OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immovable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unaging mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

NOTHING MYSTICALLY INTRIGUING ABOUT MISERY

Nothing mystically intriguing about misery

but I do the best I can with what there is to work with

when I’m down, when I’m blue, it’s not azure,

it’s a stormy Prussian waiting for the sky to clear

and array a starmap of lapis lazuli freaked

with flecks and fuses of gold. Add a touch of cobalt

for aerial perspective to give myself a little space

to wander in while I remember not to short-circuit

the tarpits in the shadows of my depression

or under estimate what’s so extraordinarily ordinary

about the lifemasks I’ve shucked in the mundanity

of my middens, the museums of arcane waste

I’ve squandered over the years like garbage on nothing.

Just because someone drove a nail through your eye

you keep insisting is a sliver of the true star

might wallpaper your imagination like Matisse

but doesn’t mean you’re a one-eyed messiah

crucified like a Cyclops by a red hot stake

from your own fire, or that your tears are somehow,

because of the quality of your crying, better aged

than New York City tapwater, or the ensuing darkness

is necessarily prophetic. Could be a black hole

or the heavy lift of the cast iron lid of the total eclipse

I used to remove like a shark’s pupil to look into

what I imagined the sun must be like on the other side

without my eyes evaporating in the blaze with the hiss

of water droplets falling on my mother’s wood stove

when I was a blistering kid. Uncannily shaped

like this archaic desk I sit at now trying to write

my way like a counterintuitive backroad out of hell.

The train through town is trying to howl with the wolves

but it hasn’t got the agony for it and I’d rather

not know where I’m going despite the exuberance

of the gnostics who indict the same appearances

they’re enlightened by like apparitions in shallow mirrors

though I don’t mean anymore than they do by it.

It’s like art, love, life, the less you know about it

the more you’ve taken it to heart. If the whole

is in every part of what’s been broken, then mastery

must be as well. The human brain a ballet of cotyledons

performing swan lake on tour rising from the stage,

flowering out of death with the unfurling of a leaf

with a twist to it like the turning of a page by the wind

trying to read what it wrote behind its own back

when no one else is looking to see what it sowed

in arable rows of boustrophic print on the moon.

Like thornapples and rabies, I’ve cured my own disease

at times, with home remedies that very seldom,

if you live through them, leave you feeling

like the happy lunatic of a creative psychosis

inspired by a compendium of excruciating transformations

learning to swim hydrophobically in the Burgess Shale

as you say to evolution, physician heal thyself,

and somehow like a snakey faith healer miraculously

it does by killing entire species of itself off at a time.

Where are the fireflies in this ice fog of nuclear winter?

Why is the moon sleepwalking with the dead?

Who’s pulling my wishbones apart like crutches

that nothing depends upon not even my struggle

to wrestle with the dark angel in the way,

the prophylactic shaitan keeping me from

harming myself in the apprentice years of Lucifer

fulfilling the prohibitions that were expected of him

as my railroaded emotions walk away with a limp?

I’m screaming for red. I’m going through

ultra-violet withdrawals from life at dangerous frequencies.

I’m boiling like a kid in its mother’s milk.

Who cut the tongues out of my deaf mute cowboy mutes

and left me nothing to say in a sign language

not even the abysmal silence up ahead where the road

leads me into a wilderness with keener eyes than mine

nods, empathically, and bows its head like a sunflower

mimicing a streetlamp and says, yes, I think I understand.

My heart’s been torn out of my chest

like a canal root of starmud at the hands

of a Mayan dentist pulling my back room wisdom teeth out

like the molars of astronomical temples he had to abandon

like the calderas of extinct volcanoes impacted

like chimney fires of lava and creosote on a shepherd moon

marking the cards that bluff genetic codes into signs

of thermophilic life to prove we’re not freakishly alone

with the dark energies of quantumly entangled light

upstaging the dawn by clinging to the gunwale

of a lifeboat waiting to be salvaged by a coffin.

PATRICK WHITE

BLACKBERRIES AND SALMON

BLACKBERRIES AND SALMON

Blackberries and salmon. Sea-logged books of sitka spruce

drying like an expurgated library in the sun.

I’ll never forgive what went on out of the corner of my eye

like a wolf spider weaving a space-time continuum

over the black hole of a guitar carved out of my heartwood

to play desperately sad songs under my breath,

or the pods of blackfish that came in on the tide

to upend my flotilla of lifeboats. Matriculated Eden,

I owe half my childhood to pears yellowing in the moonrise

of abandoned orchards. Dusty blue patina on the plums,

nothing worse than misery in paradise, waking up

in the land of the lotus-eaters, imperial teachers

mean with under reaching their unappreciated selves

two masts down like rungs on the rope ladders

of the British navy moored to its trophy lines,

saline and sour about having to make it big provincially

in the London of the Pacific, born dead on arrival.

For many years I was a by stander in my own country,

happy if some beknighted nitwit patronized me

for disappointing his colonial expectations

of never being surpassed by an excellence he couldn’t disown.

Supercilious waterclocks on Greenwich Mean Time,

I was closer to the dateline than the prime meridian,

but everybody entertained an imported point of view

like Japanese fishing buoys that washed ashore

among the kelp and the cormorants after they

almost drowned, when the tug-boats died of exhaustion

hauling the British Empire up on beach

like the corpse of a whale with no message

from a celestial fortune-cookie stowed away inside.

Fish straight from the docks, potatoes

from the processing plant on Market Street

that scraped, bruised, keel-hauled and gouged them

like asteroids in the Oort belt rinsing off their starmud

for bagging, and the little old ladies of the Uplands

among their broom and lilac, their sunburnt arbutus

peeling off gnostic gospels of skin, as my mother

bleached her knuckles and knees like a lobster

thrown into the boiling point live as she screamed

like the San Andreas fault for revolutionary earthquakes

to put an end to washing her misery off their kitchen floors

and throwing out good food, far too rich for the poor.

I begged for her disarmingly, flaunting the expertise

of my innocence. Peanut butter by the bucketful,

I looked for castaway beer bottles in the Sikh woodlots

like holy grails you had to disgorge the condoms out of

like the moon shedding the phases of a snake.

I learned more about comparative religion

in the valleys of degradation than a garden on a hill of skulls.

A thief of flowers, I brought the vermillion

to the palette of her green thumb and no one asked

too many questions when the grandsons

of my mother’s employer were dragged

from the golden chariots they rode through our slums

as a reminder of their mean-hearted casuistic mortality.

Deviated septums and blood-caked craniums,

but not a prophetic skull among them to read the signs.

Nothing worth wasting a good death mask on.

There are child labourers born into life whose job it is

to have no hope so the indifferent can actualize

their dreams as effortlessly as they took them for granted.

Atrocities looking for reality shows forty years later.

Hydrocephalic perverts asking for a change of waiters.

Reading Mesopotamian history as escapist literature,

I learned to take the absurd in stride with unassuming nonchalance

as my mother burnt the last piece of furniture

to keep the furnace alive like a domestic crematorium.

Evening in Paris perfumes in mystically blue bottles,

new paints for the calling she gave up

like a futuristic fossil of the life she would never

return to, stored in portly steamer trunks

that never made the crossing back to paradise

like a salmon run trying to swim back up Mt. Kosciusko.

Not a horror story you couldn’t resist, but I wouldn’t want you

to meet my father after he’d drank away every advantage in life,

unlike his kids, to end up topping trees in a logging camp

outside Jordan River, where the cougars were known

to jump through the windows, and he tore the door down

to teach my mother to bleed appropriately

like an emergency ambulance for kicking him out.

Hell of a man. Though he never suffered as much

with a chain saw in his hands as we did

wondering which of a hundred compound eyes

with multiple lenses for hospital windows

our mother was in when we looked up to see

if we were orphans at the mercy of uniformed social workers

with no idea how to live, and less how to love

like the bitch mother of a litter of timber wolves

howling outside her room, down below, live, please, live.

Not that it made much of a difference to the arachnids.

Light years away dusk must surely have fallen by now

like California poppies and the wild sea roses.

The shaggy garments of the western red cedars

stripped bare to the limbs as someone plays a xylophone

like a log boom knocking bones on the headstones

in a drowned sailor’s cemetery. A roll of the dice

and the breakers are all froth and spume against the rocks

in the back alleys of the Times Colonist loading docks

gambling at lunch for another chance to lose big time.

Five dead men by the age of seven my eyes

were undertakers calloused by the diffident glare of death

trying to mean too much to a child who couldn’t care less.

Less soggy stars out east than there, but they

were the first magnitude mermaids on the rocks

to sing to me about an ocean of light I could plausibly

drown in off the coasts of my island galaxy

without ever remorsefully turning the tide against me.

There are those who go along with the stream

even when it’s an undertow and those who hug the shore

like arthopods and sand fleas clicking like stone castanets

who never learned to dance with wings on their heels.

Those who swim and those who burrow like toledo worms

in the hulls of landlocked ships that have never sailed the moon

and rust like blood leaking from the eye holes of their anchors.

Even in a Pacific storm it’s not wise to seek shelter

from your homelessness for fear of dying in a lighthouse.

Chaos is always a habitat bigger than any mere domicile

could ever understand without going under like a dolphin

in a fishing net translated by happenstance into a constellation

on a blue star globe between Vulpecula, the fox, and Pegasus,

the flying horse, with Job’s Coffin, like the asterism

of a lifeboat buried in its heart like a Viking funeral ship

to run silent, run deep, without striking a warning

the fiddleheads of the dragons and the blackfish are back.

So many years listening to the nightwinds rave

until the squall was spent and and the turbulent dawn

returned the wheel like a zodiac to its antiquated star charts

trying to cross the bar like the last remaining threshold

of the Knights Templar burned alive at the stakes

they lashed themselves to recant their confessions

to the waterclocks in the choirs of anachronistic mermaids

not knowing what else to do with a drunken sailor

that early in the morning but pink slip his childhood

like a wild rainbow salmon putting out to sea with a warning

not to raise the colours of its skull and crossbones

among the angel fleets of its breezy Sunday regattas?

PATRICK WHITE  

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE

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