ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

Acutely aware of the onceness of life, one

of the many shadows that followed me for lightyears

was the terror of wasting it on myself and not

the mystery of what it is to be here knee deep in starmud,

up over my head in a fathomless atmosphere of awareness,

knowing I was going to leave my body behind

one day like gumboots. Any moment now.

The green light of the firefly about to change to red.

In the last flash of insight to cross my mind,

which could well be, as it has been here,

the foundation stone of a whole new universe,

I didn’t want to get caught, one foot in and one foot out,

trying to weather the storm like a lifeboat

still moored to the dock like an apple in winter

on the tree of life, not risking what I had to let go of

like seeds that abandon the rafters of the tree to be true to it.

Some people trip, some fall, some plunge,

some swan-dive into the abyss. I made

a big black hole in my heart and let all the stars

leak into it like the creative side of the light when it

turns around to look at itself without being rebuffed

by its own reflectivity. I’ve danced under the chandeliers

in the blue-white palaces of the Pleiades

when the air was full of mirrors, and that was

as elegant as a graceful woman on the verge of tears,

and often, I’ve worn my eyelids like hoods and eclipses

over the falcons of my eyes to keep the lunettes of my talons

from seizing the heart of the dove like a bouquet of blood.

Like the gutter receives the spent flames of the leaves

and the Japanese plum blossoms, like the baleen

of a blue whale harvests the krill and knows

by the taste in its mouth whether it’s autumn or spring,

when they were tired of shining, I let the stars

go slumming in my humanity as if I were a spiritual nightclub

where they could let their hair down like black dwarfs

sick of photo-ops and burn out alone at the bar

like bruised black and blue flash bulbs any way they wanted to.

I brought the stars back down to earth as often

as they raised my skull up like a grail

they poured themselves into until my eyes

were brimming over with their radiance and never once

did I ever hear them say when. Or enough is enough.

My capacity for emptiness was and still is limitless.

How else could you hold all that shining within yourself

and not go blind? How could you ever hope to know

what hour it was like the zeitgeist of the times at home

in a material eternity if you didn’t live space

like an intimate experience there were only the stars

and a few nightbirds you could tell it to who could understand?

Though the signs were everywhere like a secret

that wanted to be known. All you had to do

was open your heart and take a look through the third eye

of a black hole dilating in the middle of your iris like a new moon

climbing the rungs on a ladder of event horizons

as if it were crossing the thresholds of each house of the zodiac

back into the burning arms of the black sun no one could see

that wasn’t intrigued by the mystery of the dark eyes

behind the veils and lifemasks of the light

that paled them like nightwatchmen making

their final rounds on the grave yard shift

turn their lanterns down like stars in the dawn.

Acutely aware of the onceness of life,

I cherished my fingertips, not what they touched.

I exalted my seeing, not what it saw. I honoured my voice

for the nobility of its calling, not what was said in my sleep.

I gathered up all the myriad thoughts and facets of mind

like wavelengths of the omnipresence of the universe

like fireflies and lightning, and delighted and horrified

as I was by what they revealed, looked deeply into the eye

of the one jewel of the world concealed behind all the shining.

I’ve firewalked the Milky Way on a pilgrimage

of ghosts and smoke and taken the hands of many lovers

as if they were my own like an Orphic leper

come back from the dead like a moonrise silhouetting

the green boughs of a tree that had suffered many dismemberments,

to revel in the return of life to my limbs like an orchard in spring,

not the windfall of the fruits of the earth that fell out of their sleeves

like cornucopias, wishing-wells, and the caressable magic of lamps.

Though I praised the fountains and goblets, the flowering

of the starfields after the ice-storms of Orion thawed

like a chandelier over the candelabra of the trees

I drowned in the godhead of the dark watershed like the source

of the great rivers of my life returning to the sea

like the stray threads and frayed deltas of my blood

reworked into new flying carpets on the loom

of the lunar ebb and neap of my tidal heart

seminal with life along the island coasts of consciousness

when the moon is in the corals like a sower in the fields.

But more than desire itself, I celebrated my heart,

not for what it longed for, but the art of love that mastered me

like a down and out stranger I once met in West Van

when he saw I was out of cigarettes, and opening his hand

like an ashtray of butts he’d been picking up off the streets,

and saving for himself, picked the longest one out

and gave it to me as freely without forethought

as any highroller ever shot the stars as if he had no limits.

PATRICK WHITE

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

STARS TONIGHT AND THE TRAIN WHISTLES JUST PASSING THROUGH

Stars tonight and the train whistles just passing through,

not dying like some wounded animal, a mammoth in a tarpit

beset by dire wolves just as the ice-age is taking its hand

off the throats of the rivers and returning the world to trees,

no drunks or teenagers lying across the tracks, no accidents

or suicides with loved ones leaving flowers and photographs

on the spot where it happened too late, too late, and no one

in a small town really able to relate to such a universal absence

like the death of the larger mammals when spring is at the gate.

I listen for the music of fate, and I’m almost always ready to dance,

but sometimes when I consider the erosively random indifference of chance

I speak as if I had to keep a tight grip on my molecules

or dissipate into space myself with no nebular aspirations

of ever becoming a star to shine a little light

on what I’m doing here as if I just bought drinks for the house,

though I’m never quite sure what I’m trying to celebrate,

but it’s enough to start a riot of sacred clowns

laughing on a winter night as they put each other down

as if the only way they could bluff themselves into having a little fun

were to put callouses on their smiles, and talk tougher than they are.

And over the course of time, the scars prove as hurtful as the wounds.

Atrocities turn into local stories and the asylums are abandoned

to the ghosts of the mad who murdered the nurse

in the moonlit flash of an axe you can still see ninety years later

if you’re driving by alone on a starless night in late February.

It’s the commonality of it all that makes it chronically appalling.

It’s the sententious acceptance of death as if it had already

been achieved sooner than later, and sooner waste your last breath

on the ashes of a dying fire than wonder why

intimately specific human beings turbulent with life

are forgotten as carbon copies of us as they’re fossilized

and remembered, if at all, as the narrative themes of morbid legends,

or nacreously glazed in mother of pearl as if the dawn were never false.

I can’t see the bright side of a black hole through the temple

of a universe that’s playing Russian roulette with itself,

but I can hear the tumblers of a solar system falling into place

on a safe full of secrets for my eyes only as if some things

came to light like undertakers chalking the faces of the cosmetically dead.

Lifemasks and strawdogs and scarecrows thrown

on the ritual fires of the crematorium after the sacrifice is said

to make the living feel better about having their hearts cut out.

Whatever gets you through the night. Aquatic Byron

reaching into the pyre to pull Shelley’s drowned heart out of the flames.

The way I seek a deeper solitude than death out in the nearby woods

where I always feel like an exile with a homeless heart

looking up at the stars like a handful of sacred dirt in a medicine bag

I’ve been saving for years to throw on my own grave

I’m holding up to the abysmal impersonality of the nightsky,

not to have it blessed by a consolation prize, but to give

the unresponsive silence of the alphas and omegas of the mystery

a taste of my humanity even if they spit me out as a bitter kind of light.

I will shine. Without a lantern. Without a firefly. Without

a guiding star. Without a radiant familiar in a desolate place.

If nothing else, I’ll keep adding my paint rag to the big picture

of the dark until I grow eyes to look beyond the obvious mirrors,

part the curtains, lift the veils, kiss the eyelids of the new moon

until the dead wake up like an eclipse of black roses

blooming in their blood, turn the trilithons of Stonehenge

until it’s aligned with the vernal equinox and the dead return

like migrating birds to the innocence of their childhoods

and the coffins they were buried are disinterred like toyboxes.

PATRICK WHITE

THE BLUE DAWN COMES

THE BLUE DAWN COMES

The blue dawn comes, the night has walked

its bridge of stars and there shall be other days

we will dance in one another’s eyes,

circles of rain in the shadows of the willows,

the fragrance of your hair, your skin,

words I will say into the abyss like a nightbird

longing for your green bough, and the silence

shall know the taste of our human joys and sorrows

in the perishing of the flowers, in the moonrise

of your sad, sad smile rising from your depths

like the flame of a goldfish in a waterlily pond,

the candle of your body still burning

among the earthbound stars you rise and set among.

I shall name comets after you with occult names

that bend their path toward the sun once

and then are seen no more like the passions

of fireflies enamoured with the stars.

And I shall sing of you like a poet

worthy of a lover’s farewells

on this road of smoke unravelling

like the plans of a man when the lanterns

of the starmaps go out like the star sapphires

of your eyes in the paling dawn as you walk away.

Millennia shall pass, eras fade, futures deteriorate,

and time silt the world with the ashes and dust

of stars that never shone down upon us,

most evanescent of all the waterbirds

that rose from the lake to disappear like our tears

among these sleepwalking ghosts of the mist

returning to their graves and the waves

will not forget what it was like to be graced

by the compound bows of the black swans

that fletched the spirit’s arrows with the feathers

of an eclipse that revealed us to each other

like the stigmata of a wounded bliss in the dark.

And wherever your hands found me

I shall wander in the labyrinths of your fingertips forever,

preferring the way I was lost and homeless in you,

to the thresholds and doorways of lovers to come

who will know me by name, but never understand my eyes

nor the bracelets of rain that have aged

like the orbits of binary stars dancing in tree rings

around my heartwood, nor why the nightbird sings alone

to the moonsets that have fallen like blossoms from my boughs,

still true to the vows we never made to one another.

PATRICK WHITE

IN A DARKENED ROOM

IN A DARKENED ROOM

In a darkened room I see shadows in the hall

moving under the door like an astronomer

counting the planets around a distant star,

transits and occlusions and axial perturbations

of insight into the possibilities of life.

And more than life, it seems, at times,

the cosmic odds of love not being the victim

of the way it has to live to preserve itself.

Yevtushenko writing Lima Junction, first line:

As we get older we get honester. Most of us

either exhausted into the truth, too lazy to lie,

or trying to make an anonymous impression upon life

like the Burgess Shale on a grailquest for oxygen.

How much can be made of so little. Predators

growing eyes and prey encased in exoskeletons.

Pikaia drops a thin lifeline into the waters of life

and everyone’s been climbing up their spine

like scarlet runners and serpent fire ever since.

Burning siege ladders storming the parapets of heaven.

Thermophilic cyanobacteria the hard drive of the planet

look at the software that’s evolved from that

like happy apps to keep our left front parietal lobes amused.

I never planned on a purpose in life. I think

all paradigms of the truth are potential liars.

There’s something more honest about an iron chain

than a gold. One smells like blood on the snow,

the other, too much cologne on a sunset. Religion,

art, science, the disclaimers of secular spiritualism

like a ghost denying the gene pool it’s hovering over,

all well and good, the junkie’s got his moonrock,

and we’re well protected by an umbrella

of intercontinental, ballistic Clovis points,

and the shepherds of the black camel, obviously oil,

are raising tall buildings in the desert like the horns of unicorns

among the obelisks and minaras, and I’ve got

more ways of expressing myself than I’ve got

things to say, but, hey, it’s the twenty-first century

and still the heart’s the mushroom cloud of a stromatolite.

Lady I wish it were stars and fireflies with me too

all of the time, windfalls of golden apples

in the orchards of the Hesperides, ripening

like the halos and auras of moondogs

and mystics wheeling in their shadows

at the crossroads of sundials in a vertiginous trance

at the thought of meeting you like a willow at midnight

at the zenith of a bridge in an aquatic garden on the moon

where the mindstream is always at ease

with the oceanic night sea it’s flowing into

and the poppies in our blood were dancing like solar flares

to the wild timbrels of the savage celebration

of the conflagration of life they were returning to

like a watershed of light. Fire flows in the dragon’s veins

and a corona of solar flares turns into a rosette of flame-throwers.

Fossils flower in our starmud as the earth’s answer to constellations.

No suffering. No salvation. And the physician left

to heal himself. First from his ignorance. Then the wound

of salvation itself. Private conjuring put on public view

is propaganda, not spiritual art. I have a symbolic mind.

A paleolithic future. I wear the hides of my insights

like wolfs’ heads. I die like a shaman in front of my paintings.

Bury my bones under the hearthstones like a pyre of kindling.

Spit paint my portrait in red ochre like dried blood

bound by animal grease. There are elk horns

in the middens of my starmud, mother of pearl in my eyes

like another moonrise whispering strange dream grammars

that express the solitude of the creatures of night.

And an inexplicable longing to understand the mystery of sorrow.

Were the first hominids troubled by the birth signs

of the new mindscape they were emerging into

as most of us migrating with the big-game stars into

the available futures of our vagrant imaginations

looking into an abyss of gaping astonishment and silence

at ancient galaxies rising like smoke from distant fires,

realizing we are not alone with our genetic codes

like surrealistic poems looking for happy mutations.

Relative to the future memories of stars yet to shine,

we’re all troubled apes in prime time trying to crack

cosmological koans with the rocks of good ideas.

Sponges filtering the krill of the stars through our pores.

Wisdom teeth pushing up through our jawbones

under the molars of the bi-valved goose-necked barnacles

of our observatories on wilderness mountaintops

several mirrors closer to deciphering the stars

as the creation of the intel of our own senses.

No dirt. No pearl. Whether you throw it before swine or not.

The true harvests of the soul are still sown

under the fertile crescents of your fingernails.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

THIS OR THAT DELUSIONAL CHOICE

This or that delusional choice, great exercises of the will,

chromatic aberration of the optics of consciousness,

must there be a you, must there be an I

for us to understand each other, paint rags of a dream,

fleeting lines of a poem uncoiling like smoke from a candle

a gust of jealous stars blew out to make a bigger impression

upon the dark. Radiant fossils of the constellations,

every star in their eyes down to Albireo in the tail of the Swan,

a brilliant mutation, a masterpiece of evolution

tweaking its own creation with hotspots of genius,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

must our thought waves divide the sea of awareness

that isn’t troubled by its own weather on the turbulent surface,

or the low pianissimos of its kingfishers at peace with the fish

in a halcyon mood with each other like a truce of music

in which we drown like the moon every night,

a sword of light returned in tribute to the waters

wounded by the beauty of an act of grace

like a tiny stone in an oyster shell that lacquered it

into a lunar pearl hanging from the neck of the earth.

Must there be a you, must there be an I,

when our theta-waves are weaving a flying carpet

under both our feet pacing back and forth

like the shuttle-cock heartbeats of clacking looms

in front the windows, worried like needles in haystacks

if someone were going to pop our balloons of laughing gas

like joy’s grape against the palettes of our mouths,

extemporizing Keats at a Grateful Dead concert,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the iron in our blood is still

the youngest bell of the sun at the marriage of light

where atomic numbers join together

that which none can put asunder,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when we’re both children of the same fire-womb,

same dragon mother, same midwife, same wet nurse of the earth?

Separation is not real in an interdependently originated world.

There are quantum entanglements like little knots

in our hair, wild comets that just got out of bed,

hearts being what the other needs as they change

their spin like partners in a dance of stars at the crossroads

of the wind when it gleefully loses its sense of direction

like starmaps and leaves in the euphoria

of an autumn that put its burdens down

on the soft shoulders of the road and walks on

lighter than freedom, more naked than water,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

where two rivers join in an alloy insight and intuition,

is that not the secret meeting place of the imagination

where you know what the rocks are thinking

by the columbine growing out of their prophetic skulls

in the spring, and the vulvas of the visionary crocuses

get a leg up on the nuns of the snow, as if they hadn’t heard of sin,

but merely suggested they must be a good place for spring to begin,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

when the alluvial silt of our starmad settles on the fields

and gathers in the same delta renewed every year

at the annual flooding of the headwaters of the Milky Way?

If we both lied and said we were the victims of war,

there wouldn’t be anything left to fight over any more,

no tilting at the shadows and mirages of words

that don’t realize they all were born of the same mother-tongue

when every syllable was as sacred as a hermit thrush

in an aspen grove, and the wildflowers bloomed

from the bottom of their roots up, without saying a word,

like loveletters to the bees with irresistible R.S.V.P.s,

must there be a you, must there be an I,

and the God particle that doesn’t want to be identified

as the archon of gravity that lavishes on everything alike,

a gift of mass that gives us somewhere to stand in space,

face to face beside each other in the bilateral symmetry of the light

that doesn’t divide us a convenience of consciousness

whenever the mindstream needs a bridge and turns

the blueprint of one reflection toward another in order to build it?

Can you see how the star is the mother of the eye,

and the eye gives birth to Al Tair in Aquila,

as if the indissoluble bond between us and everything were

one long umbilical cord of seeing and being,

thrown out to us like the strong rope

of an unravelling string theory making waves

among the drumheads of the membranes resonating

with the parallel lifelines in a guitar shaped universe

to a lifeboat in the abyss that hauls us into it

so we could all meet each other like music

on this spherical dancefloor of a planet like earth?

Ignorance isn’t ignorant when it doesn’t discriminate

between itself and wisdom, and wisdom isn’t wise

if it does. Both revel in the same bliss

as the stars and the lightning and the fireflies

illuminating the aniconic darkness with mandalic kells

and constellations that never wear the same fire twice

like Isis, the Queen of Heaven, however young her future grows,

remembering all the cosmologies she abandoned in her youth

like lovers that couldn’t keep their eyes off her

as she hinted at dark secrets in her past that kept them glued

to the evanescence of her starmaps like a fragrance of light

reminiscent of many nights in the astral gardens of earth

among the lemons and the pomegranates, the grapevines

and the moon a gesture of water on the limbs

of the naked arbutus trees cooling off their sunburns.

Our eyes, twin navels of a world of wavelengths

that can never be tied off and cut by the knife

of consciousness if the Conservation of Data Principle

is true even in the deepest black holes, the singularity

of an original insight like the thought in your mother’s mind

at conception that contains each of us within the other,

worlds within worlds within worlds, shepherd moons

in the pearl beds of the elegant dreamers who can take

a bit of starmud and teach it to shine like a black sun at midnight

or an albino one at opalescent noon, a positive and a negative,

both sides of the same moon as the embryo emerges

in the womb of a dark room like a picture of the same music in all of us,

must there be a you, must there be an I, must

we grow heads upon our severed heads like grapevines,

hollyhocks, cemeteries, asteroids and hydras

because we don’t realize we’re all metaphors

seeking our likeness in the eyes of each other

to express the hidden secret in the lifelines of the poem

that wished to be known as the water, blood, light, love, night

of the one mind in all of us so elemental that what it writes,

what it expresses, what it unceasingly sings when it creates,

isn’t an image or sound that acquaints it with its own unlikeness,

but an ear, an eye, a tongue, a fingertip, a nose,

five open petals, five chemoreceptors, five original words

of the one flower that blooms in us like the mind

in all directions at once, like a star that turns its light around

to see itself like the past looking back on the future,

realizes, even after its light is spent and it’s deepening its insight

on the path of the black dwarf that doesn’t mean

there be a you, there be an I, that sprouts a rosary

of heads like prayer beads on a spinal cord

that snaps and scatters the mindstream over a precipice

like a waterfall of separate grains of wheat

ingathered by the wind in the siloes of the abyss

into a single harvest of broken loaves and a string of fish

like baby shoes. That doesn’t mean when the music’s over

turn your eyes out. That doesn’t mean standing here together

in the dark feeling the same astonishment, fear, and love,

three waves of the same mind, that we can’t see, that we’re blind,

that the poem we’re writing to Arcturus in the crowns

of the black walnut trees, or the crows in the sumac, ever

comes down to any one line like a hummingbird in the larkspur,

that isn’t the undiscriminating end and beginning

of everything all at the same time.

PATRICK WHITE

THERE ARE MASKS

There are masks I will not wear,

backstage wardrobes I won’t dress up in,

lives someone else can star in,

fires that will never feather my voice,

or sweep the shadows

from my palace of ice and eyes,

faces that will never hang like fruit

from any bough of my being,

daggers I won’t bury in the wounds

they inflicted like mouths

the tongue has been cut out of,

dignities of desire

that will not circle the roadkill,

my wings linked to the foodchain.

My heart will never labour

like the ox of a bell under a yoke,

though I plough the starfields;

nor will I fill its rivers

with leeches and eclipses

and let it sip the blood of others

to nourish my own lust.

I will not smudge the clarity of my heat

with greenwood, not sacrifice

the hawk’s eye for the ant’s,

cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.

I will not eat the days

like spoonfuls of my own ashes,

a martyr to my own orthodoxies,

trying to be true to a creed of fire

that moves underground like a root-fire

in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame

smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,

trying to put itself out with its own tears

for the best of reasons,

for lost earrings in a coffin.

Anyone can see

you’re a raven worthy of silver

who’s roofing her wings with tin,

an urgent orchid with flare

trying to bloom in the shadow

of a nightshift toy factory.

Your wingspan

should be measured in horizons

from dawn to dusk; and you

free to ride your own thermals,

to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter

under the door of the wind,

to take the hood off your sky

and explore your own vastness,

all the bridges you built

to lie in the shadows

of the burning cherry trees,

true to your own emergency,

true to your own fingertips and eyes,

the impulse of the serpent at the gate

who whispers to you like skin

when the candles go out,

who comes to you like water to a witching wand

a root-god to the poppy

that shudders with black lightning

to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,

to drown in the black rose

of an exquisite oblivion,

naked in a moist parachute that blooms

like a smile you’d thought you’d lost.

The butterfly can’t be

stuffed back into the cocoon,

the bird back into the egg,

the pearl back into the grain of sand

that grew a palace

out of the tiniest foundation stone.

Fire is not a flower of ashes

that sheds its petals twice.

There are roads that disappear

like stray threads of hair

over our shoulders

even as we walk them,

every step farewell and arrival,

as time yeasts the envelope

with crucial stars that make things happen,

the wheatfield of an autumn letter

in the loaf of the hollow mailbox

rising like dawn out of a dark mouth

over its own harvest.

You can’t live forever like a sentence

balked at the fang marks of the colon

you can’t remember biting you.

Because life is not punctuated

any more than space,

things will follow

the promise of the serpent’s tattoo

to die back into life,

the black lioness

of your passionate constellation,

not a nun at the stake

of a forbidden lust to live,

but a new moon at the opening gates

of the parenthetical secret

between two crescents.

Are you afraid

to let your life graze like wild horses

on the grasslands

of your own transformations,

do you desecrate a greater law

to obey a smaller;

would you tie your last lifeboat,

your last island full of moonlight

to the sunken pillars of a wharf

that aged like a palace,

an endless prelude

to a book of farewell

that collapsed under the weight

of its own hesitation

to read itself to the end?

Even now your foundation-stones

are turning into quicksand

and the abyss

of what you must jump into

to follow your wings

out of the barnyard

opens like a mouth

trying to clear a wishbone

or a song from its throat.

Are you afraid

to give up your collection of hats,

those skies and overturned nests you walk under,

a hawk behind chicken-wire

for a bough in the wild

without a return address?

I want to hear the nightbird sing

that dazzles the serpent

with the joy of her own being,

slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell

to seize her in the dark rapture

of his amorous coils

and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,

the secret oceans of bliss

that lie hidden

in every drop of blood, every tear

that falls from the thorns

of the black star that burns like a rose

in the mouth of the dragon

that is waiting like wings

at her bruised heel

for her to wash off the old mythologies,

naked in the eye of the rain,

and mount the taboo and eclipse

of her own repealed desire

and fly from the graveyard firepits

of the grounded comets

praying for a match in hell

to light the pyres of their own cremations.

Ill omen or good,

the brush is loaded with red,

with roses, blood, fire,

and the sky is primed

like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.

Staring will not paint the apple

you want to bite into,

install the serpent like a voice

in the tree that tempts you,

run the fingers of the nightwind

through your raven hair like a mad pianist

trying to tune your keyboard

to the crazed scales of the full moon.

If you want to dance naked

under chandeliers of black cherries,

alive enough to get away with yourself

don’t turn your eyes to glass

and scan the heavens

like the small end of a telescope

to see if you can spot your own approach

like an astronomical catastrophe

that will burn the house down,

the matchbook flaring of a coffin

that docks like a death-boat

to take on a cargo of ashes;

but lay down one stroke of paint,

risk your own interstellar spaces once,

leap like a wounded dolphin

from the wave of the mirror once,

and life will strew stars in your path

that will awake the dreamer

like gardens in the furrows

of your salted fields.

You will stop living

like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

before the blaze of your own hunger

for heat and light

and run like a sudden thaw of honey

from the frozen hive

that wants to ride its own melting

like a forge pouring out the hot metals

of the enchanted swords

the dark magicians plunge into the stone

to sort the jesters from the crowns.

PATRICK WHITE