can’t be rehearsed by a choir.

Spontaneity keeps me from looking like a liar

in the eyes of the stars when they overhear me talking to myself.

Crazy wisdom. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

You’ve got to keep saying yes, yes, yes, to the light,

to the dark, to life, to love, to solitude, grief, despair

and all their attendant transformations if you want to stay sincere.

Visions of life. The twenty seven year old hooker

so strung out on cocaine in the bank robber’s house

where there wasn’t so much as a spoon or a fork or a plate,

she was a black, aniconic madonna of pain,

the paint rag of a thousand fantasies from fairy dust

to snakepits, none of them her own.

The coke white blankness of a bright vacancy

enslaving her dark abundance like shadows at noon.

The crone of her infancy, a withered spring.

I’ve been holding back my tears like an ice-age ever since.

Life can be as cold as an exacto knife as often

as it lets you feel its wisdom ripening like an apple

in the sunset just as the air is beginning to cool off

from labouring so intensely all day at minding flowers and the stars,

by God, the stars are distilled from a thousand lovers’ eyes.

The syrinx selects its own song when nobody’s using it.

And I’d rather fail, throwing my voice like a sparrow

against a windowpane keeping me from the sky

until it breaks and I’m grounded at the roots

of the prima donnas of the cosmos in their ballet slippers

dancing on the wind. Say it all in one big-hearted metaphor

like the roar of a dragon with a compassionate heart,

so that every poem I ever wrote was a fleet of lifeboats

flying the skull and crossbones like a shepherd of wolves

that knew how to howl at the moon like smoke from a distant fire

and I was poet enough to know that madness

is just another form of prayer. Be that. Without compromise.

Rather than disrespect my life and art by taking notes.

If you’re making a gift of a gift don’t call it a sacrifice.

Still within you, I swear, my gun-shy brother,

my reticent sister, despite all your wary attempts

to the contrary, there resides a jewel,

and you can call me a fool if you want,

a star sapphire, let’s say, because that’s my birth stone

and I had one once that was given to me by a lover,

a radiance like white phosphorus starclusters

that burns through everything from children’s skin

to the comets of kelp rinsing their hair in the tide

as they root their eyes in starmud like black ribbons

undone on a gift of life, or streamers on a girl’s first bike.

This jewel cuts through the void like a scalpel of starlight.

It’s an intimacy with your own awareness that leaves

everybody standing at the gate a stranger to themselves.

This is that homespun genius that makes its own clothes

like the moon to cover its nakedness in raiments of light

and takes in everybody under the cloak of its eclipse

like the leather yurt of a dragon giving shelter to birds

that are afraid of the lightning under its fireproof wings.

This is the labour of a lifetime spent on the flash of a firefly.

This is the lantern you’ve carried before you for lightyears

like a nightwatchman into the dark to see if there was

anyone else there who was as scared as you were to find out.

This is the work that taught you to be just as fulfilled

by what you failed at as you were empty

when they handed you a fictitious award.

And you knew immediately what a long way back it was

to the anonymous sixties when you were insignificant enough

to get some real work done and you weren’t famous

for the way you worship everything under the sun.

The uniqueness of your eyes might evaporate

like snowflakes of dry ice with the fragrance

of cornflowers tossed into a grave like the sad, longing

in the afterthoughts of a Neanderthal mother,

but your seeing, not what your looking at,

is as ageless and unperishing in its formlessness as ever.

And though you might have changed the covers

from pulp to hardback sometime in the early Cambrian,

none of your emotions and many yet to come

that have been left unthumbed like the novels of friends,

have grown any older under the carapaces

of your prophetic skulls trying to balance

the lunacy of a spare harvest moon on your head

while you’re crossing an exhausted suspension bridge.

Like I said, I don’t need to make a choir out of my voice

to listen to the sacred syllables whispering

in the autumn aspen trees to know there’s something sacred

in the silence that follows the wind isn’t revealing

like a poem that wasn’t written to be overlooked or not.

I’ve lapped the marrow from the broken koans

in the terrible lairs of the gods, and I’ve sung

the dead up out of the coffins of the sunflowers

knowing they’d look back eventually at their own shadows

but it might prove crucial to the state of their afterlives

that someone who loved them at least gave it a good try.

Magnificent the life within you, isn’t it? The way

its freedom never gets caught in any sudden squall

of golden chains you might want to weigh it down with

like the spiritual bling of maidens of the mist with rainbows

to dazzle the eyes of the blind into believing what they hope for?

Kids and wives, divorces like horrible vacations,

lovers that painted their nails in blood like razorblades,

brute dung heaps who snarled like distempered carnivores

under a heavy snowfall, forgetting no real shepherd of wolves

would be caught dead in sheep’s clothing. Disappointment

turned out to be more of a perennial than a one night stand.

You began to understand why God bewails human ingratitude.

And it was the folly of common sense when you were paranoid

to close your eyes like the granite crypt of your afterlife

against the superstitious shadows of the approaching grave-robbers.

You brought it all with you. Did you really think

you could leave it behind like a dogstar

you tried to ditch in the country to give it

some chance of spiritual survival like a fire in the wild

that could live off the land without it following you

like a return journey for the rest of your forsaken way?

It’s not that wonderful, heart-thawing, mystical acts

of human compassion have stopped happening

like oxygen and fire breaking into tears, it’s just

the turn of the miracles to lose their faith in us

like the hurt feelings of beautifully rejected lovers.

Something about the way love bonds both sides

of an open wound as wide as an expanding universe

like a maternal welder kissing our injuries into stronger scars.

Zen cracks in a teacup mended with gold.

Stop trying to sift through the middens of your past

like an archaeological dig in the starfields

you were trying to build an on ramp to the Road of Ghosts in,

and when you’re woken up in the small hours of the morning

by the dead who’ve got nothing but time on their hands

until dawn, and they ask you what you were dreaming

don’t answer like a seance addressing yourself to their absence.

Sometimes you just have to leave some things unburied

in the Valley of the Kings and Queens and move on

to second-guessing the tumblers like habitable planets

in possible solar systems like ours on the locks

of the stargates of Orion that will know you by the way you knock

not by the junkyard of sacred relics you’ve been hoarding.

If you dump your own redundancy, you’ll travel a lot lighter.

If you don’t forget the hidden jewel within you

has long had a place among the stars, whose eyes

I ask you, even after all these seeing nights and lightyears

of peering through a glass darkly, a candle in a lantern

released like a firefly to find its way home, could shine

any brighter than the waterstars and starmud of yours are now?

PATRICK WHITE

THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

THE WORDS ARE MERELY THE PERFORMERS

The words are merely the performers,

the jugglers and the acrobats, the fire-swallowers.

The fat lady with a moustache behind

her flap of tent. The Parsifals, the mottled clowns.

The Crips and the Bloods, the red rose and the blue,

the Mafia dons. Thought is not verbal expression.

The word, tree, can’t read. And clever’s a boor shy

of being intelligent. Keats was right when he wrote

how much superior humour is to wit though

he didn’t live to see very much of it.

And Whitman, too, when he made his exit

from the learned astronomer to witness the stars

as if the beauty of reality could speak for itself

and the science of shining had nothing to do

with starmaps. Things are words, labials of the moon.

Abstractions merely the ghosts of the senses

trying to get back to the earth before the dawn comes up.

Things teach us their names like a dynasty of kings

on the stairs of Incan temples. Generations of stars,

the demotic of light, the patois of their mother tongue.

And the way they relate to one another,

in a thousand different grammars, river reeds rooted

in tributaries all flowing into the proto-nostratic

of the one mindstream like sacred syllables of the rain.

The rain says wave, wet, water, and everybody

goes skinny-dipping in the womb of W

hanging on for dear life to an umbilical rope

at the local watering hole. Ever measure the red shift

of a consonant to determine whether it’s going away

or coming toward you? Are your vowels truly edible

or just the wax fruit that pose for your still lives?

In the Beth Luis Nion Druidic tree alphabet

apple trees ask the most questions about how

when, who, why, where, taking their Q from Latin

like a suggestion from a patron of poets. Horace,

perhaps, like a quarterhorse in the stables of Maecenas.

I can hear the windfall that drops from the tops

of the black walnut trees. I understand the semiotics

of the diadems of the stars setting fire to the hair

of the willows in winter plunging their burning tresses

in the river to put them out like matchbooks

in the hands of delinquent boys. Cruel arsonists

of their prankish joys. The fire gods come

looking for fire. The water sylphs hiss like sibilants.

Point is. As long as you’re alive there’s a conversation

going on all the time that you alone are privy to

even when you’re listening with your ear pressed hard

like a seashell to the walls of your skull. The silence

is riddled with the voices of things like space

is saturated with the red wavelengths of the heaviness

of our eyes, dying like the memory of old stars

that once considered us friends, after we finished crying.

The silence is startled by the sudden outburst

of a nightbird and the dark is seized by a longing

to step out of the shadows and reveal itself reciprocally

like a lighthouse calling out from its widow walk

to an empty lifeboat in the fog, drifting aimlessly

without the oar of a verb, or the rudder of a participle

trailing in the wake of a maritime moon, mute

as the bells of an unmoved sea to say three bells, all’s well, all’s well.

PATRICK WHITE

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

BRIGHT BLUE WINTER SUNDAY IN A SLOW TOWN

Bright blue winter Sunday in a slow town.

Eclipsed by the vivid contrast of light and dark,

watching the carcasse of a sabre-tooth in a tarpit,

cellphone by cellphone, being replaced, no app for it,

by younger minerals with an ice-age attitude

less flexible than water about finding their place in life.

Keep your Smilodons protean. Your fangs

deep and lunar as if you were the beginning

and end of things, and all phases in between,

parentheses around the full moon with a smiley face

if you don’t want to grow old plastering starmaps over a window

with one fixed star in the same place every night.

I’m not wallpapering space with wavelengths

of ticker tape in a blizzard of statistical genomes

falling like snow-globes on the triumphs of the past.

This slum isn’t riding a golden chariot past the bank.

But it’s impossible to be anything but confessional

in the twenty-first century, now my eyes change

the nature of anything I’m looking at, the observer,

the observed, no subject, no object, no experiment.

Just this dynamic equilibrium of creative experience

building bridges like oxymoronic metaphors flying in unison

like two wings on a waterbird, or labouring like an ox

to yoke both sides of the mindstream in a single pair

of lunar handcuffs. A new layer of skin has been added

to the bubble of the earth’s atmosphere like a mind

laying its reflection down upon the water

like a chameleonic simulacrum of the moon inseparable

from the undulance of the thought-waves that perceive it.

An inhumane aloofness can never justify

giving birth to Frankenstein ever again.

Things of the world are things of the mind.

Tat tvam asi. You are that. How can you tell me

you poured yourself out of the universe like a window

looking at the stars from the outside in

like an objectively flat goblet that’s never tasted

the flavour of the wine in the dark cellars of its own heart

as if there were an emotional life behind the shining

that can’t be ignored anymore than the mind

can be left out of a unified field theory inexplicably incomplete?

Add a little love to a little understanding

and wisdom’s back in vogue like a literary technique

of going without knowing where the road ends

with the whole universe as a travelling companion

as close to you as your seeing is to the stars

though you’re both lost in the mystery

of just happening to be here with no fixed plans.

My voice is the mother tongue of esoteric nightbirds.

The stars speak in the sacred syllables of my deepest secrets.

Even in the homelessness of the unknown, I am declared

a changeling on a threshold no one’s dared to cross yet without me.

You who think of yourselves as a dirty word

that has to be expurgated like a sunspot on the heart,

the womb scrubbed out by antiseptically surgical hands

that have yet to deliver you like the windfall

of the low hanging fruit of the earth, let me reach

deep into the matrix of your conception of yourselves

and turn you around so every moon rise isn’t a breach birth.

Let me return an eternal flame to the candle

that went so cold it stopped crying sincerely

after you left, like a wax mannequin in pursuit

of a more trustworthy clarity than the ambivalent probabilities

of your provisional humanity trying to take

the focus off itself like the studied indifference of a telescope.

Didn’t you notice its legs unfolded like an easel

so you could climb up on it like a scaffolding

to paint a yard of wet plaster a day until even you

stood in awe of your own creation myth

as an allegorical explanation of your troubled magnificence?

Unchain yourselves from the protocols

of an objective delusion and cultivate a starfield

of subjective correlatives that correspond

with the inexact science of remaining indefensibly human

in the name of deeper accuracy, a sweeter intimacy

with the Cepheid variables and creative singularities

painting haloes around the black holes of yourself

like the moondogs and moodrings of a tree in the rain.

How much you’ll miss about being alive

if you make the same assumptions as a windowpane

that clarity is necessarily sane. Your starmud

wasn’t meant to be squared with every other brick in the wall

even if you’re lacquered in lapis lazuli beside the Ishtar gate.

If the rivers are polluted on the outside

and all your aqueducts taste of the Via Cloacum,

what’s that if not plack on your own arteries?

All our passports are the democratized peers

of our own lack of identity in arrears to everyone.

No one’s asking you to burn your bridges like equal signs

between light and mass. It’s ok if things come and go

as they’ve always done in the absence of a mind

trying to befriend a camera as a more reliable way

of remembering things you can’t help being back stage.

Life isn’t a photo-op of fixed images and neither is poetry.

Adding a little humanity to what’s meteoric about your origins

doesn’t mean you’re going to end up kissing the Kaaba

like a black stone that’s been worn down by millions of lips.

It’s equally conceivable you’re as aniconic as an eclipse.

You’re lustrous with nothing inside. You’re rough as ore

with a gold girlfriend. The stone draws the sword out of you.

Vulcan walks with a limp like Jacob and Richard III

like the iambs of a waterclock, one leg shorter than the other.

It’s time you learned to celebrate your own creative absurdity

like a child playing intensely with her own imagination.

It’s time you got brave enough to risk your own creation

without asking someone for a starmap to misguide you.

Put the delight back in being a lighthouse full of fireflies

or a foghorn that doesn’t heed its own warning

at the mere sound of a voice clearing its throat

of a nightingale covered in creosote to say nothing

a decent chimney spark wouldn’t want the stars to over hear.

Start a fire the size of a big-hearted furnace

that can hold all the stars in and out of place at one time

like a space that embraces everything trivial and sublime

whether they mythically deflate or shine like a weather balloon

candling at high altitude like an emergency parachute

entangled in its own life lines as if that were the only way

you’re ever going to understand the afterlife of a dandelion

air lifting a time capsule to root sometime later in the future.

Surrealistic town, all eyes at the window as if

you were staring into a crystal ball while your ears

are listening to the blind prophetic skull of the moon

predict the return of a nocturnal atmosphere

bluer than a star sapphire in the eyes of a twilit peacock.

There’s not even so much the measure of an eyelash

in the distance between you and the next star.

You’re the nightbird perched like an arrow

singing on the green bough of the centaur.

Gap the abyss a little closer than you do your spark plugs

and not only your soul, but your body will achieve ignition

like two tines of the same tuning fork coming together

like two fingertips of what’s humanly divine

creatively collaborating with your own mind

like choirs of picture music on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

or the wind in the dry leaves clinging to the black walnut trees

while the stars rise in the east like the patriarchs of the fireflies

transcending their sobriety with the creative spontaneity

of burning their imaginary exemplars like effigies and strawdogs

in the gleeful heresy of making constellations up

out of the gusts of the stars that fly like enlightened dragons

that take you by surprise like the fires in their lucidly munificent eyes.

PATRICK WHITE