THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

THE SNOW A SILENCE WHITER THAN LAST NIGHT

The snow a silence whiter than last night

and the sky, a red violet. A mysterious rose.

As if the night were blushing at something said

that wasn’t meant to be disclosed.

I feel cramped without the stars, embedded

like a hibernating frog in my own starmud,

my bloodstream reconfigured as the thin thread

of a red alcoholic thermometer, though I don’t drink.

Nocturnal solitaries huddle their way through the night

like dark comets past the unwary mirrors

of the nightwatchmen working on their novels

as if nobody were watching. I people the abyss

with my life and let my mindstream decide

where it wants to wander through its own timelessness

as if the past, as well as any future I could imagine

could take the lead at anytime from compliance

with the present, and it wouldn’t make

the least bit of difference. Three waves

of the same oceanic awareness. Three talons

open like the triune esoteric crescents of the moon

and one hawk blooms like a poppy in the snow.

My imagination isn’t a cry I follow

deeper into the woods of a hidden mindscape

as if it were mapping my eyes like stars

it had never seen before and was wracking its brains

to come up with names that made it feel less homesick.

It is me. Like a nightbird is the child of the wind.

Like a song whose dark secret is a longing to live.

Like the heart of a stranger is the hearth of his homelessness.

I am the evanescent foundation stone of my own fire.

Like the moon, a lantern in the arms of my own journey.

I gather the fruit of a rootless tree and it tastes

like the voice of the sun and the moon waxing lyrical

as the water and light of the alpha and omega

of sacred syllables, with the third extreme

of the earth in between shining in the middle intensity

of the three wise men in Orion’s belt

just before the dawn pales the seeing-eye dog

of blind Osiris blazing like an underground root fire

set below the treeline of cedars ageing on the hills to the west.

I remember the lovers I carried both ways

across the thresholds of a burning house,

and what I’ve made of my sorrows are wildflowers

that bloom for a night in a garden that tends to itself.

If my children are lost to me as they are,

I don’t ask my imagination to explain why anymore.

I let it drink its fill of compassion from my heart

like a bottomless well deeper than the stars are high

and I leave my door ajar for the dead who still call me friend

to come in, whatever the hour, as often as I open it

to the apparitions of the living I greet like dream figures

who have just stepped into my intuitive vision

of not needing to wake them up until I do because

as I keep repeating like the riff of a mantra on a blue guitar,

mark one jewel like the third eye of Venus in the dawn

and they’re all marked with the same morning star.

I invite the darkness to enfold me within the pages

of its imageless book like the godhead of the great void

revealing a story that keeps growing in the telling of it

as the mindstream changes the tempo of its narrative theme

from a pulse, to the merest fragrance of a melody

expiring like the last breath on the deathbed of bird-bone flute.

I am all skulls. I am all shepherd moons. I am space

that exculpates gravity to bend and relent at a black mass.

I refuse to imprison my enlightenment in a church

and get by with finding my way by a candle

that casts as many shadows as it illuminates.

I put my hands up over my eyes like the wingspan

of an eclipse over a full moon, instead of folding them

like birds roosting in a dark wood, praying for light,

and the stars that fire the eyes of the Queen of Heaven

grow brighter than I’ve ever seen them before.

PATRICK WHITE

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

QUIETLY AND LIKE A THOUSAND OTHER TIMES

Quietly and like a thousand other times,

I want to go. I don’t know where. It doesn’t matter.

This moment now is as homeless as it gets.

You can have all the entrances, I’ll take the exits.

Been so long I don’t trust what happiness

would turn me into now, though I think

it’s just as stupid to despair. I’ve let go

of the crows and doves of my emotions,

the quantum insanity of my thought experiments,

and if I ever had dreams, they’re lost atmospheres by now

like a childhood among the asteroids

that happened astronomically to someone else.

I started out on a qrailquest, a maculate clown,

a partial fool, and though I stayed in the shadows

of my right-brained peripheral vision, more

a magic circle than a halo, I kept my third eye

out for it in passing. Strange how time mutates

the journey without losing the narrative theme

of the original psychodynamic. Now

I’m drilling for oil on the moon like the watershed

of a full eclipse and I’m no more averse

to the darkness as I was to the light. Either way

there’s more sincerity in being lost than in being

insufferably found. However rough the storm

who ever comes to the aid of a lighthouse

with a heart as empty as a lifeboat and says

hey, get in, we’ll be swept out to sea together

where the earth can’t threaten either of us anymore?

Doesn’t happen. Much. There’s something fatuous

about security that takes your edge off like a keel

and leaves you bobbing on an inner tube way out

of your depths and your legs dangling

like participial jellyfish out of the mouth of Satan

like Brutus in the coldest ditch of Dante’s Inferno.

For lightyears I’ve practiced the furious discipline

of a purposeless art, and betrayed myself

in the name of compassion for the beautiful absurdity

of celebrating the immensity of my own impoverishment.

I passed the test I set for myself like a stranger

at a dangerous gate to prove I was still sincere

in my own eyes. And even when I suspected a trap,

still, I was a wild shepherd of wolves in the wilderness,

and I hopped the fence. Intense as a wounded exile.

As soon as anyone starts explaining themselves to me,

I immediately hear the bells of faithful alibis.

Unfamiliar demons arise like infidels of the truth

and I’d rather follow last night’s wolf moon down

below the treeline, than cry over another fool’s lies.

Not bitter, not overjoyed, my curiosity amused,

given how little hope there is for any of us,

I’d still rather err with the largesse of dragons

who know more about shining and burning

than the fire blossoms of a thousand Chinese box-kites

looking for the ley lines on tinfoil starmaps

that never lead anyone astray creatively, least of all,

stop longing for the more subliminal phases and shadows

of Venus on a moonless winter night at perihelion.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference

between artifice and a genuine sacrifice

but it’s a matter of taste whether you want

bubbles in your poetry breaking the surface

like effervescent sacred syllables at a seal hunt

coming up for air, or add your breath

to the nucleation of new worlds in hyperspace

by going along with the drift, the gist, the flow,

the probable concourse, the aniconic fractal,

the supersymmetrical elaboration of the rococo,

loading every rift with ore like John Keats,

or the wound of a rikku teacup at a Chanoyu

ceremony for the taste of Zen with mended gaps of gold.

If you’re still too distinct to tolerate life with a smile,

at least try not to wince, and pray for a day

when your facial expressions are not in the name

of trying to better anything that isn’t spontaneous.

You can call it mind, form, matter, and then,

you can reverse the spin into the opposite

thought, the annihilant emotion, and achieve

spiritual immolation in a rapture of nirvanic self-destruction.

Nihilism when it isn’t in vogue as fashionable sentiment

looks at the world and says it’s empty as if

something were there that isn’t anymore, an absence

that let the meaning leak out through their pores.

The little green apples of disappointment are sour

but if you hang around long enough, the return journey

is sweeter than the first, and disappointment

gets drunk with the wasps in the decaying taverns

plying the windfalls of dusk with nectar and ambrosia.

When things go supernova creatively, it’s not the end

of anything. It’s just one prelude over the line

like the Big Bang before it was wired for sound

like one hand clapping and all the lights going on

when you enter the house of life late at night

like a stray thought in your mother’s head

that nudges one stray photon into a collaborative avalanche

of interdependently originated genetic chain reactions.

You can be an inert gas and light up like a flavour

of neon or argon, with a fixed address

at the candy store of a highway motel, or more

significantly radioactive like a heavy metal

you can shine like an enfant terrible orphaned

by your own catastrophe in the name of art

as the potted plants wither on your lethal windowsills

for the lack of deuterium, and the waterclock

glows in the dark like a small zodiac on a stopwatch.

There’s no lack of fraudulent embassies ready

to forge a false passport with a name and a face

into countries that don’t exist without a border and a map,

but in all the years of my transits and zeniths, nadirs

and pain thresholds, gates, doorways, taboos,

dares, taunts, threats, holy wars and peaceful defeats

without any regrets, I’ve secured my passage

by exploring spiritually poetic realms without

a lack of identity in a universal mindscape

that doesn’t have one separate from everything else

for fear I’d give myself away as an imposter.

Why sip from the waters of life when

you can gulp the ocean whole in every drop?

Quick, quick, said reality to the passenger pigeon.

Humankind cannot stand too many birds.

PATRICK WHITE

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

COULD I BREATHE THE STARS

Could I breathe the stars, I would expire in light.

Were I the harvest moon, I would retract my claws.

Were my heart anything other than what it is,

I would be a windfall of silver apples burnished by crows

and not this rag of a man with a mouthy wound.

I would not be this perversion of radiance mutating

in these acephalic mirrors warped by shape-shifting space.

I would see clearly the angry red berries of the hawthorn

and adopt them as a solar system. And think I was blessed.

And, o yes, spiky woman, when love was in eclipse

if I were not so afraid of falling upon you like a sword,

I would notch the moon like a gunsight

with its own valleys and mountains,

and let the light shine through like Bailey’s Beads,

and place it on your head like a laurel of fire,

the enlightened corona of a door I’ve left ajar.

You agitate the spiders in their morning webs

into vibrating like the needles of sewing machines

or the clappers of fire alarms, as the sun

takes the pulse of its dreamcatchers,

looking for signs of life from the night before.

I am a creature of darkness. I know the abyss.

It fills you like a universe you just can’t seem

to get your heart and arms around.

It’s bigger than the wingspan of your spirit,

the one vacuum nature doesn’t abhor.

No end of it. No beginning you can hope for.

You embody the impersonality of it intimately.

The dark mother of the abounding stars

whose beauty adds an edge to the emptiness

that keeps you from pleading for oblivion

in an isolation deeper than the dead.

The irises were surgically removed from your eyes

and you’re out looking for rainbows at night with a match.

But there’s no one to keep your promises to,

and just at the bend in the river, where you laid

a poppy on the grave of the white crow

to pay your respects to the end of the road,

you plunge over the edge of a finger-pointing precipice

like a willow of water into an ocean of awareness

and there’s no one there to catch you. And the dreamcatchers

aren’t the safety nets they said they were.

Were I a witchdoctor that knew the antidote to love

I would come with strange concoctions

of the Pleiades and deadly nightshade

ground with a sexual pestle in the mortar of my skull

and spiced with a measure of the inconceivable

and have you rise from your death bed

like a miracle among roses that escaped the frost.

I’d stroke the back of your hand like the head of a swan.

And you’d feel it melting like ice. The moon would bloom

like a love letter delivered to a dead branch.

The nightmare of the dispassionate fever

would transmutate into an elixir of life

that would thrill every flower into believing they had

lightning for roots. Wondrous blossoms of insight.

Into the Open. Into the Absence, the nihilistic emptiness

of the cup poured out in a hemorrhage of the heart

when the wine went bad. Someone there in the doorway

gone like a shadow from the sundial of the farewell

they left you with like the wing of a bird

that doesn’t sing anymore in the morning.

And even the birch groves don’t feel very strong

when they’ve been cast down by an ice storm

into white canes and crutches of suffering

you once could lean on for emotional support.

I would be a lightbulb in a house well for you

to keep you from freezing and more grandiosely

if I were a pagan architect, I would erect a temple

with pillars of fire for you that even time

when its hair grows out like solar flares

couldn’t pull down in a fury of indignant ions.

There would be no lack of heretics, martyrs,

or Norse gods to sing in your flames

because they would have finally found something

greater than their solipsistic selves to sacrifice to

that consumes them with devotion

axially aligned with you. And wherever you walked

true north would be under your feet.

As it is I follow you like an oriflamme

in a pageant of longing I will not be ransomed from.

And even if the court jester to the queen

isn’t the grand marshal that gets to carry it,

the one who rides first in the wake of your love,

his armour burning like a mirror of your reflected fire,

I have raised a small banner of blood

on the lance of a thorn the white knights

would think was laughably burlesque

were it not for the fact that it pours out of a dragon’s eyes

like the eclipse of a black rose in tears

igneously bleeding in the darkness

to temper its fangs like swords it remits in tribute,

from a burning bridge of fireflies,

to the solitary river of the unhonoured waters of the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

WOLF MOON FOLLOWING IN THE TRACKS OF JUPITER

WOLF MOON FOLLOWING IN THE TRACKS OF JUPITER

Wolf moon following in the tracks of Jupiter.

A dirty window. A cold night. A lonely astronomer

gazing through the flat glass without enlargement

or diminishment, he doesn’t grind his third eye

into a lens to grow more intimate or keep things at a distance

though he’s infinitely grateful for any firefly of light

like a chimney spark above a labyrinth of rooftops

and a fully enlightened prophetic skull only a few

devoted lunatics are howling at for reasons that elude them

at this hour of the early morning in a Prussian blue abyss.

Bleak January. No harvest. The soil too hard

to bury the dead. Hungry ghosts gnawing the air.

His heart a mason jar of black dwarfs that don’t

glow in the dark anymore. No jewels, or precious metals

in the ore of a solar flare of spent match heads,

he remembers the cool sapphires of the eyes

that used to look deeply into his like the Pleiades

without pretence or embarrassment, but more said

in a single glance about light, clarity and beauty

than any starmap could ever have imagined.

Dust on the windowsill, stars strewn across the sky,

he feels like an exile but knows deeper within

he isn’t any more misplaced than they are as

he bypasses his tears like mind and form

eviscerate matter, and like a lunar ocean

without an atmosphere to back it up, evaporates

into space like the last winding road of smoke

he’ll ever take like a geni unravelling the wick

from the flame, the wish from the mirage of a dry well.

He reminds himself he isn’t getting any older

than time is, and to say time is old, doesn’t make

any sense at any moment of the day or night.

Like the light of a star, the past often makes it

to the future long before the present ever does.

Waxing isn’t any younger than waning is.

The tide going out is just the opening eyelid

of the one coming in. Blue shift, red shift.

One mile east, one mile west, valleys and mountains

of the same wavelength, a snake in the flute

of the snakecharmer, dancing like fire on water

as if it refused to turn out the lights after the music was over.

If not peace, then at least an amicable truce

with the supersymmetry of his opposites,

he spins like a galactic dervish of stars

at the crossroads of where all ways of life

meet like jinxed prayer wheels at the nave

of a black hole with an iris of spokes

like the hands of an all encompassing clock

without a sense of direction, hour after

pointless hour as far as the world’s concerned.

Why spend a life bemoaning the absurd,

when it liberates his spirit from the tyranny

of common sense, like a detached retina

clinging to its visuals when the lack

of sequential event horizons opens the gate

to a flashflood of visionary metaphors

more acquainted with his imagination

than his third eye is with errors of perception.

Less and less he asks himself if he’s lived it wrong.

If anybody has, knitting socks for centipedes

to benignly pass the time doing something useful.

He doesn’t judge the efficacy of anyone’s delusions

to get the job done as if the beauty of the scaffolding

were the real masterpiece, and the painting itself

were merely another celebrity excuse

for the flesh to adumbrate the design of the skeleton.

Ladders of bone six feet closer to heaven

than the grave for awhile longer yet,

root fires of lightning rising through the rafters

of a leafless tree burning down like the lungs

of a star-breathing house suffocating in its own nebularity,

though he’s heard it said, the eternal sky

does not inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

PATRICK WHITE

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