WHAT I WANTED TO SHOW YOU

What I wanted to show you,

you will not see.

What I wanted to give you,

you will not receive.

The wind may mourn your passing

like an abandoned dog

and the leaves of the silver Russian olive

may be baffled into silver

by the way you left the gate open

to a bigger, colder, darker world than it was

before you told me you loved me

like an arsonist in a wheat field,

a comet above the willow tree

that wept its way into autumn.

Go. I lay no claims or obligations

at your feet anymore than I would

try to smudge space

with the black rose of the night

that tastes of old eclipses in my blood.

You say ebulliently

you want to know passionately

the depths of love,

but like the fools before you

who blundered into the fire,

you’re only witching for volcanoes

with the tongue of snake.

As well look for fishroads

under the dead seas of the moon

as follow the path you’re on.

And your beauty is no excuse,

your body no sanctuary,

your blackberry heart

no pilgrim to anywhere

you can’t stand in the light

trying on shadows like lingerie

in the mirror of the delusions

you’ve clarified like the skin of a bubble

that has smeared the reflection of the world so long

you think you’re a planet with trees.

You’re a spiritual junkie

jonesing for suffusions of the inconceivable

to animate the dust and galaxies

you have no life or love to breathe into

other than that little wind

you carry around in a bottle

in case you’re ever stranded

without an emergency exit

from all the lies you tell in paradise.

You suffer the mythically inflated gigantism

of your own unbearable insignificance,

and abase yourself prophetically

before the mountain of your own lostness,

hoping for a map

of your wandering in stone

that would authorize your confusion

as holier than the rest.

Lonely for converts,

you tell me I’m sure of heaven.

Just as lonely I reply

if someone like me

were to show up in heaven,

it couldn’t be much of place to aspire to

and how could the blessed

not feel cheated?

But you don’t get it;

you really don’t understand

that life isn’t an auditon of angels

and the black cartoon

you’ve made of yourself

to win a feather

isn’t a prelude

to the main feature

when the lights go out

and the ushers

who conducted the dead to their seats

evaporate in the aisles

and you upstage the movie

with your nakedness

as if God couldn’t see

the snake-flute of your body

dancing with serpents in the dark.

Lust alone would have been enough

to keep us together

but waking from your dream

of forbidden undertows,

washed ashore again

on your oracular island,

you kept trying to weld the right light

to the wrong shadow,

and eventually

even the most exotic futility grows boring.

You dipped the stone-flaked arrowhead

of your aboriginal heart

in the toxic fires of your own undoing

and pointing it at mine

tried to deceive yourself into a direction.

And now you want,

now you long,

now you want to come back

and immerse yourself in the life

you once stepped over

like a drunk asleep on the sidewalk.

You’ve suffered and grown,

you’ve wept and derived humility

from irreparable loss;

you’ve trembled before

the first, terrible intimations of the vastness

of the sky in your heart

like the virgin flight of a lost bird,

and you want to be given another chance,

to surrender yourself at the gate

you once walked through backwards

so enamoured were you of your shadow.

And you promise the river your tears,

the moon your scars, me

the rarest of your orchids in the night.

But when I ask you

what the drunk was dreaming

you still look blankly around the room

as if everything in existence

were merely the baffled clue to your beauty

and the answer

something black and revealing that clings.

You still can’t imagine

how easy it is

to say no to you.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY ISN'T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

POETRY ISN’T A SALVE I PUT ON MY BURNS

Poetry isn’t a salve I put on my burns,

an ointment of the moon, though it can help

like a afterword, it’s the original shriek of pain itself.

The moment the talons tear into the rabbit,

the rose snarls and bares its thorns and bites

and the owl that seemed so wise in its nest of carrion

turns out to be, no more no less than what it always was,

a feather pillow plumped up around a scrawny raptor.

Sweet dreams. The night tossed in its sleep like a snakepit

trying to get on the same wavelength as the big names

on a starchart though everything ends in a colon

as if something were to follow like a fangmark

or a binary of black holes. If you’re going

to punctuate things, do it like a firing squad.

Born a tiger, born a puff adder, born

with the claws of the moon like an anthropod

clacking across the seas like top heavy castanets,

how did you ever manage to underwhelm yourself

and evolution, and learn to kill like a tapeworm?

Not a morning I’d enter in a new age beauty pageant.

Mercifully grey, but too exhausted to put up much

of a pretence. Mr. Bluebird’s opening a chic boutique

of organic food he’s gleaned from his many years of experience

hand picking seeds out of the teeth of vegetarians

like a sparrow dragonflies in the grilles of cars in parking lots

while the mandalic carpet of the forces of life

are swept from under his feet at his office desk

as neat as a moonrise on his fingernails

is aerated by earthworms the size of vacuum hoses.

Ex-hippie vulture capitalists with their third eyes open

like the fractals of a peacock collecting

emotional enlightenment experiences like the badges

of a cub practising knots he’ll later hang himself with

as soon as he masters a noose. Wonder what the Buddha would think.

I’m not moaning Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani from a cross

or a pigeon with the messiah complex of a dove

betrayed under the eaves of my apartment

and I wish I could forgive everyone for not knowing

what they do, but simply put, this morning, it just isn’t true.

Try a troll under a bridge by the fieldstone embankment

at the side of the Tay Canal trying to spiritualize his anti-matter

by putting a happy face on a total eclipse. Sometimes black

is the only colour my rainbow body can resort to

to reinvigorate my soul, though it’s reticent to admit it.

My mother’s ninety three. Afraid of what that means.

My brother just had his leg amputated for number two diabetes.

I haven’t seen either of my kids in thirty plus years

such that the distance between my tears and theirs

would have to be measured in parsecs and lightyears

and I’m so sick of not having any money

I’d tar and feather another night owl with it if I did.

It makes me queasy sometimes remembering

how wonderful life used to be before I entered

this isolation cell in the name of a solitude bigger than me

that would demand nothing less than everything of me

all the time, so that when I died from all the things

I’ve given up in life to write, I’d have to ask someone

if they noticed an appreciable difference in my line-breaks.

I’m imminently qualified and well published enough

to say that what I do, before another donkey begins to bray

about the anti-social function of my heretical wisdom

sticking the stars in their eyes like the spurs of a man

broken by a winged horse, is unpatently absurd

though I still don’t think there’s any other way to learn

to ride a word like a wavelength instead of a particle

and when I talk to God in the valley at the foot of the mountain

about what she’s doing to me, I’m still humble enough

to remember to always use the indefinite article in her presence.

Though I’ve had love affairs with other muses, poetry

has always been my most committed relationship to life.

Say it beautifully. Say it tragically. Exalt like a stranger

before the open gates of your metaphors. Don’t step

on a crack in the sidewalk that will break your mother’s back,

and when shining comes to zenith like a firefly in a lighthouse,

never respect a threshold that hasn’t got it fingers crossed

or darken a burning doorway with a firehose at nadir

until all the houses of the most influential zodiacs

go up in flames like the taste of a slum in a spoonful of ashes.

And if you get mistaken for a cult leader of one

in a small town of succubi, leave a garbage bag

full of used voodoo dolls one night outside the Salvation Army

and watch the passersby steal the burnt effigies of your childhood

without attempting to save anybody from anything

like the curse that cast aspersions on King Tut’s throne.

I didn’t come to poetry like an immigrant to a foreign country

but I’ve tried so hard over the years just to belong

except for a few benighted souls, no one visits me

unless their unremarkable absence wants something

it’s impossible to give them as long as their hands are full.

I try to balance their bright vacancy with my dark abundance

but how few on a spiritual path ever truly realize

that scales are the first step on your way to feathers

and if you’re not dragon enough to swallow your own eclipse

don’t try the full moon unless you’ve got dental insurance.

Your fangs would break like the first and last crescents

of soft, graphite pencils biting into stone like the fossils

of Anomalocaris in the collected works of the Burgess Shale.

And that’s ok, too. As I’ve often said my brother used to say.

Unrequited goodness is the sign of a successful sacrifice.

Do ut des. I give so that you give. Or, more savagely,

do ut abeas. I give so that you go away. With blessings

on your head and house of course, and a small shrine in my heart

where I keep the relics of all your best ideals

like the needles of baby teeth that fall like thorns

from the mouths of kittens that roar like crematoria

though I’m demonically amused that the flamethrowers

they mistake for real dragons never seem to bring the rain

in time to put their pyres out like new age fire brigades.

Just the same sumac in the fall is still more of an arsonist

than the naphtha of paper birch in the dead of winter.

Knowing what I know about how little much there is to know

about nothing, I won’t disrespect myself by becoming bitter.

Someone asks, I show up like a genie with a lamp

and we talk about matchbooks like the haiku of a dragon

or a crow on a branch in the void bound autumn rain.

I listen to the world dispassionately as if I were

absolutely certain there wasn’t a quantum self to the atoms

that wasn’t certifiably insane according to its own lights,

as I show them my arcane starmaps with albedos of chrome

and carbon, so they can see for themselves in the dark

how much deeper a black mirror is when the lights go out

than a white one that’s in your face all the time

as if it didn’t trust you to take your eyes off it once and awhile

like the broken link of a shepherd moon on a short chain

that wants to howl with the wolves, free of the flock,

still labouring under the delusion it’s got something to do

with where it’s going and where it’s been and tomorrow’s

already so far off the path, every prophecy you ever make

is just the future memory of your erratically inspired aftermath.

PATRICK WHITE

DEEP IN THE NIGHT

Deep in the night that shells its husk of blue

to pan the nuggets of its stars from a darker stream,

the heart an executioner with a fistful of pardons,

and the soft, moist, lulling of the evening air,

the threshing of slow fish,

I’m enthroned alone in a crucial palace of light

that realigns its domains to the borders of the wind,

and I don’t want to feel lonely but I do,

and I don’t want to miss so many, so many faces

stripped from the bough like a savaged telephone-book,

so many feathers of light drifting through the shadows of their names,

and the black granite of the uncarved bell

that turtles the blood under the eyelid of the knowing,

that makes my eyes want to scream

until the pillars of the dead sea fall like rotten salt:

how long can one road endure the passage of everything

walking life off into the stars that measure the miles in skulls?

Was I young? Were you there in the brindled moonlight?

Did I remember how to love you well; did I see with long eyes

how you rose out of the chest of the hills like a spirit leaving,

the blue effulgence of your nebulous departure

almost a cocoon of morning mist, the last breath of a lake

as if an indigo thistle released its silk to the wind

or a dandelion relinquished its ivory mane?

Were you the soul of me that lingered by gates and wharves?

Have you come back now with your bells of blood and lamps of flesh?

Can I feel again the leaves of the silver herbs

in the gardens of your fingertips?

Touch me like the breaking of a fast,

find me like a river in the night,

the dazzled theme of a wandering valley,

and pour your journey into mine like stars into a vine,

shadows running down the worn convictions of the stairs,

the midnight wines of old eclipses in the goblets of your eyes.

Once for the flame that dances on the wick of the tongue,

Once for the orchards that plead with the heart for birds,

Once for the envelope that read the letter it married,

and you, by the river, a sapphire among rocks,

tender blue grass in the translucent water-skin of the night,

loving me once as if your hands were autumns full of departure

and your eyes, the gulf of the world in your eyes, your eyes

were the soft flowing of the dark honeys

that leak from the wounded hives

we carry like knives to the grave.

Distinguished among broken clocks,

sultry and bitter, a quarantined bay of refugee stars,

caught in the threshing blades of a circular waterfall,

a mess of tents I’ve furloughed across the milky distances

like a chain-letter from a secret constellation to you,

I blue the intimate spaces between us with time

and patch the maps with the confluence of our lifelines

and try to restore the eyes in the sockets of our bridges

under a brow of swallows in the dusk. And I remember

all the names of the flowers, all the names of the stars,

all the badges of love that heaven and earth once offered

in lieu of the reasons why

love bares the skin of a poppy

to the teeth of the hunting sun

and then flares like a firefly

over the water-lamps of the moon,

but when it dies of its own self-inflicted wounds,

slashed by shadows among the ripe fruit of its vowels,

and the seed wasn’t asked and the harvest had no choice

there are always two skies,

one bound by roots, the other, eyes,

at the back of every voice.

PATRICK WHITE

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

SHAPE OF DESIRE. HURT ONE. LOST. HOLINESS, GRIEVING

Shape of desire. Hurt one. Lost. Holiness, grieving.

Who could make love to someone as melancholy

and beautiful as you? And that face. Erotic innocence

baffled by a world that doesn’t quite know how

to receive your gift, however happy you are to give it.

Even in a small town where the virgins

who’ve turned everyone down get called slut

by six adolescent boys with the windows rolled down

like purple tinted skies just after sunset

to bluff the bruise out of the rejection by punishing it

as if it happened to someone else, you wear your face

more like a soft, sad atmosphere around an uninhabited planet

than the brittle carapace of an overturned begging bowl

like a turtle on its back most people wear for lifemasks.

I can see a milky aura of white hovering around your face

like an auroral scarf of light glowing with tenderness.

I’ve seen it before in the faces of both sexes, though

I’m heterosexually suicidal, and it lasts

about two years and then disappears for good

between a night and a dawn like the death of morning glory.

I’ve been into seeking other things myself,

but in the whole orchard when I’ve seen it in the past

I’ve often thought this must be the hour of the perfect blossom,

when a face isn’t an expression of anything, but a seance

that calls the gentlest spirits to it like night mist on a lake

and everyone mourns as if beauty were predestined to be forsaken.

Genius ever was so. And I suspect good people, too,

with quiet virtues kinder than plants returning oxygen

for carbon dioxide like new lamps for old, are just as betrayed

by the anonymous sacrifices they make in private

as they are commended in public by people who hate them.

I’ve got to be careful here because I don’t want

to dig a black hole in your heart, when I was out witching for water.

I’m trying not to use lightning bolts of insight

when a gust of intuitive fireflies would do the job.

I don’t want to be an unwieldy dragon among

the blue glass menageries of your exquisite tears.

Aggrandize the thorns and diminish the rose.

You can judge for yourself by the capacity of your eyes

to hold so many stars all at once that shining

can’t be stamped out like a cigarette heater on the carpet

anymore than the heart can doused like a burning house

and learn to live like a fire hydrant out of gratitude.

There’s definitely something seeking about the way you look.

Explore the loneliness. The sadness. The abyss.

Don’t lose the opportunity to learn to mindscape your pain.

As they say in Zen, intense heat unusual sprouts.

Orchids have been known to bloom in the shadows of outhouses.

Listen attentively to how even the most buff bells of life

seem to swing between the sentimental and the vicious

like two extremes of the same enzyme when it’s hard to tell

whether love’s still the lifeline it was reputed to be

or at the end, doubles back on itself and loops into a noose.

And don’t kid yourself. Not all waterclocks make it to the sea

nor do the salmon, however nobly they answer the call

to a higher vocation of oceanic consciousness, make it back up.

Spring no more favours the fledgling in its nest,

than a baited leg hold trap a wolf in mid-winter.

Many people talk and act as if they know what they’re doing,

but most of us are living like a secret that keeps us going,

so don’t be afraid when the unknown becomes inevitably vast

and space turns into glass you’re trying to swim through

like a goldfish or the flamingo fantail of a comet

and everyone’s got a precipitous attitude about what you should do.

It’s your cliff. Jump if you want to or enjoy the view

like a star that’s just been given your eyes like its first telescope.

But don’t let yourself be pushed. Make sure

you’ve got the feathers for it because timing in life

is synonymous with the whole of its content, and suicide?

That’s like asking antimatter to come to the rescue

of a lifeboat with a positive outlook going under

as your life flashes before your eyes like lightning without thunder.

If you want to respect yourself for the immensities

of the myriad annihilations you’re willing to risk,

go all the way like a dragonfly uncurling from its chrysalis

like a question mark that crawls out onto a limb

into an exclamation mark that unfolds its wings and flies

when there’s no where else to swim. Do it creatively

and take a much more dangerous leap of absurdity

by risking it all on a beginning that starts with a fall

and ends up a mountain climber with a base camp among the stars.

What aviator laments the broken egg-shell on the ground,

cosmic or earthbound, when the whole sky lies before it

with a smile on its face as wide as your wingspan

and a heart as big as any abyss, as if it always knew,

as the wind comes to the fireflies and the stars

in a perpetuity of unperishing perennials that refuse

to bloom like traffic lights and triggers, one night,

maybe now, in a blaze of self-immolating transformation

as surely as the Pleiades coming up like the chandelier

of a lost earring in the east, just as beautifully,

in the great lost and found of sorrow and bliss

you, too, no less bravely, would come to this.

PATRICK WHITE

SO MANY MORNINGS

SO MANY MORNINGS

So many mornings I want to be done

with waking up as if it were always winter

and rifling through my pockets to see if

I’ve got enough cash to buy me and the cat

another day or two of life she can spend

chasing paper balls of the poems I roll up

to expend on her amusement, and for me

a microbubble of space and time I can

write and paint in without feeling hungover

from the chronic sobriety of my last encounter

with a swarm of killer bees retooled

from the dirty thirties smuggling prohibition

through the Thousand Islands. Return me to exile.

I’m the King of the Outcasts, a pure blood pariah,

a leper of the moon, a sacred clown who dances for rain

to help him recall how to cry. I’m a blue flower

in No Man’s Land someone ploughed with a cannon.

It’s a kind of protest sign I hold up

like a placard of chicory that means no surrender.

I sheathe the moon in my scabbard like a blood-stained blade.

I am the lunar trifecta of aquiline talons that grasp at nothing.

I labour at life with an effortless effort of intensity

that makes Rasputin look like a slacker among mad monks.

I have been dispossessed by more spirits I’ve never met

except as an anonymous urgency to write something

as if I were here to listen, not speak, and my voice

were merely the microphone everyone popped their p’s in

as if they were French kissing electricity, than any man I know of.

I wholly understand experientially what the Zen master meant

when he said he didn’t like poems written by poets,

cooking prepared by cooks, or paintings done by painters.

Leftover carbon in a half-hearted fire. Boulders of coal

instead of diamonds for the adamantine eyes

of an enlightened snowman wondering

what it might have been like to have been born a scarecrow,

a strawdog, on a hot summer evening in the flesh instead of

made out of stars on an immaculate winter night harder

than moonlight on the lake ice. I’ve found my way

out of this labyrinth of dead ends more than once.

The crows and the wolf gods know all the backtrails out of hell,

but it was a sadder day than I ever imagined

clarity and freedom could be. The solitude is interminable.

And even the moon doesn’t truly understand what you’re howling at.

You’ve probably never heard of Archibald Lampman

but he was the warrior minstrel of the forlorn hope

a hundred and fifty years ago plus in Ottawa

at the Council of the Three Fires where the rivers join

and I smear the same kind of war paint on my face

though the feathers in my topknot I plucked from Pegasus

to see if I’d forgotten how to write with ink and quills.

Poetry is the last sanctuary of savage dignity in the Black Hills.

I’m a hold out from way back when the Chinese

taught the Haida to carve cedar totem poles like the power nodes

of the chakras in their spines. I’ve got knots and nooses in mine.

But the principle remains the same. Having tried

shattering a few celestial spheres into the crystal chandeliers

of a wine glass falling everywhere like the fine mist of an ice-storm

with my voice to see if I could make something habitable

out of this shepherd moon that might surprise everybody yet

with life forms that defy uninspired expectations, I

turned my attention to Tibetan prayer bowls

that hummed in spirals that made a mantra

out of every line of picture-music I wrote after that

placing the emphasis on the assonance of my sacred syllables

I kissed and placed in the pyx and lockets of my consonants

as if I never wanted to forget a face that had meant

something to me sometime like an eclipse of the full moon.

Now I’d never undertake a journey

that didn’t leave me homeless at the end.

That’s what I do in life. That’s how I honour

all the prophetic skulls that have brought me to this moment.

Some things I reveal like a candle in a morgue.

And when I fall like a stone bird out of the heavens

you can be sure Medusa’s been stargazing again.

Pain to me is a naturally renewable resource,

and if I were ever to write my autobiography,

it would read like the Burgess Shale.

Hail, fellow, well met in the flea markets of poetic vision.

Here you can tinker with your revisions like hex-keys and lies.

It’s difficult to know what you’re going to say next

given there’s no connection between thought and emotion

and verbal expression, and you realize they’re not sharing

the same dream grammars when one calls you to prayer

and the other to take notes at a seance of all your former selves.

All I know is whenever it was my turn to jump out of the plane

engulfed by the abyss, to test out my winged heels, it always

seemed like bad faith to reach for a parachute as if

there were something left to save. Be brave, young Icarus,

be brave. Daring said feathers and falling took flight.

Though I’m afraid I’m beginning to repeat myself

like the white noise of an old man remembering the past.

I’ve been plunging with the dolphins on the moon

in this shadowy sea of sentience since I was first conceived.

And it’s not so much that madness became a way of life

as it was a matter of sharing what I saw without asking

or expecting to be believed, if I lived it by myself for everyone.

PATRICK WHITE

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

SHOCK ONE BIRD INTO TAKING TO ITS WINGS

Shock one bird into taking to its wings

and all the others will fly up out of the sacred woods

into an emergent symphony of spontaneously choreographed words

like rivers reeds dancing in unison to the music of a distant sea.

Fish do the same. And the fans of the corals before the moon

turns them into stone. Listen. Aldebaran

bellows from the heart of the bull sacrificed to creation

like the gift of a gift to itself. It’s raining blood

in some parts of the world. If I don’t look for asylum

in reality it’s because I completely trust my imagination

not to schedule any dress rehearsals for my dreams

as if you could improve the play by upgrading the stage.

And my religion can’t bring itself to believe in a god

that created the world just to let herself be victimized by it.

I don’t take the universe as a sign of intelligence

because I can’t look at a stone without feeling I’ve added

a little wisdom to my thoughts, an earthy, sage laughter

to the unworldly seriousness of my moonrocks.

Life in the universe, elaborating its redundancy

through sex and fractals into an order of complexity

that weaves every wavelength of its picture-music

into a lyrical tapestry that would otherwise

be hanging in hyperspace like a blank membrane. Life

is intelligence in action like a mystic that got up off his knees

to fix the church roof by opening it up to the stars

that keep falling like the mercy of a transcendent rain

to wash the starmud off the roots of life with light

until they shine like lightning breaking into blossom

from the bottom up. Whether things are good or bad

synchronicity reverses the spin of my atoms

like the turn and counterturn of matter and anti-matter

dancing creatively as if love could be measured

in direct proportion to its potential for annihilation.

That’s how things have always gotten done around here.

Someone manages to peel their snowblind reflection

off the mirror like the sunburn of a coronal halo

a throne too close to home, and the night begins

to cool things off with the moonlit salve of a herbal darkness.

Everything lives, animate and inanimate alike,

the lotus eaters, the condottieri of the vulture capitalists,

and in the great reservoirs and watersheds of memory

that generated muses to inspire the living with the fires

of the dead, to keep them from going out, everyone, everything

down to the last mystically specific detail of scarlet paint

flaking off a fingernail as if someone painted a window

to cover up a moonrise with a sunset, lives, endures, thrives

in the well springs of an expansive mind that celebrates

its regeneration out of the magical black holes and top hats

it’s been pulling itself out of like rabbits by the ears for lightyears

while supernovas go berserk with applause just to tempt itself

into finding out how the trick was done by its own sleight of hand

without anyone catching on. Whatever it washes its hands of,

science is still an antiseptic magic that keeps reminding itself

of where it came from the harder it tries to deny its roots,

but there are other vital organs of the body that can

lay claim to being children of the mind as well, not just

this one changeling of a brain child laid on the steps of a temple

or found among the bullrushes. Eye-child, the bird

that lives like a larynx in your throat, heart child,

and the shy child that can feel the light breathing on her skin.

We are the neurons and axons of a galactic intelligence this week

and we’re communicating with shepherd moons and starclusters

that are as alien as we are sending out space probes like genes

unlocking the secrets of the universe like wardens and nightwatchmen

breaking koans like keys to the cosmic eggs where they’re imprisoned

like seven sleepers in the cave of our genome. If you

can put up with that many similes in a row like variations

in the evolutionary bush that might or might not catch fire

like sage brush happy to lay back on the wind and drift, just drift

in the wanderlust of not really knowing what we’re doing here

but taking it on faith, it’s blind luck to be aware of it.

And the available dimensions of tomorrow will have recourse

to these metaphors poured out of the heart like a waterclock

and new dinosaurs will walk the earth among the emotional mammals

in boas of ostrich feathers and suggestive snake-skin sequins

that shimmer like the waves on a lake at night, liquid anthracite,

dark tears with black diamonds for eyes burning heretics

in the unconfessed fires of their adamantine translucency.

Maybe it’s time to let the caves we enter like carbon-based life forms

paint us for a change in colours that have yet to be seen

in anyone’s paintbox like the bulbs of wildflowers about to bloom

in the starfields with a rainbow coloured thumb for gardens.

Let’s turn our astral portraits inside out as if the stars

were embodied within each of us like a starmap

in the crystal skull of a drop of water on a spinal blade of grass.

Mind only. Everything is mind. Not two. Not one. Not nothing.

In every part, in every grain, the whole of the harvest moon.

And the formlessness isn’t inchoate. And the form

is as homeless as the mind looking for its lantern

with its lantern, as if it wasn’t accompanied by its own light

like an honour guard of stars and fireflies the whole way

to the gate and the threshold of an endless beginning.

That’s what’s inconceivably beautiful and playful

about being alive in a mind as aniconicly vast as this.

We only hide the secrets from ourselves

that we must urgently want to be known

like mirages breaking water in the wombs of our wells.

We’re rummaging for grails in our own spiritual lost and founds.

We’re sending telescopes into space like foreign embassies

acting as plenipotentiaries for our eyes only

as if our seeing had to be diplomatic about

the infinite number of ways there are of deciphering the stars.

Make it a loveletter from a bride catalogue of Asian mermaids

if you want to hear the lyrics of what they’re singing to you

about the music of the mind walking on the waters of life

like the Pleiades webbing the constellation of Taurus

among the leafless boughs of the horned locust trees

standing in the moonlight gaping like gored matadors.

Or make up stories to keep the fires within you amused

with a ghost of smoke on a rocky road rising

out of the ashes of its deathmask on a distant hillside

with a nebular glow on its face and a secret syllable

you have to hear with your eyes before you’ll believe its yours

hidden like a jewel in the folds of its veils like a prefix

that isn’t just another false dawn on the mother tongue

of the word for bliss because no one yet has even known

how to say it in the silence of waiting for it to speak for itself.

PATRICK WHITE