IT’S GOOD TO KNOW

It’s good to know you’re there,

though the world is a diatribe

of waltzing trains and threshing razors,

it’s good to know

a door burns for me somewhere in the darkness,

a bell waits like a nipple of silence

and your blood waits like a language,

a rose of rain in a starfield,

that my mouth alone can say to the night

in a shudder of light that only the blind can hear,

sipping from a chalice of water

spiked with diamond nails.

My heart flashes across the sky

and buries itself like a meteor

at the cornerstone of a sightless temple

pillared by faithless candles

that flirt with the shadows

of the fire in their eyes,

and I’m bridges beyond any way back the way I came,

my wake the scar of a vapour trail

in yesterday’s cherry sunset,

and I still catch myself at my worst

whenever I’m good.

There’s always a thread of blood on the water,

and a half-finished suicide note on the mirror

scrawled in manic lipstick,

and a gravestone

I carry around on my shoulders like a skull

that feels like the weight of the world,

and a child leftover from an ancient crib-death

that is often afraid of me,

and a ferocity of freedom

that thaws my deepest thoughts like chains,

and bleaches every feeling like a wound

in the antiseptic of the sun

that bites like a mystic arrow

that was feathered with a message

before I was born to find me.

But it’s good to know

your fury and your gentleness,

the glow and heat of your chimneys and fireflies,

your altars of wind and smoke

spuming across the vastness of the solitude

like blood and chalk

and lines written after school

on the blackboard shale of my river skin

still trying to reform its way to the sea.

It’s good to look at the moon

through your passionate windows

and taste the fragrant honey of your darkness

attuning the tines of my tongue

to a fork in the road of your body,

to the delta of an unknown civilization,

to the mystery of rivers entwined like serpents.

And the vines of the words

that have sought me out

like blood vessels and burning bushes

and the blossoming fingers of someone

kneading a face

out of the huge volume,

the pure space of my unattainability.

O you have said things to me

in ink and water and brandy and fire,

in night and moonlight and poppies and tears

that have made the hardest rocks

on the highest slopes

of my mountains and cloudy ladders bleed

to be opened like a harvest of love-letters in a bomb-shelter

by the tenderness of your knives again and again,

urgent with beauty and joy

to be overthrown

by the whisper of your voice in the valley

triggering this skyborn avalanche

of nocturnal thrones.

And the bells turn into vases

and the vases into urns

and the urns back into the wombs

of a thousand terminal exiles

tolling like a heartbeat

with a passport and a threshold,

and though I am no longer

the leaf of hope

that aspired to rudder

the fire stream of these volcanic transformations,

it’s good to drift awhile

in the dreamtime of this endless night

like recoverable salvage

among the lanterns of your searching lifeboats

and the reaping eyes

of your eloquent islands of light.

PATRICK WHITE

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A MOMENT IN THE WORLD, WITH NO REGRET

A moment in the world, with no regret

I cancel the madness, the sadness, the hurt, the pain.

I cancel the thorns on the footpaths through

the labyrinths of the brain, I absolve the dragons

of the vows they took to protect the taboos

around the silver snake skins the moon shed

on the lake just before it went insane among

its secluded death masks. A nanosecond of peace

symbolically invoked against the gestures of darkness

calculating the odds of it ever happening

by a poet who lays his reason down

like the sacred syllable of an astrolabe in the grass

and shouts hallelujah at the stars until he’s got them

so well trained to the echoes of his voice

they spontaneously pour their best season of aged light

into the seashells and wine-cellars of his ears.

I short circuit the fuses and nerves

of the terrorist’s spinal cord wired to hatred

and say, brother, you can’t make a watergarden

of bloodshed in paradise by blowing up children

like waterlilies or trying to teach a snakepit

of downed powerlines to dance to the sound

of your Ousi or Ak-47 like a flute. Making scar tissue

of the moon isn’t proof of the sincerity of your wound.

Allah is great. Not petty, clever, and cunning.

Yahweh made friends with a man from Uruk.

Eve was a starlit night in Ethiopia and the mother

of us all. Adam means the red man. Melanin

is a mood ring. Our flags are torn like blossoms

from a bough. O improbable cause just for once

take the barking dog off the short chain of your mind

and will, and let it run free in a wild starfield

while you lie down in paradise alive and well now

writing love lyrics for the roses in the valleys

you wander into without forgetting the name of God.

And you put down the rod. You the whip. You

the voice and the tongue that throws acid

in the eyes of your native language like a spitting cobra.

You the book that drank saliva out of another man’s mouth

to justify the public fountains piped from the sewers

of the Via Cloaca of political affairs. Get

real naked, as nude as the truth, and take a bath

in the stars for once to see what a little bit of dirt

you really are, compared to the creative radiance

of their magnificence. Take a few minutes off the clock

and throw them like flower seeds that glow

in the dark starmud of your soul on the dungheap

of your ambitions and taking root like a heart

in your body again, a blessing of change

that transforms you from the inside out,

watch them bloom like starclusters of New England asters

with astronomical aspirations undeterred

by the black dwarfs of yours that burn out

like a matchbook of solar flares along the return journey

of the looping lightyears of the humbler eras

of your second innocence better than the first

because you’ve overcome the worst in yourself

the better to receive it as a gift you didn’t

give yourself behind your back like a shadow

of what it’s supposed to be. Put down your arrogance.

Put down your deceit. How far can you get in life

anyway? Think of the 3.5 billion years

of upright walking on the earth it took put one footprint

down on the moon. Already standing on two good legs

like pillars of the public why do you reach out for

the crutch of a human who’s only got one

on their lunar lander and as much hope

as the nostalgic ghost of a child amputee?

I’ll reserve judgement for another day, but for now

put it on hold as if you had another more important

call to take from a nightbird you haven’t heard from

in a long time, trying to clarify your original longing

for something just as real, as it is sublime

whether you attain it or not, or die happily in the attempt,

as long as it takes for an electron to jump

the quantum gap between orbitals to release

a photon of insight, stop underwhelming yourself,

the rest of us, and the world. On the face of it

we’re all on the same side of seeing as our eyes are,

the same bank of being as our presence here is

listening to our mindstreams whisper lyrical suggestions

to the prophetic skulls of moonrocks caught in the flow

like glacial lockets of an underground ice age

dreaming of a day it might rain on the moon.

Un-noose the knot wrapped around your neck

like the umbilical cord of a premature birth.

Unloose the Circlet of the Western Fish

and throw them back in the water to swim away.

Kick the stool away like rabies from a mad moondog

and take it as the first sign of a parallel universe

that today’s not a good day to commit suicide,

to kill someone, to injure and maim, to bully the earth

because you’re in debt to your own self-worth.

One riff of picture-music. One gust of stars

in the dread locks of the willows, one sip of time

running like clear water down from the world mountain again,

that isn’t polluted by the oilslicks of our own reflections in it,

one moment of silence, to stop and remember your death

like a muse that comes every night to sleep on your grave

because you failed at everything she urged you to do

and you did, by losing and growing, losing and growing

against the angel in the way you never hesitated to take on.

One little mutant side-step of evolution off the beaten path

so there’s no road kill in the wake of the journey

that’s revealing your life to you like crows and crocuses

in the spring, self immolations of sumac in the fall

because you’ve finally found something worth dying for

that demands nothing less than everything of your life

all the time you’ve got it like a burning candle

to befriend the light by flowering a little. Vetch

in the quantumly entangled starfields, or Lady at the Gate

over by the abandoned pump on the moon

with the broken trigger of a waxing handle for leverage.

PATRICK WHITE

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I CONCEDE MY FRETFUL BEGINNINGS

I concede my fretful beginnings to no one

because I was with the stars

before they began to shine, before

the first Adam of the primordial atom

stepped out of his shadowless glade,

and the worlds fanned out like birds from water

and the surreal sea dreamed of krill and corals

or the ghastly fumaroles of the expurgated heart

of the labouring earth

taught its thermophiles to live without light

like a memory displaced so deep in the mind

only the convulsions and catastrophes

of sunless winters severed from their vivid chains

like stillborns and candid moons

can waken it again to recall the swell

of the wave that gave it breasts

and its life on land in the mansions

of orphaned oxygen that taught it to breathe

and let its breath be vital to cherries and bees. I affirm

and celebrate my connection to everything

and my foot is not less than my hand

nor my blood merely the flag of my imperious brain;

and often at night when I’m alone

with my own poor, longing self

I can feel my eyes webbing the harp of my bones

with the soft night songs of my ancient minerals

and the sad, dark airs of my gypsy metals

slaying the iron roses in their teeth out of love.

I owe it all to everything, and everything to it,

and I am complete, even in my emptiness;

even in the desolation of galaxies and leaves,

even in the spoiling of my most cherished nativities,

the shedding of eyelids and black pollen

on the naves of the daisy wheels,

I am always full of the world, at home

with everything from the emerald wardrobes

of the friendless algae

to the carbon solitudes of hapless man,

I am the host and the guest

in the black mirror of my shining, the equinoctial eye

of my own arrayed being.

And the things that I say in the dark like planets

to amuse the night with motion and appease

my secret need for migrant harmonies,

are the foundation stones, the organs and skin

and kidnapped statuary of my summer palaces among the stars

and I am content with my solitary progress

through the wind-taxed realms of poppies and wheat.

I am the composite serenity of the night sky

that does not inhibit the flight of its cloudy owls

or its magnetic transfusions of bats.

If something troubles me, if there are distant seabirds

shrieking their warnings out over a turbulent sea,

or ants in the grass divining the lightning to come,

or the swan of the moon torn like a white peony

by something rising up with a beak and a shell from below

like the hungry turtle of the snapping world,

I take shelter in the roots of things,

in the watersheds of the relentless rivers

that press on with their dreams of eloquent deltas

in mystic union with the sea.

I summon the shields and shales of my radical nature

to renew their loyalty to the heights of land I stand on

battered but unbeaten like a northern pine.

And I shall live as long as there are rocks to cry on,

and fireflies to keep their homely constellations close to earth.

PATRICK WHITE

THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

THE DARK SILENCE YOU EMBODIED

The dark silence you embodied, twenty years later,

speaking to me now in the quiet of the night,

Jupiter flashing in the northwest, still trying

to shine by its own light after all this time. The air

so cold and clear, it’s a burning mirror

I can see you in discretely entranced

by the shapes of sadness cast by your small body

like a lamp of fire that swore never to go out

except in a blaze of light, supernova, one

last, wild, limitless, open-throttled ride

shrieking across the firmament as if at last

all that light, the wary tenderness of your compassion,

your wonder and your puzzlement at being so young

to have such heavy bells of sorrow tolling in your soul,

as if you carried within you the memory

of many rivers and seas and storms ago,

so when you shone you never dazzled

like a carillon of light on a shallow mountain rivulet,

but shine, you always did, even in your worst eclipse,

as if the romantic generosity of your expansive heart

had finally grown big enough to contain

the creative liberation of your enlightened madness.

Your intensity broke out into genius like fireflies

in a fog, the Pleiades out of the blue cocoon

of a nebular cloud. You could think

with your whole body as only a few artists

ever could. What most could only intuit at a distance

like someone weeping deep in the woods at night

as if they’d lost a child, or a lover for life,

and had come to rave in secret among the owls,

the darkness in the eyes of your blood intimately understood

without saying a word, and for a moment, you

were the shrine of a lost humanity

that used to forgive us for what we prayed for.

I can still hear the beginnings of wisdom

in the love and the laughter you squandered

on the ruinous amusements of the world,

without any fear of ever bankrupting your wine cellar

as if life were one long, surrealistic journey

of wandering scholars, defrocked Druids,

sacred clowns, lunatic poets and baffled pilgrims

each looking for exits and entrances on and off

the spiritual highway we were all hitchhiking on

as if all you had to do was cock your thumb

and the moon with one headlight blown out

would pick you up on some lonely backroad at night

and you’d see God everywhere on the way

to your mysterious destination. Dragons in exile

summoning rogue planets to orbit their homelessness

like the infinite ripples and wavelengths

of black holes standing like strangers in the rain.

Where the rivers joined we flowed into one another

as we danced like binary stars around

the invisible fires of our gravitational eyes

and where the roads parted like the wishbones

of the wounds we exchanged like the farewells

and witching wands we afflicted upon each other’s hearts

as if there were something deeper, a darker whisper,

a more compelling summons than the lightning

we were divining for in each other’s eyes

to strike the dark jewels of the dead we carried

within us, urns of our childhoods back into life

like an occult paradise of underground root fires

that could travel for lightyears in the valleys of death,

we were about to firewalk like barefoot stars alone,

I bowed like a gracious ice-age to thank you

for the ghost dance, and you went off

to carve the sphinx out of your tears

like rain on the fertile plains of a green savannah.

Many stars have flowed like sand through

the hourglass of the mirages we’ve become since then

and covered the grass and the eyes of the lakes

with lunar seas more desolate than the deserts of earth,

and though I’ve stopped at many wells along the way

and luxuriated in the oases of the soul alone

with the moon on water that ached like I did

to be loved by more inseparable reflections,

I’ve never been so far from you I needed to ask

anyone in my vagrant travels among the fixed stars

if they’ve ever seen your constellation rising

like a legend of love that only appears once in a lifetime

to leave an indelible impression upon the heart

like the thorns of a black rose still burning subliminally

on the star charts of the unearthly mystery

that wholly consumed us both in the radiant flashfloods

and ineffable ashes of starmud we emptied out of our urns

like two spirits of the wind swept up in the fires of life for good.

PATRICK WHITE

BLUE COMET OF A PEACOCK DRAGGING ITS TAIL

BLUE COMET OF A PEACOCK DRAGGING ITS TAIL

Blue comet of a peacock dragging its tail

like the dowdy hen of a resplendent female

walking in your coronation like the Queen of Heaven

in a new wardrobe across my inner sky

like a broom down in the dumps of its middens

sweeping the stars off the stairs, open your eyes

like the Pleiades and see how even the dust can shine

when there’s light in your seeing, and fire

in your starmud. Don’t post your loveletter

in a hateful envelope. Smile. Like a kid with a sparkler.

Or as I did in my childhood whenever a new starmap

fell out of the National Geographic like a message

from God as if she’d just dropped one of her veils.

The way I’ve felt about women ever since.

Don’t live like a mop when you were meant for splendour.

Even a matchbook can flare for a moment of two

like the stamens and pistils of a Chinese star gazer lily

with indelible ginger pollen. This might risk

being nauseously sententious, but don’t be

the kind of explosion that keeps letting its fuse down.

Let your serpent fire run all the way up your spinal cord

through a gauntlet of planetesimal chakras

and explode like Roman candles in the firmament

of your mind mesmerized by the fireworks of your spirit.

There are sunsets, dawns and moonrises, night skies,

the grey pearls of cloudy noons you’ve never seen

waiting for you to claim them as the children

of your own eyes, artistic children impatient

to show you the pictures they drew in rainbow crayons

about the way they feel about you. Do you know

how hard dusk tries to be beautiful for you?

How Venus lingers like a blossom of larkspur

long after dark, though the sun has given up,

trying to catch your eye above the shopping mall?

You got it. Flaunt it. Like poppies in the wheat,

like the apple bloom of the moon strewn

like the wavelength of a particle when you look away

and something deep inside of you says follow me

I’ve laid out a flightpath of feathers for you.

Why keep the pages of your book uncut

like a fan in the hand of a poetess in Tokugawa Japan?

Let five petals open and one flower bloom

like a fleet of origami waterlilies raising their sails

on the Fall River in the summer just past Maberly.

When was beauty ever not a jewel looked upon as vain

by the ore of the houseflies in residence who

can’t see their own smeared like the aurora borealis

on the stained-glass windows of their wings

in the indiscriminate sunlight? Let it shine, let it shine,

let it shine, and what it will be let it be to the blind.

Not all flowers open at the same time. The crowbars

of the dragonflies don’t pry the eggcups

of the waterlilies open like grave-robbers

in the manger of some stranger’s belated afterlife.

There’s an hour that comes like insight to a fist

that tenderly unfolds each finger gently

and opens the soft palms of the wild cosmos

swaying like stars and butterflies at the end

of their aerials, to give freely of themselves

a generous answer to the stingy questions

about what we’re all doing walking around on the earth.

PATRICK WHITE

THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

THIS FAR FROM SHORE, THE NIGHT AN OCEANIC EMOTION

This far from shore, the night an oceanic emotion

I’m bobbing in like an empty lifeboat,

a message in a bottle among the stars

as if I had nothing to lose, nothing to rescue,

no voice on the hill calling out in the fog

to see if I’m still here or salvage by now.

I’m a runner of the woods, a courier de bois,

portaging across the moon to shoot

the black water rapids on the far side

of a wilderness with ten thousand shattered mirrors

as if every lake wanted a little piece

of the big reflection as a keepsake

of what they see in themselves when they look.

I light a fire like the memory of daylilies

that used to bloom beside my mindstream

and I’m humanly at peace with the immense

impersonal intimacy of the solitude it inspires.

Everyone’s journey might be no more

than the history of a wavelength woven

into the fabric of a vast intelligence

pervasive as space in which everything is created

like the flash of a firefly out of the void

to ride around on the flying carpets

of the sky or the water like a fish or a bird

or the nucleating bubble of a membrane in hyperspace

as if the multiverse were a playful idea

that got out of hand in the elaboration of it,

an inspiration that hasn’t burnt itself out

like a fire in the starfields, at least here,

for billions of years, the godhead run amok

with appearing in its own imagination

like a stranger in the doorway of its homelessness.

It would be unkind to say nothing about it

except to say there’s nothing you can say about it,

but compassion demands you offer the gaping silence

of a wounded mouth a little lunar scar tissue

now and again, and not deny the nightbird

the lyrics to its longing, and even

in this desert of stars when it get’s cold at night

let your mirages dress up in your hand me down delusions

if it keeps them warm for awhile. Truth

can walk naked if it wants, but love’s all

silk in the summer and flannel in the winter,

and come the spring, a ball gown of apple orchards.

In autumn it trails a robe of smoke

like an era of pageantry magnificently adorned

like a dead muse on a pyre of bird bone flutes

and unpublished manuscripts brought to you

by the fruition of the letter apple, if the Druids are right.

Mellow sorrows ripen into expansive sunsets somehow

as you age, and the barriers of the self-contained

come down of their own accord like cedar rail fences

wearing lichens like tattoos of the moon not to forget

the redwing blackbirds that sang from its green boughs

and how it all changes if you take your mind off it

even for a moment to dream of writing a loveletter

to the eyes of some beauty who never promised to understand.

The arms of the old moon may be empty,

and the new too late for the future of yesterday,

but to plague yourself with disappointment

is an eclipse of black mould eating away at the rafters

that uphold this house of life like the rootless tree

of a human doing their time standing up as

they look time straight in its one good eye

and say to themselves under their breath, bring it on.

I am a peer of eternity as much as you are

in your labyrinth of mirrors, as I am by my fire

looking up at the stars shining down on me

with tears in their eyes for the way I feel their light

ripening in me like a brandy of the spirit

I warm in my hands and breathe deeply in,

the bouquet of a heart that’s been tempered

like an alloy of joy and grief. The hour keeps an edge

on my blood as soft as rain that can’t be blunted

by the pain of knowing one day, soon, I’ll

fall upon it like the shadow of a sundial,

the petal of a flower that denied it loved me,

the paling of a gate I lived my way through

like the flightfeather of a waterbird in passing.

No stranger to the garden, no foe of the mystery,

my prophetic skull will go on singing

long after the snakes and ladders of my flesh and bones,

my arteries, my chromosomes, have taken down

the scaffolding I climbed up on like a boy

the highest tree in an abandoned orchard

to paint a myth of creation in the hues

of my heart and voice, listening to the wind

in the apple bloom whispering evanescently

as I prick out the cartoons of my fresco

like new constellations of an enlightened imagination

on the roof of a private chapel of a tent

I cart around with me like the skin of a serpent

I once shed, but will leave like a blossom

on a green bough awhile to remind the leaves

and the nightbirds what the wind meant about love and life.

I’ll spread my wings like a starmap to everywhere

and nowhere in particular like a river

that flows through a small town at night

and I’ll let the fire that burns within me decide

as the ghosts of many springs past gather around me

and the winter stars blaze in the still clarity

of their savage distances like messages

from an eleventh dimension that don’t

ever seem get to me on time, whether this life

I let live me out of respect for its crazy wisdom

were a dream, a poem, or the picture-music

of an unfinished lyric about a firefly of insight

that caught its breath, as I did, like a thief of fire

on the run, pausing a moment in a midnight garden

I didn’t feel wholly estranged from like an exile

seeking shelter in the shadows of its trees

somewhere between a seance and an exorcism.

PATRICK WHITE

AFTER YOU LEAVE

After you leave, a bell

deeper than the sea strikes once

and my blood thinks it’s a ghost of fire

and tries to evaporate; gusts

of the most graceful emotions,

eloquent clarities of the heart,

shake me free of myself

like leaves and petals and pages,

the tender radiance of nightskies,

and I am astounded in the openness

of an embrace without limits,

of boundary stones being hurled delinquently

through the windows of ice-age mirrors

that have wept so long and slowly

over the silver river locked in chains.

How easy in this solitude

to declare myself to you,

to undo the delusions and the fears,

to flip through the chapters of the onion,

take off this last layer of skin,

and shed the final masks of snow

in the warming recollection of your presence,

in the way your beauty exhilarates me

then thrusts me like a torch into a deep silence,

and my heart sets out by itself toward you

scintillant everywhere, gold

flowing out of the dark ore,

as if the moon rinsed out its own reflection,

the legend of a secret constellation

behind the vital starmap of fireflies

that makes me want to shine for you so intensely

in this dark doorway of pain and passage

that the light hurts with the poignancy

of its longing to fall like a key

from the spirit’s lost and found

upon your planet;

to open gardens that have no word

for fence or gate,

to bridge your streams

with the pillars and roots of inspired stars.

My heart sets out for you all by itself

like a lantern on a road

that unspools with arrival at every step.

After you leave I am possessed of the will

of an anvil and a forge

to become a chalice for you, a sword,

an axle and a plough, a strong bolt

against the miscreance of battering circumstance.

I raise your reflection to my lips

like a cup from a watershed of wine

and in every single sip

swallow an ocean like a potion

from the tears of the moon,

knowing how dangerous it could be

to miss you, to become

an addict of your light at the first taste,

to wait for eras for the return of the dawn

that unravels even now like mystic lightning through my veins.

No more than the sun from the vine,

the moon from the dreaming apple

the stars from the ripening vowel of the apricot,

could any torn net woven of knotted lifelines

undo the vision you have already mingled

like a night rose of fragrant fire in my blood,

not to drift again alone

like an empty boat

ferrying the corpse of the ferryman

through the fog to a cold shore

now that I’ve been washed up on your island

like the voice of a salvaged star in a bottle,

a frenzy of light and love in your tides,

a drowned lighthouse

coming to life in every wave of you.

I want to be brave enough

to risk the possibility

of listening to the night together

with the unveiled bride of the moon

in the bay of my arms,

I want to be the sail, the flame,

the gull of her breathing,

the blue dolphin off the coast of her mouth.

I want to swim like a mirror

the sea holds up to her face

to do her hair up with starfish

she tresses like galaxies in the depths;

I want to devote myself like a candle

to the shrine of the September moonrise

that saturates the far sky over the sad hills

like a warm breath glowing on chilled glass

when she smiles

like the wind over the abundant harvest

of the ashes I’ve stored against

this famine of passion

in the silo of the blue guitar.

I want to place my life

like a feather of fire

on the mysterious altar of lunar rain

that splashes like stars everywhere

in the telescopic silvering of the well in her eyes,

and turn these deserts of space and time

back into grasslands

crossing her thresholds

in whispers of pollen and dust.

She walks into the room

to help me paint the bedroom walls,

as I try to cover the graffiti

of my vandalized soul with white,

and a dove in a cage

panics at her approach

before an open door.

She climbs the ladder in rags with a brush

like the moon over a lake,

behind a cloud,

through the branches of a leafless willow

and everything in the room

is enhanced by her shining

and I’m rolling new skies over

the scars and fossils of old stars,

worn faces with plaster patches

to rewrite the shepherding lies,

the myths and symbols of my solitude

in the sidereal headlines of her transformative light.

Now it’s four a.m

and I’m pacing from empty room to empty room

like the pendulum of a heavy clock

that aspires to be a bell,

threshing words like wild rice

under an eyelid of peacock blue

to fill the empty hold of a buoyant heart,

the small boat of her hands,

with the eyes of a precious gathering.

And the tender snow falls quietly outside

on the crow limbs of the winter trees

like flesh returning to the bones of the dead

in a silent resurrection

more unsayable than a veil of white

that puts its finger to its lips

like an arrow of fire to a bow of blood

to hear what the hidden nightbird

under the eaves of a burning house is singing.

PATRICK WHITE