HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

HEAL SOFTLY, LOVER, BURN GENTLY

Heal softly, lover, burn gently,

the moon is full on your windowsill,

and the stars haven’t gone down

over the eyes of your bells

or made a fool of your tears

over a jest of ashes. You are

the night branch that reaches for me

and I’m the bird that returns

to your cherry chandeliers,

the ripe goblets of your fire-plums,

and the stars in the quince of your eyes.

And there are blackberries in your blood

thorns and vines, simmering eclipses

broken gates and lonely doorways

where I’ll always come to shine,

where I’ll wait like a ghost beyond death

for the eyelids and bridges

in the breath of your wine.

Eternity isn’t time enough

to hold the sea I bear you

nor a mountain robed in snow

nor a valley heeding voices in the depths,

more than a wound and a toy

to the love I feel for you.

Heal softly, lover, hear me, see

in this dreamtime of the flesh,

how the lanterns

of the lady slippers glow with honey

that fill the hives with light,

and the doe sleeps softly

in the silver grass that jewels the water,

and the fireflies outlive the brass

of graver monuments than these

that write our names on the moon in shadows.

I say it in bees and bruises and orchids

in apples and eglantine,

in roads and doors and thresholds,

in skulls and scars and sunspots

in grapes and scarlet runners,

in the slips of the cucumber seeds,

and the lips of the velvet borage

that kiss and overflow the stone,

you’re the harp in the throat of time

the spider weaves

to hear the morning play.

No widow of burnt guitars,

no journal of summer

pressed between the pages

of the nightshift shales,

no blood on a chain,

or raven lost in the rags and ribbons

of her own black sails, not

frost on a garden that fails,

or a lock that’s lost it keys,

or a rock that grieves for its plundered ores,

you are the candle and the seal

of all my mystic urgencies,

the gentle thief of my confessions

at the circuits and sessions

of a doomed man’s last appeal

to die in the bay of your arms,

a dolphin, a bottle, a snail

that craved its way to you.

Heal softly, lover, turn with the herbs

that follow the sun like clocks

and when your day is done

bathe in the dusk with the birds

that fly through the air like autumn,

and scented by the apricots

and peacock blues that pour out of my heart

like the eyes and inks of a prelude,

a painter, a pitcher of words,

rise from your ancient solitude renewed

and dressed by the wind

in your scarves and veils,

in your nets, your shawls and auroras,

in anklets, chokers, loops and chains

in your nebulae and orbits

and the nippled rain of your earrings,

wait for me as I will wait for you

where the nightjar sings

to celebrate his lover’s soft approach

with every quill and feather of his wings.

And no world will deceive us,

no flame expire, no radiance cease,

no fracture mar the jubilant fire

that recast its heart in the irons of hell

to love you long and well.

PATRICK WHITE

WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED?

Who could have anticipated being who and where we are

this moment? Did we imagine now, did we see

ourselves here when we were children? These windows,

that view, those stairs across the street we’ve

never walked to the top of into the stale darkness

of a room that hasn’t been used by anything

but flies, echoes and shadows for years?

The hollow stillness, the white gold ray

of winter light illuminating an emulsion of dust?

How strange to be the awareness of anyone.

To take your identity off like a name tag,

to shed your skin like a wavelength weary

of being a particle and when no one’s looking

slip into the vastness without making a ripple

like a watersnake as supple as smoke among the stars.

Peace in the evanescence of my eyes, my heart

unfeathered like the petal of a wild aster,

a forgotten poem, the small gesture of a thought

that didn’t take root on the skull of a rock.

If the rain were a flower, it would be columbine.

I’m standing on this aquiline precipice

scattering my ashes on the wind like words

that were fire once when I was younger than tomorrow

o when was that?---and sang like an arsonist

with a blue guitar about the women I loved

and the sorrows of the mysterious wines

they mingled in my blood like a seance of bells,

and the joys, out of thousands, that elected

like a moment or two of auspicious beauty and bliss

to winter with me through these lightyears of solitude

as if life were indelibly thriving under the ice-caps

of a shepherd moon like an introverted mindstream

that kept returning to itself like the solar flare

of an unopened loveletter stamped: No longer

at this address. Even a starmap can sometimes

get lost in the abyss. You are that. That is this.

Shadows of the mind, ricocheting splinters of radiance

lodged like mystic thorns in the heart, the Burgess Shale

encyclopedically contained in every fossil of a memory

imprinted on my imagination like the life forms

of words anyone of which could have been my mother-tongue.

My lyrical innocence may have passed, but not

the wonder of listening to the stars singing to themselves

like nightbirds getting on with the labour of longing

as if work were a form of worship, as the Upanishad says.

The hour liberated from its waterclocks and sundials,

the empty lifeboat of the moon from its urgent rescues,

unmoored from the wharfs and umbilical cords

of its earthly obligations, just to drift like a compass needle

in deep space, unaligned from its addiction to true north.

If I take one step beyond being, it isn’t death, or oblivion.

I’m only washing my skin off the world so I see it afresh

like the bright vacancy, dark abundance of what’s shining

through the flowing lens of an unpolluted abyss.

It’s the return journey that reflowers the wild grape vines

that lose it in the winter. Every breath, a miraculous revival

of wines that have deepened their dreams in the interim.

Images and symbols are overlaid in space

like the playbills of a visionary hunting magic

still looking after all these caves and labyrinths

for the unattainable prey of the mysterious female

I keep following like the life-giving herds of the stars,

the ghost dancers among the white buffalo of the clouds

that gather and disperse me like the world out of nothing.

I can hear my life howling like a wolf moon

over the dark corpse of these hills, but I’ve never known

where the music’s coming from or why it’s grieving.

Or why so many open windows and returning birds

greet the spring with odes and epitaphs in the same breath

like galaxies passing through one another, the ghosts

of two strangers encountering the unknown

like the harmony of infinite points of view

going in radiantly contradictory directions at the same time.

Life on the burning bridges of the stars like a lover

trying to span the universe with cosmic thoughts

reflecting the face of the other on the underside of time.

As if one were the light, and one, more vastly sublime

than even the night can find the words to speak of

shining like eye sockets of dice in the black mirror

of the prophetic skulls orbiting the prayer wheels

of the mind like interlocking mountain gears of the rain

on the downside of a species whose time has come.

Though I still think it might be crucial to know

who you aren’t as well as who you think you are

before you go extinct. Who sends a cold furnace

or an urn of the ashes of the nightbirds to speak

like a shabby messenger for the light as they knew it once

in the wildflowers of the earth sowing the starfields

with seeds on the wind about to open their eyes again

from the long dream of trying to shine from the inside out?

My starmud is rooted in light and flowers in the darkness.

The supersymmetry of above and below make one hourglass.

As many demons in the nightsky as there are angels in a cemetery.

Heaven and hell, one electron, that can be in several places

at the same time, how many worlds is my mind sustaining

where everything is an infinite elaboration of this one

and that of all the imaginary alternatives that are

necessarily bound to occur like the will of someone so free

it spontaneously has nothing to do with any of them

like the imageless image of the creator we create

in the likeness of to resemble ourselves without our faces on?

I give my oceanic thoughtwaves the same free rein

I give the wild mustangs of moonlight

an immeasurable range of emotions to roam in

without being broken, saddled or spurred

toward any destination in my homelessness

knowing that all movement is a characteristic feature

of the stillness that keeps it all going. The more you focus

the more you blur the effect. And when you look

out of the corner of your eye at life, it’s as if

a thief of fire with the insight of a wolf moon

that thought it howled alone in its own forsaken mindscape

discovered us awake at the window listening to it

and like the picture-music of a shaman on a limestone wall

put his finger to his lips to bond us like carbon

to a secret we all share without ever telling each other.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

Don’t think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.

Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments

some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell

in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum

of all my failures, it’s a strange book to quote from.

I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,

but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity

and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,

defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.

You’d think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way

like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path

the rest of the herd doesn’t take much anymore

as they did when the more siderealized shepherds

used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,

would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy

left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip

to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun

as it’s going down like a mailbox at the side of the road

with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.

You can spend your whole life as preparation

for a moment that never comes. Some people

don’t want to catch up to their star.

They just want to follow it as far as they can go.

They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.

Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations

and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others

by their constellations or their urns,

I’ve had more of a precessional inclination

to scatter them like seagulls on the wind

just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,

each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music

or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony

living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.

Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to leave signs

of where I’d been as delusory clues for those

sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,

roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into

with more infinitely spacious windows

than there are condemned houses

in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light

than it deserves, and I like people that have been

sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass

that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.

An alumnus of the underground schools

for the occult science of new moons,

every moment of my life since

I’ve been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.

The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up

like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house

shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,

playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,

and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,

swaying like a river reed going with the flow

to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning

looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It’s the arrogance of consciousness to think

it’s anymore than an eddy in the mindstream

that’s got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness

it’s heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan

that’s got nothing to do with how things fall out.

The world turns and things are relegated

to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned

from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.

The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces

keep changing shape like the fossils of a man

who isn’t comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears

slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat

like heart-shaped morning glory leaves

steaming into the dawn

like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,

arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,

or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight

from the bottom up on the roots of the earth

as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles

to see the stars burning in the day

from the bottom of a dry housewell

that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount

of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss

of a message it’s waiting to receive

that’s already been delivered

like a star that’s strong and true,

but apocalyptically behind the times

as if one person’s past were another person’s present

and past and future and present

were all living co-terminously in the moment

like the triune identity of time looking three ways,

and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,

simultaneously, so when the wind blows

through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars

because I listen attentively to the lyrics

like a nightbird waiting for an answer

to its amorous enquiry, I know I’m not

singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.

My world’s been complete since the Big Bang

and everything after, the prophetic echo

of a future memory of cosmic events

that happened without me billions of light years ago.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

AND WHEN YOU GET WHAT YOU WANT, IS IT WHAT YOU DREAMED?

And when you get what you want, is it what you dreamed?

Did the mirage live up to its reputation, did it exceed

your expectations or is there another award beyond this one?

O endlessly hungry one, pleonaxic emptiness, were you born

like a black hole on a midway of blazing radiance,

a blinding light that serves as a guide to star-nosed moles?

Fulfilment or doom, depression, disappointment, as if

some clown had washed his face off like a painted tear

in a green room mirror, and discovered he was still crying?

You grasp it like the garment of a passing ghost,

sand, water, cloud, and it changes shape in your hands

like the nature of a bird when neither of you understands.

We all wake up to spend the wealth we hoarded in our dreams.

We even greet death with money under our tongue.

In Zen they’d say we’re all stealing the Buddha’s purse

to buy the Buddha’s horse one way or another

whether we can ride it or not, and if today you’re disappointed

you’ll be mesmerized by something else tomorrow,

a junk dealer going through a widow’s private treasures.

You’ll open your mouth again like an oyster farm

trying to breed pearls like the philosopher’s stone

labouring to turn all these new moons of pitted ore into gold.

Good luck. Hope you’re the wiser for it. As for me

and my house, I’ve never been disappointed

in my wonder at the world, and what I’m doing here

being aware of it all as the world tracks its starmud in

across my homeless threshold and all these ancient footprints

are dance steps back to a self that’s just a tic of the emptiness

I catch once and awhile out of the corner of my third eye

abrogating credit for a dream it had nothing to do with

because that’s a bird still flapping its wings in a shell

thinking it’s being upheld by the wind until someone

cracks it open like a brittle atmosphere and all that space

comes rushing in and you realize with a cosmic sigh of relief

like a sunflower bowing its heavy head, what a great debt

you owe to the nothing that you are that can’t possess anything.

You’re standing there in all your spiritual bling,

gold necklaces around your throat, chakras and chains

looped like nooses in knots at the end of your spinal cord.

What did you do? Bind yourself to the axis of the earth

to be mistaken for a saint or a martyr, the wobbly snake

of an inebriated caduceus, but where’s the fire, where’s

the heretic, the apostate, the dragon singing in its own flames,

where even one firefly of insight that consumes the universe?

Or are you just another photo op with mermaids

calling you to the soft rocks of a popular song?

A straw dog in the rain smouldering like methane

on a compost heap after another ritual performance?

You’re greedy for joy. You’re greedy for illumination

in the spotlight. But bliss is one of the spices of life,

not the main course. And to want more than this

is to declare you’re a glutton with lousy spiritual manners.

And O yes I know, you think this is like blooming

and having someone throw acid in your face

when you were anticipating rain on your plum blossoms.

You duck through a hole in the fence like a raccoon

caught pilfering corn in a garden, and you want

a Roman triumph with rosewater and slaves

for passing through the gateless gate to liberation

when all you’ve really done is barge through

the emergency exit to run from a shotgun loaded with stars

in the hands of a scarecrow trying to terrify the birds

by shooting straight up into the air until things

begin to take root of themselves, and the locust trees

are feathered with the leaves of nesting lapwings

that don’t have any further to fall though they feign

a dizzying descent of wounded maple keys

and all the shamans have to heal themselves

by ploughing the ground they were born on into bookshelves.

PATRICK WHITE

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

IF I EVER GET TO LOOK BACK ON ALL THIS

If I ever get to look back on all this

even if it’s just to show me how wrong I was

about so much, how much I risked for so little,

I don’t want to have been mean and petty here,

I don’t want to have lived short-minded

as if my brain never grew to its proper height

and I had to live close to the ground

with burrowing wasps and centipedes

trading toxins in the grass like slumlords.

Tried to live like a magnanimous man

with an open hand whenever my luck kept pace

with my generosity. Didn’t want to die

knowing nothing about the stars, that shining

that grew in time even brighter in the dark within.

Wanted to know the fury and compassion, genius,

the affable kindness, madness and love of humankind.

Used to say we were born to see and be happy,

and if you couldn’t find a meaning that suited you,

make one up of your own. Don’t waste

the great creative potential of the absurd

and try to fit yourself like a little polyp of sentience

into the fossilized coral reefs of the past.

Go for the galaxies. What’s to lose?

If you’re going to fall, fall from a height.

Sooner a brilliant failure than a mediocre flight.

You’d be surprised at what the timing of one comet

falling out of the black halo around the sun

can mean to millions watching down below for signs.

Sensible shoes, or starmud on your winged heels,

Icarus or Neil Armstrong using his foot

to take a big step for humankind, walk your mile

standing up as if you were scanning for leopards,

your simian continuum at a fork in the road.

Danger is a capricious muse, but it can still

rivet you with inspiration. The hunters get eyes.

You grow an exoskeleton, then rib

the walls and rafters of the house and soon

the sun decides where the windows are going to go.

The Hox genes talk, and you’re the topic of conversation.

You start listening as if

you were listening in on yourself,

all those voices and things

for words you don’t understand,

bliss, butterflies, sorrows and assassins,

the victimized heroes of egoistic tragedies,

and the poetry in the pity of unexpurgated passion.

Lovers in the last throes of unmitigated catastrophe.

The rush and turmoil of the picture-music

going on all the time, shapeshifting

from one musical scene into another

and even you with your hands over your ears

sick of listening to the cosmic hiss,

climactic cymbals in the great performance

just waiting to come together like a hadron collider

deep underground where black holes in space

are born of the impact. If you’re not already

too calculating, or mesmerized like a stone bird

by the snake-eyes of the dice, put some money

down on yourself as if you had one to lose,

and if for nothing more than the exercise,

kiss your prophetic skulls for luck and let them roll.

And when you love, don’t approach a seabed on the moon

with a spoonful of water you can both sip from.

Return like an ocean with a convincing atmosphere.

If fools rush in where angels fear to tread

the angels will follow soon enough, with blessings

on the horns of your head. Learn

every gesture of her eyes like pictographic signage,

of her heart, a grammar for two, of her mind

be the no one to lift its veils, of her body,

apprentice yourself to the genius of her starmud.

Everything that lives is a gesture of the absurd

the imagination delights in elaborating

like people with the personalities of apple-trees

or the encyclopedic prolixity of the Burgess Shale.

I am is not the cornerstone of anything.

I imagine. And the wind is the threshold of the tent

that sheds the desolation of a self like a flower

that blooms in fire. Why water a mirage? Live large.

Squander stars on your vision of this, swallow the abyss

to keep your emptiness well fed, let your wisdom

be the private life of space, your time on earth

be passage and transformation, and your heart

cherish the bliss of all, animate and inanimate alike,

who suffer the same dream of being awake that you do.

PATRICK WHITE

HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

HALF THE TRUTH IS A FRAUD OF THE HEART

Half the truth is a fraud of the heart

and a lie kills it outright. The silence

pretends it’s a window, and the night

throws the moon through it like a bad imitation

of the sky. I never tried to make your delusions

mine. Nor ask you to drink from the same

well of mirages I did. Even after we’d been

together awhile you seemed content

to be a rogue planet in your homelessness

without a star to shepherd you to higher pastures

so I never offered you a threshold

you couldn’t cross like the wind in a wheatfield

blowing on the poppies like a wildfire

I thought it was wise to let burn itself out.

Did I love you? Yes. Even your scars

were beautiful. And there was always

something intriguing about your darkness

that made the fireflies and dragons of your mystery

burning every doorway you appeared in

seem uninhabitably alluring and dangerous.

I never made a starmap of your shining,

where the ink didn’t run like the black tears

of a coming eclipse in a reflecting telescope.

Missing you was usually a prelude to making love

in a false dawn, but the effect was always the same.

The stars never paled in the ghost light

and none of our fountains were ever interred

in a fire hydrant like a urn of water

for the eyeless ashes of the self-contained.

Now the shadows that followed you

like a maimed cult of overly-intentioned volunteers

have nothing to fear from the black holes

you were always afraid of being swallowed up by.

Raccoon and muskrat skulls, albino planetesimals

you collected like chess pieces on your windowsill

and wrapped your mind around like an atmosphere

so they could shine again by your reflected light.

After so many extinctions, there must have been

nights that engulfed you like the womb of a tarpit

trying to give birth to a moonrise after a hysterectomy

in your early twenties when your boyfriend

left you in hospital because he couldn’t cope

with disease. Just another plague rat jumping ship

in Genoa. And then a man you later married

left after a month and the ring turned green

and the dog and furniture were gone when you

got home from waitressing at the club, your

art scholarship missing from the joint account.

Then thirty pills like phases of the moon a day,

thirty pieces of silver, and your heart

so severely betrayed, the eclipse indelible,

you couldn’t trust your own derangement

without reading Tarot to know whether

the next stranger who showed up in your doorway

were an exit or an entrance. Or another

rich clown looking for an Egyptian princess

on the black market of the spooky and occult.

I knew from the start you were compelled

to cut things out of your life, that the knife

that had cut you had been thrust like a scalpel

into your hand like a torch in a relay of death masks

with surgical skills. I never blamed you.

Always thought I’d do a lot worse if it

had happened to me like an Aztec sacrifice

that had torn my heart out and offered it up

to the gods on the altar of a hospital bed

to propitiate the blood thirst of ignoble enemies.

Of which I was not one. Nor yet a judas-goat,

as you could have told by the fire and shadows

slashed on my pelt, and the way I kept my claws

indrawn around you like an outdated calendar

of fangs and crescent moons in an ageing arsenal.

Or by the nature of the scars I wore like Mars

when its water went underground like a frozen house well.

I remember the thick, sloppy flakes of the blizzard

I drove back to the farm in that night alone in a black Le Mans,

after the last meal at the executioner’s restaurant,

your absence riding shotgun like a habit

still in shock that it had been broken so easily,

driving like the bullet of a northern pike

through the right temple of the storm as if

I were immortal even at a hundred miles an hour

passing the snails of the lonely snow ploughs

on roads like buttered mirrors I dared to kill me

knowing anything alive or dead or spectral

in the snowblind darkness of that pluperfect hour

that seemed like the past tense of everything real

had more to lose than I already had. So bring it on.

And it did. Through several love affairs after that.

It’s excruciating to watch someone you love slowly crushed

like a black swan in the coils of an anaconda,

or an oracle by a python she used to prophesy by,

the promise of a new moon swallowed by a black hole

of paranoia. I’ve known darkness, made my allotted share

of mistakes in life, but by luck and intuition avoided

most of the major errors of the soul, even my demons

endowed with a kind of largesse I’ve always

been grateful for, not so much for God, or an ideal,

maybe to keep from being keel-hauled by the muse

on the dark side of the moon, who ever really knows why,

but it wasn’t in my nature to betray you, though

you almost seemed to ask. I may have been

an odd kind of wavelength, skewed and twisted

by the spaces I’ve travelled through, bent

by the gravitational eyes that glanced at me in passing,

but it wasn’t in my scar tissue to wound you

as you had been so many times so grievously before,

so nobly, as you truly were, by making you fall

by default on the sword of your most precious nightmare

and even stranger to think it might have kept us together.

What a world of bubbles and thorns that elates

and breaks us. The chandeliers it drowns in our tears.

You get naked as water to go skinny-dipping in moonlight

with someone you love and you end up swimming

through snakes in the rear view mirror for lightyears to come.

PATRICK WHITE

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

BY THE TIME YOU SAY IT

By the time you say it, you’re a bridge beyond the last river of your lament.

Is there meaning in this, content? Emerging

from this cold oceanic reflection, how good

to wrap the sky around you like a blue woolen robe warmed by a fire,

your lungs two bag-ladies sorting through the trash

of your denuded coffin for any rumour of green.

A back-alley dog sniffs at your limp smile beside a broken wineglass.

Your passions turn into mouths and eat you; your heart

mistakes itself for the apple on the tree of knowledge

and dreads the approach of Eve. Today, for example, over coffee on Gore St.

(just so the peasants don’t storm the moat again,

thinking we don’t know where we’re at)

I heard you wondering why the moon always ends in et cetera.

Just to distract you from gnashing your teeth in the void

and sticking your flavourless gum messiah

to the underside of the flat earth, I showed you a picture of the wind’s face

I painted under an overpass on primeval concrete.

A fascist restauranteur enraged by the ulcers on his greed

preached his disease to an unwilling congregation of tables

and jackaled our money away to the squat god of his digital scripture.

Fascinated and hurt, you surveyed the distant puppet-masters

of your own hormonal attachments assemble and reassemble

like constellations at a crossroads and then

got up to give your sad friend an embrace on her birthday,

fingerprinting your own sorrow with someone else’s hand. The albino sun

high above, opening doors and burning thresholds, was proud of you

as I liberated another orphanage in your honour.

People on wheels went by, more nonsensical than this watershed of pain

that pushes up a mad flower of poetry

through the startled soil of an intimate, unknown planet

hanging from the first crescent of the moon like a drop of water

on a blade of radiant star-grass. You. Above the turmoil

of your blood-weather. And now the vast night

crowds into the asylum of my ancient, weeping windows

and the lamps go on like recovering suicides, their light

experimenting with brown-out dosages of prozac

like something electrical trying to live. Alone again on the deck

of an ark of phantoms beached by the flood

on this brutal world-mountain, my field of vision

is heaped with the skulls and skeletons of warrior dragons

who died true to a door that never opened. And if you listen hard enough

you can hear a secret priesthood of serpents

singing the melancholic lyrics of their eerie toxins in lethal shrines

under the foundation-stones of untenable temples

abandoned to a slum of birds, fractured stairs and pillars

a crusade of minerals on their way home, liberated by an infidel.

Is it continuous or do we make it so; the last forty years of my life

devoted like a lover to the strange face in the moonlight

that beckons me deeper and deeper into her shining as if I were no more

than a ray of her manifestation, each feeling moment

whole to the furthest star, every thought

sufficient as fire, quiescent, an event of fabulous proportions.

It’s true things change and change is a clock without hands.

Here now in the jewelled fish nets of satiated gods

that trawl the mind-sea for luminous, translucent fish

that have schooled into vagrant poems

for a gesture of provisional expression

timeless as now, I stop and bend like light to show you

how the black water-lilies are night mirrors

returning your eyes like water to the river. And yet,

most astounding of all, there is neither you nor I to witness it,

nor anything that swims like the language of a lost people

through these imagined depths, not even the gust of a god

over the stillness of the waves. Consciousness is the shadow of a living intelligence

whose awareness and being are purposeless flower and star,

all the worlds in every directionless direction

resplendent in the heart of a single atom, dust kicked up

by a child dancing alone in a dusky summer lane

with the scintillant gnats and fairies

whose lives are neither brief nor long, born or perishing.

Here, by this road of ghosts, touched by a wing,

I offer you this expansive bouquet of galaxies, endless dancers

wheeling joy into joy like love into bread. Do you see?

Nothing approaches nothing and zero gets up to dance.

There is nowhere that isn’t a tree, no moment

that isn’t the whole of space embracing it, everything in this event

already achieved. Why grieve then as if there were holes in the world

when everything you fall into, someone’s else’s face,

the violet oceans of an orchid heart, this trance of enlightened play

is nothing more than your own footprint on an Arab moon

full of intoxicated rain. Gently, I lay your heavy head

upon the doorsill of your lover and for the moment, an elder of the wind,

whisper nightbirds of ecstatic seeing

into your abundant emptiness. The point is

there is no point that isn’t already the whole of the radiant point

drawing long caravans, burdened with gifts for a bride,

out of the dream deserts of her lostness and longing

like a star dictating love poems to a viper-scribe in the sand. Just look

at the labour of these fools who contrive a hovel out of a palace

and consult their blood like mud at the mirage of an oasis

for fishtracks. Here, I’ll sing it again on a page of water

because you are more beautiful and intelligent than the ones

who stand at the gate and swear by dawn

the light shall not pass, because your suffering is transcendence,

the original home of the many who make one face without flaw,

because I am drunk on the whiskey-fire of autumn leaves

even as the spring tunes its green harps to the high-pitched valley hearts

of ascending birds, every one a nugget of sun panned

from the empty pockets of a generous dawn,

because great sleepwalking moons of faith

are shedding your eyelids like skies and rose petals

releasing mysterious fragrances of time

in the narrow alleys of medieval Bombay where blue-white stars

feed their growing families by cobbling their tongues

like new leather fixed with nails of light

to the worn-out sandals of pilgrim gods on the Perfume Trail,

because even though there is suffering, ignorance, folly and greed,

and death enough to glut any neon highway vacancy,

and hitch-hiking saviours galore to lie down with in darkness

and rise in the light on magic-finger mattresses,

because there is no less of your whole celestial orchard

in the butterfly that lands on a dead branch

like one of your smiles

than there is in all the thundering worlds

that fall like windfall apples or wild horses cantering through the night,

because most people’s seeing is a kind of love blind to music

and you are rarer than a radioactive strawberry in that regard,

the divergent snake-roads of your witching-wands, violins of water,

and because your great insight grows a secret heart within the heart

of an embryo word and nudges it into flight,

the ripening celebration in the heart of a dazzled bird

hurled from a thousand nests like rice from a begging bowl

to express the joy she is

at the fathomless wedding of bride and water, drunkard and unknowing wine,

I’ll lift my voice again to you and sing.

A black snake swims across the leprous face of the moon

unwrapping her bandages on the water like music

to reveal her concealed beauty to no one.

Isis and the Sphinx cry out like loons.

A singing water-lily offers its severed head on a prophetic platter

to the breeze of a dancing girl, mistress of veils,

who toys with the weakness of kings.

On the slightest tongue of the rain, a feast of maggots and stars.

PATRICK WHITE