MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

MY LONELY ISLAND MUSIC

My lonely island music,

already I see in your eyes, devastation in the dead zone,

skulls littering the field, autumns wandering away

weeping like windows that mistook themselves for the sky

and murdered a bird. Mystic September, vamp of this vision,

how could the moon not leap from my tongue

in praise of the world that shines through you

bathing alone in the dawn of every moment, utterly

alive, your beauty the page of a unwritten scripture

poised in the ink at the nib of every blade of grass to say

beyond the saying

what can’t be said. How unbearably sad

in this defeated hour that so few know the truth

that walks ahead of them like their own footprints

returning to the door they left by, already lost,

their houses, foundation stones of quicksand. Get it right in the seed,

get it right in the root of the eye, let the wind

take the ashes, sweep the shadows from the stairs,

and all the moons of yesterday are caravans of blossoms on the water.

Get it wrong and you’re a widow plundering corpses

for wedding rings and pocket-watches, black rain

on the open eyes of the dead. Devoid of transcendence

in the mirroring awareness, on a diet of fire,

you’ll end up combing your hair with a ladder.

Can you hear this bell of green before it rings, can you see

the painting in your blood before the brush is lifted

like a maggot of consciousness to the rose?

If you can, then check your shadow at the threshold

and walk naked into the far fields of your seeing, your feet

on the ground, your head in the stars; if you can’t,

you’re deepening your ignorance by ignoring your depths,

your light passes over itself like an eclipse or the hand

of a black magician, conjuring. Peril in the seeing.

A mask of frost over the surgical face of the heart. Understand

deeply and with authority that this dream cannot be understood,

taste this dream for yourself and look once

into the brilliant darkness that lies beyond wisdom and forsaking

and acknowledge in a crown of water

you are queen of that, your own teacherless realms.

Can’t you feel the roots of the black orchid of this space

wounding the soil with the stars of another night-sky

already opening above and below you? Rightly and brightly,

you are that opening, the sum of all the awareness of the whole of your life

expressed in the unborn no-point of a star of perception in space,

blue knowledge beyond the scope of the death-sighted.

Why study your own legends like snapped twigs on the trail

and send yourself in a straitjacket to school

when you already know by heart

the book of the breath you must live? Open your fist. Where

did it go? What’s in your hand? Do you understand? Our lives

are the shadows of birds sown like seed across the skies,

fish-maps printed on water, compasses looking for directions

that don’t exist. We are brief and we are vital, pilgrims

on a bridge of ancient zeroes, angels under every stone,

gypsies at home. Hold your life up like a match to a mirror in a dark room

to see whose face it is

then blow yourself out like an orchard

before blazing becomes a kind of blindness.

Put the world to your lips like a finger

in the black clarity of the silence. Do you see, do you see

the white songbird of the moon enter the throat of the well

to flaunt its plumage privately in an empty theater,

the roar of the ghosts of the infinite aeons for applause,

the sound of one hand clapping? Anciently, you were so

and now you are so

and tomorrow after tomorrow you shall be so, hidden

right under your own nose, calling yourself like a girl to her friend

when the game is over to come out of hiding. Most people

never understand more than a keyhole and a whisper of themselves,

trembling behind the dangerous doors of their own names

when they’re called to come out and play

with a universe that begins in every moment,

a fire-fly in a canning jar. They graze on the fodder of illusions,

domesticated by their own cupboards and cowardice,

peopling the wilderness beyond their artificial paradise

with demons that threaten to behead them in a palace coup

for the genuine liberation of an empty throne.

The blossom doesn’t know its own beginning,

nor the snowflake, its end. Can you find your true face

in this mirror of echoes,

the one you wore before the birth of silence?

I shall come looking for you like the wind

and I shall find you among trees and flowers

and among the grasses of the fields

and in the living light that breathes over the harvest

and in the water-mind of the stream that flexes the reeds

and playfully graces the ripe honey of the sun

with a sweetness unknown to the business of bees. No inside, no outside,

everywhere I step is the arrival and the walking of my blood

the whole of the way to you from whom I cannot be separated,

slipped like a letter under a door that opens, a mouth in space,

to paint the moon on an eye of scarlet water. One leaf falling,

the whole history of the world

in the way I love you by letting go; in the way

when you are closest, your heart, the thunder

of subtle intimacies in a lost well,

I drown in the vastness like a bird in the reflection of the sky,

happy refugees all along the side-roads of my nerves,

my mind, a fool of the moon, all parade and passage.

Do you understand? Not different, not the same,

we are rain on a window, faces beyond

the blindness of mirrors that use our eyes to see.

In every feather, in every leaf, in every flight of the word

ten thousand dawns, all of the earth,

this emptiness within emptiness singing to itself in the void.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

DON’T TRY TO FORCE ME TO MY KNEES TO PAY HOMAGE

Don’t try to force me to my knees to pay homage to the world

you’re living in, and I won’t ask you to verify my last mirage.

Let’s just pass through each other imperturbably intense

as two cosmic events encountering in this immensity

like galaxies in a ghost dance when the night

is an abysmal radiance, and I’m mystically intrigued

with the turn of your earlobes, oysters making pearls,

where silver ripples of rain are hooped like the orbits

of shepherd moons on a concentric abacus of prayer-beads,

and though I’m not trying to account for anything,

what metaphors they might have in common

with the golden ratio of sunflowers and seashells.

I want to bathe naked with you in the sacred pools

of a silence that isn’t polluted by the history of our sorrows.

Even if they prove as waterproof as a twelve volume tattoo

they’ll wash off in the stars if you scrub hard enough.

I want to look at you with innocent eyes again and again

directly into the eyes of a human insight into creation

and the occult labour of enlightened destruction

that follows in the wake of winged heels that are blown

like blossoms off the green boughs of their night songs

so that an apprentice of your heart like I am

might sweeten like an art in the afterglow

of the many journeys, many sunsets that have flavoured it

like an old brandy remembering what it was like to be a young wine.

I don’t want to broker your light through the middle man

of a lens, a mirror, a window that treated its stars like dirt.

I don’t want to analyze why you’re sitting on the futon

crying, and feel the supple silence after I ask you why

rigidify into a maze of lab rats looking for antidotes

to a snakepit of radioactive wavelengths that can’t be trained

to bite somebody else if that’s what’s on their mind.

Why spring? Why autumn? Why passions you pick up

like a fever from the stars on a hot summer night

when you fall in love with the cool poultice of the moon

lying like a waterlily pad on your forehead, trying

to draw the infection out like enlightenment from

the iris of your third eye rooting in the spiritual looking glass

of a crystal skull suffering from the chromatic aberration of its rainbows?

I promise not to shatter your delusions, if you

never stop setting my doorways on fire everytime

you walk into the room like a total eclipse of the senses

in black underwear with a smile like a starmap on your face.

I want to walk down a long, country road at night

with you in a state of grace that intensifies

the hermit thrush’s longing for the unattainable.

I want to feel your golden needle penetrate my voodoo heart

like a love song that never mended, a wound

even the latest surgeons don’t know how to stitch up.

If I praise your body like the resurgence of a sea on the moon,

don’t misconstrue that as an insult to the fire

on the altar of your mind. If I touch you and light comes

on the first day of creation to the fingertips of the blind,

how is that different from nocturnal wildflowers

opening like eyes in the starfields of the mystically inclined?

If I seek illumination from the dark mysteries of the blood

like a black rose in a cult of thorns, and my intensities

engender life forms on planets that seem uninhabitably mad to you,

and you’re not convinced there are evergreens that germinate

and bloom like a Zen garden of pine-cones in fire,

I won’t challenge the evanescent vapour of a dream

that’s haunting you like the fragrance of a song for the dead

you can’t get out of your clothes, or those boas of moonlight

that feather the bays and contours of your lonely island shores

as if someone who had drowned in the emotional undertow

of your breakers, trying to get to you, were about to be

washed up like the master of some lost purpose

under the eyelid of the next wave, and you, just out of reach.

I will not ask you what that was. Enigma favours you.

More than one petal on a sundial and time flowers

in all directions at once. I will not disturb the dead

that are buried in you. I have my own, and sharing

isn’t disclosure. Tell your ghosts they’re as free

to answer the seance of your longing as they ever were.

I don’t expect you to translate the poetry of your silence

into the same language you speak to me in, nor the river

to uproot the tributaries of the lifelines that sustain it.

In every affair, one is the grammar, and the other,

the inspiration of the holy book they collaborate on

like the biography of water’s fathomless afterlives.

And none of the rules, like your tears, indelible

should the wind or the rain decide to wash them out

like a flashflood of stars in a spring run-off

that sweeps your heart downstream like a message

in a bottle for someone else should you decide

you need a stable bridge not an unmoored lifeboat like me.

If you’re attached to the danger of living as I am

when I’m with you, who’s in need of saving

when you can drown a whole ocean of sacred syllables

in a few simple tears or a dragon of crazy wisdom

with fireflies in its eyes and a moonrise in its heart

in a single star in the rear view mirror of last night’s dream

where objects, like lovers, are always closer than they seem.

PATRICK WHITE  

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

SOMEONE TOOK THE GREY DAY LIKE A DIRTY RAG

Someone took the grey day like a dirty rag

and wrung all the sunshine out of it.

Ten thousand poems bloom like flowers,

beam a little light back to the stars

and go back to seed before I’ve put

a word to the page. Infinite worlds,

infinite possibilities and all of them

inter-reflectively true. All the cosmic eggs

hatch out like a choir in a nesting church.

Pick a nightbird and give it your voice.

See if you can sing the frequencies of the stars.

The mystery doesn’t exist until

you start exploring it. Not to prove

how wonderful you are. Take my word for it

we’re all uniquely magnificent each

in our unexploited way. Liars err

on the charming side of the truth.

If you ever had an emotion as big as that

you wouldn’t be able to lift it.

Just because you sit down at your desk

like a sacred clown with a bag of bruised balloons

doesn’t mean your feelings are

universally inflatable. Tell a big enough truth

often enough, and everyone will deny it.

Look. They’re laying salt and sand

down on the icy roads like a Kuiper belt

of asteroids. Whatever you can’t

relate to here you befriend in other worlds.

Long before Heisenberg, lovers discovered

the truth of uncertainty principles,

spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement.

Cookie-cutters of black matter

shaping templates of dough sprinkled

with galaxies for the abyss next door.

I’m plotting a starmap of my neurons

and everyone of the poems I write

is a myth of origin in someone’s eyes.

The wind doesn’t fuss over the seeds it sows.

I’ve seen wild columbine like a tender carillon

of fragile bells suggested by the rain

growing out of the skulls of Cambrian rocks.

Even the lifers at Millhaven have poetry in them.

Deepen the darkness of your own nightfall

if you want to see the same stars they do.

You want to radiate like the stargates of Orion,

shine with the brilliance of Sirius in solitude,

show up like a bad penny in an abyss

of the first magnitude and see if the moon

comes up heads or tails, bearing in mind

the donkey at the end is in the lead

when the electron reverses its spin

without an intervening medium or even

a reasonable alibi. -290 on the dark side

of Mercury that close to the sun, what’s

the point of deciphering the scars of crescent moons

on icy membranes laid out like rinks in hyperspace

when you could be out there with the rest of the quarks

figure-skating for yourself like the language of poets

who don’t know what they’re dying for,

but let the heart make a generous guess.

Here’s one. Elaborate as sophisticated a universe

as you want out of your own simplicity

and where it stops is your seabed for the night

and write of all the myriad forms of life

that thrive in your dreams, agonistically

dependent upon one another and exhilarated

by the rush of a creative avalanche see

if you can make the same indelible impression

with sacred syllables of your own upon life

as the Burgess Shale without your name on the cover.

PATRICK WHITE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

PUTTING A LITTLE FINESSE IN MY SOLITUDE

Putting a little finesse in my solitude

I befriended a river as the intimate familiar

of my mindstream flowing under three bridges

of my vertebrae where I can stop where I’m going

once and awhile and look down, just look down,

look down a long time into the rippling

reflection of the sky’s third eye looking up at me

as if we shared the same tears in common.

The swallows nest in heritage stone along the canal.

And the moon, the willows, the lime-green water tower

trying to look colossally spaced out among the trees

plunge their images into consciousness like a telescope

without an inverting mirror to reorient them.

As above so below. Twenty stars at the most

due to light pollution, I walk past a Brink’s truck

emptying the vaults of the bank, looking

suspiciously unsuspicious as I step into a crossfire

of overenthusiastic hellos from the flaps unbottoned

on their guns trying to pass for one of the locals.

Back door out of town, upstream half a mile

where things aren’t quite as dangerously trivial

and the stars aren’t cosmetically occluded by make-up

and I can hear the river walking on its own waters

like moonlight writing wave functions in chalk on a blackboard.

Everything feels closer to eternity out here

in plain view of what there is to cherish, perishing

as I remember a woman I’ve remembered for so long

without ever stepping into the same recollection twice

like the eye of a jeweller swimming through star sapphires

as if the patina of time hadn’t found a way

to dull their shining yet, cling to their translucency

like a snakepit of oil, breathe on their clarity

like a milky cataract mistaking a window for a crystal skull.

Here, I can say she was beautiful and it doesn’t

echo across the waters like the night call

of a distant bird always saying farewell to the music

of some hidden tree the wind’s been playing

like a flute for the last twenty years. It’s crucial

to give your past a future to look forward to

so it can go on growing in your absence

like the painting of a garden you planted and abandoned

like a constellation of crocuses breaking through the snow

to get the rest of the way there according

to their own starmaps. Follow their own shining

wherever it leads, as mine keeps leading me here

where I can tend the beauty of the wound she left me

without listening to all kinds of scar tissue

offer me well-meaning worldly unasked-for advice

like scalpels of the moon that wanted to cut

my heart out of my chest like an ice-age arrowhead

congealed out of my blood like flint-knapped rose petals

long before the rock doves discovered

the invention of the bow like the shadow

of the wingspan of a ferruginous hawk.

Even if you were to uproot all your sorrows

like weeds from your solitude, what have you done

but exhume the lightning from your own grave,

defang the crescents of the moon from the serpent fire

at the base of your spine? Shame your passion

with a fire escape, burn out like the root-fire

of a candle into an echo of smoke that smudges

the bats from the house of the zodiac you were born under

like sage and smouldering cedar boughs that never

break into flame? No. She was beautiful

and as much as it hurts to remember that

clear-eyed as winter water worthy of the moon,

because she’s gone like the fork of a river

that’s moved on like the other half of a wishbone

from this our secret meeting place,

and the sadness and the beauty of the fireflies

that are missing among the paradigms of the stars

that once echoed their earth bound radiance

sometimes leave an abyss in my heart

a thousand deaths wide I’ll never be able to fill,

still, like the ghost of a phoenix unfeathered

like the staghorn sumac in the fall by the wind,

though space burn as hard and cold as glass,

I will spread my wings and rise like a fire

equal to the moment in passing that shines

through my tears like the arcing flightpath

of an arrow of light dipped in the waters of life.

I will celebrate my wounds as a measure

of how deeply I was seized

by what was irrevocable about her eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE STRAIGHT UP BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET

IN THE STRAIGHT UP BUILDING ACROSS THE STREET

In the straight up building across the street,

a master work of stone masons dead at least a hundred years,

now abused as a bank, the fieldstones that were pink in the dawn,

roseate quartz, are still yellow as wheat in the dusk.

Mood rings of the way the light feels about things.

Milky blue sky and grimy windows, a crystal menagerie

of perfectly still mobiles and stained glass stars

with stubby white candles waiting

for someone to light their wicks with conviction

hanging from cuphooks on the windowframe

to glean the lean insights of the light in winter.

I adorn my solitude with a palace of translucencies

in a dumpy upstairs studio apartment. I paint

the walls of the cave my prophetic skull contains

like an abyss in the palette of my emotions

with starlike things and wheeling solar systems

that would make you think the only path in life to take

is dancing around one another, pendulously suspended

from thin silver chains linked like ripples of rain

into the vertebrae of slender spines, gleaming stems

of the low hanging fruits of the earth. Among them. My brain.

Deep blue jars on the windowsill, mystic nights

in a poor man’s cathedral, how many highbeams

on the cars passing down below like blood cells

have they brought to enlightenment without

anyone realizing it as the achievement of their usual discipline?

That wisdom is as capricious as beauty about

the fathomless lucidities of life that happen in the blink of an eye.

The light doesn’t insult time apportioning out its gifts.

One firefly’s enough to ignite an entire universe.

Icons of bliss. I make a shrine to the light of any place

I’m living in. I illuminate the innate darkness

that overtakes me from time to time like an eyeless nightsky.

Black holes in my galactic spirit crazed for the light

that sends out missionaries to convert their void bound invisibility

through the medium of my sensory starmud into wildflowers

blooming like starmaps of my imagination all over the earth.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I COULD NEVER REMEMBER YOU IN GARISH PACIFIC SUNSETS

I could never remember you in garish Pacific sunsets

or the luster of opalescent Ontario dawns.

These would be ill-fitting gowns, wrong

wardrobe of metaphors to clothe you in, you

who loved to wear the moonlight like water on your skin

and your heart like the blood of a black cherry on your sleeve,

that the rain, and I saw how hard it tried like a watercolourist,

could never wash out. When I looked

as deeply into the nightsky of your eyes as I could,

six thousand stars lavished on the dark to the naked eye,

I always saw a white tailed doe looking back at me

from the brindled woods where they opened into the starfields

and I let the silence surmise old dangers had made you shy.

I could never remember you as you were and fix

the image in amber like a butterfly in a paper weight

as time wept glacially by like an ice-age in an hourglass.

Shapely as the cedar candelabra of a passionate forest fire,

you were the elegant daughter of dragons, the willow witch

of your own desires, and you spoke to my body

in the occult languages you kept alive for the sake of the dead

who were always with you like voices in your sleep.

I put this albino abyss of a snowblind canvas on my easel

like the negative starmap of the nightsky I imagine

death to be, so the wind can colour outside the lines

of the constellations as you were fond of doing

with an elfin kind of glee like a happy bell

you’d hung around the neck of something bleaker

as you often did with your life as if you were

bending space to your will like a black hole

at the nave of your galactic prayer wheel

turning in the wind like the golden ratio of a sea star.

I paint you in the picture music of a wounded heart

punctured like a matador on the thorn of the moon

as I looked upon you haunting your solitude

and knew like the last crescent in the book

of waning scars, there were some roses

just too beautiful in what they’d made of their pain

to heal. The eyelids of black roses shadowed

by penumbral eclipses of carboniferous mascara.

The deepest starwells of our sorrows flower

into the most expansive fountains of compassion,

and what a tender champion the small things of the world

found in you. The starling under the windowpane,

the Monarch butterfly that just stopped like

a slim volume of poems, intact, at the moment of perfection

denying death its deconstruction, and those

dozens of shepherd moons that showed up

like the skulls of racoons and groundhogs in the grass,

relics of a tragic past you arranged like asteroids

on the windowsills of your studio like the eastern door

of an Ojibway burial hut you adorned with the feathers

of red-tailed hawks until the autumn moon

could free their spirits from their bones.

I could never remember you as a blue-jay

among the sunflowers, you were never as abrupt

and decisive as that. You beaded all parts

of the disassembled world into the flowing

of one long continuous wavelength of a rosary

like different skulls with a variety of names

for the same spinal cord of a narrative theme

that whispered, like your life, louder

than the savage sparrowhawks of your emotions

shrieking out in predatory pain and as I remember well

how your eyes would grow wider than owls

or the new moons of Spanish guitars

when you were astonished by the symbolic depths

of some black pearl of transformative wisdom

you’d discovered dreaming on the seabed of your heart

like a lunar eclipse among the feathered corals.

The red violet that lingers over a city on a cloudy night

and saturates the air with tinctures of iodine and diluted blood,

I will add that hue to the palette of your likeness,

and glaze the bricks in the sphinx gate of your moonrise

with ultramarine blue and fleck the lapis lazuli

of your nightsky with gold paint on the bristles

of a toothbrush to simulate stars pouring out of

the watersheds of Aquarius to cool the scorched roots of things

in sacred pools and fountains inextinguishable pain

found its way to as if you were some kind of Gothic cathedral

cratered out of the moon like a river of stone

that taught the outcasts and the damaged fruits of life

how to flow up the stairwells of their renewal

with the courage of wild salmon called home from the sea.

I knew it was crucial not to make a mess of my dying

the night you left, to honour the spirit of the life

we had lived together, to make the end

as charismatically intriguing as the beginning had been.

So something inspired by our separation

could keep growing beyond us like a bridge

where incomplete solitudes could meet as strangers

and say farewell to one another like full siloes

in the plenum-void, whole as the sun and the moon

who go on shining in the darkness of ten thousand lonely nightfalls

not as the undoing of the dawn in the broken mirrors of the stars

but as a way of housing the buckets and bells of their tears

under the strong rafter of the well by the locust trees

blossoming among its thorns in the spring to summon the bees

that once sang to us, as if honey had a voice so poignantly sweet,

however deeply gored the heart by the horns of the moon,

waxing or waning, full or eclipsed, it never left scars on the music.

PATRICK WHITE

THE WESTERN LIGHT

THE WESTERN LIGHT

The western light

comes right in through my windows

and glows in a golden haze on the dirty panes.

It slashs geometric shadows on my landscapes

like some mad abstractionist

who took them way too personally.

And all they said

was moon tree star light stone flower river sun

as if that were enough of a vocabulary

to say the whole of creation

quietly under your breath

like a secret that’s shared by everyone.

Guess I’m not enough of an ideologue

to comb the swamp for my own skeleton

like the ancestor of modern art.

I’ve gazed too long and hard

at the waterlilies in the Fall River

as if I were meditating on koans

that effortlessly open by themselves

not to waste my mind on anything

that didn’t include my heart

like a work in progress

like a river on its way to the ocean.

Dark soon.

The night sheds petals of insight

like moonlight making waves

on the shoreless seas of enhanced awareness

where I stand like a human candle

with my little standard of flame

trying to light up the universe

so I can see what I am in the depths

of my own eyes.

If I’m the tragicomic clown of my own catastrophe

or if there’s something more profound

going on around me

than time and light

glancing off the mindstream

like birds against the delusive skies

that lie like the windows of insight

until you break through them

like the sun at midnight

shining its light

on a conspiracy of mirrors

against the moon.

I must have been mad before I was born

to see things the way I do now.

Everything is inconceivably probable somehow

like a fortune-cookie

that’s had its tongue cut out

for telling lies to the emperor

or the lack of a sign

for the thirteenth house of the misbegotten

in the neighbourhood watch of the zodiac.

Even when you lose your purpose in life

like a passport in a borderless country

you can still hang on to your identity

like a willess work engendered out of nothing.

You can still firewalk the ghost road of smoke

like stars under the feet of the dead

or follow your own breath

like a dancer that no one is leading.

It’s a surprise when you first come to see

that the greatest liberty of all isn’t death

but to cry as if you were bleeding

from a wound

so much sharper and deeper

than the poignancy of the knife that opened it

like a posthumous loveletter from the gods

you feel

reading your own fate

in the silence between their voices

as if forever hereafter

you could only be killed into life

and that every rafter of delusion

you ever sought shelter under

were the overturned hull of an empty lifeboat.

Sometimes I look at my life

like one of the splendid ambiguities

of a subtly nuanced godsend.

I try to befriend the way I feel

like the generous host

of a dangerous stranger

too cold and aloof

to introduce himself

as my shadow

my eclipse

my potential assassin.

I have tried to stay true to the lies

that led to the myth of my lucidity

like a mirage in a desperate desert of stars

I could drown in like an island

up to to the neck of an hourglass

in tidal waves of quicksand

laying my life down

like the foundation stone

of an inverted pyramid

that yearns for the state of mind

he enjoyed before life

more than that that won’t come after.

I have refused to put the torch out in its own reflection.

I have not tried to uproot

the beauty of the waterlilies

opening their eyes like stars

from the decay and the lies

and the scars that sustain them.

I have put to good use

the dysfunction of delusion

to make a credible raft

to get me to the other side

of this river of shadows

swollen like a flashflood

in a lunar seabed.

I have danced with ghosts

like a lonely shaman

around the unappeasable fires

of desire and death

entreating the nightsky

to rain on my flowerless roots

and sweeten the severity

of the dragon’s eyes

with tears.

I have lived in such a way

to actualize the nameless reality

of a few common words

like love and understanding

I’ve kept alight like fireflies on the wind

and cherished them

as if the seeds of insight

were the perennial beginning

of enlightened orchards

that taste like the fruit of compassion.

I have lived in such a way

like a thief of keys

to relieve the locks

on the nightwatch

of their tunnel vision

that it’s not safe

to give my new address

to my old mailbox.

But even in a black out

I have not kept the light out

by plastering my windows with starmaps

or gone underground

like a blind star-nosed mole

that put its eyes out

to share something

in common with the dead

who would never have dreamed

they would all end up sleeping with their mothers.

I open them to receive the sun.

I close them to remember the stars

I’ve been dancing under

for lightyears

against the gathering storm

like a poor man’s chandeliers.

I have celebrated my defiance

of hitching a winged horse

to a hearse

by expressing the joy I take

in the revolutionary spontaneity

of my unself-reliance.

But of all the things

I’ve ever outgrown

or overthrown

like a sword from a bridge

I gave back to the sacred waters of life

the last to fall

was the ghostship in the mirage

of the image I had of me.

I poured myself out

like imaginary water

from a fountainmouth

in a real drought

to green the secret Edens

at the sacred crossroads

of the four rivers

that might come of it

as if X marked the spot

where I was standing

as the best place to start a garden

on the waterwheel of the mindstreams

that radiated out of its stillness like spokes.

Sometimes you end up stealing fire

when all along

you thought you were meant

to invent the wheel

or make up a new language

out of the echoes of dolphins

breaking into birdsong

as if they had turned in their feet

to go back to the sea

but had not forgotten

that their fins

could fly as easily

as the wings they once wore on their heels.

Many rivers flow into the one sea

and the sea returns to transcendence

back the way it came

without stepping into the same mindstream twice.

And I prefer to think

that the same thing is true of the multiverse.

Everything that shines in the night

or in the mind

down to the smallest spark of insight

locked like a firefly

in a lighthouse of ice

on the same omnidirectional course.

And true north

just the magnetic attraction

of a voodoo doll

in a haystack of needles

trying to get a bearing on things

like the right ascension

and correct declination

of a lost soul

summoned like a deranged galaxy

to the singularity

at the bottom of a blackhole

to exchange the light it goes by

by upgrading its eyesight

to search for itself in the night

on the higher frequencies

of X-ray vision

on board an experimental satellite.

And yet for all the myriad universes

that bubble up in hyperspace

like the last breath of the drowning

I have refused to live

like a diving bell in a wishing well

trying to understand

why nothing came true but the coins.

If you’ve never resolved anything in your whole life

maybe you were meant

to keep the mystery alive.

The medium is not the message

when the message is the mystery.

A meaningful medium

is nothing but meaningless words.

The sky doesn’t intend to say birds.

The water doesn’t mean fish

anymore than an infinite number of other things.

Nothing lives like a machine

for something as small as a purpose.

You don’t have to live like a lens

to keep the sun in focus.

And maybe one of the greatest blessings

of being on the nightshift

is that when the universe is out of work

it has no use for us.

We’re free to be when and whatever we want.

Or thoroughly protean.

Or nothing at all.

A full eclipse of the clock on the wall

or a chromatically aberrant nightlight

like a colour crazy star

low on the horizon of the hall.

As for me and my house

I’ve lost track of the number of times

I’ve brought my starmud to enlightenment

like a horse you can lead to water

but you can’t make drink.

The words crawl.

The words swim.

The words take to their wings

like eagles and dragonflies

and startled waterbirds.

Half a sliced pear

looks like a short-necked Spanish guitar.

But looking for the meaning of this

isn’t the same

as listening to the music.

PATRICK WHITE