FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

FIFTY YEARS OF WRESTLING WITH THE DARK ANGEL IN THE WAY

Fifty years of wrestling with the dark angel in the way.

You’d think we’d be friends by now. Blue flower

rooted in all that dark energy standing like an eclipse

in the burning corona of the doorway, the flammable sugar maple

fallen across the road, the sun that shines at mystic midnight,

the aniconic black wisdom of a one person cult

marking its own door with an X for extinction.

Even a spear of light that drinks from your heart like a heron

can sometimes feel like a blackfly up against

the cold windowpanes of obstructive immensities

shaping the course of your mindstream in the shadows

of the valleys of death, and darker yet, the flightpaths of love

buffeted back like arrowheads against the vortices

of hurricanes and black holes unworthy of the names of women.

If you haven’t been crippled and mended by God,

you’ve never met her. You’ve never known what it’s like

to be so deeply loved by a wound you’d happily bleed out

like a waterclock for the rest of your life as you hung

on the hook of the moon prophecying in euphoric agony.

If you haven’t looked upon human suffering, your own

and others. If you’ve bleached your soul with industrial disinfectants

because you’re too weak to get down and dirty

in your own starmud, and more than your heart

it’s imperative to keep your hands clean. If you

haven’t taken off the deathmasks of the slayer and the slain

to look deeply into the eyes behind the disguise

like peas in a shell game, you’re only holding a candle up

to a blind mirror that will never see anything at all

until you blow it out. Until you learn to love humans enough

you hate God in your heart of hearts, she’ll excruciate you

with her absence until your passion is perfect

and your heresy breaks into the flames of a great blessing

that knows the night is not a reward,

and even if you’re fully enlightened

you’re still ploughing the moon with a sword.

Until your blood burns like a black rose

in the killing frosts of the abyss etching

the inside of your eyes like tears of crystal glassware

when the windows turn their eyelids inside out,

you’re still not intense enough to thaw the next ice age.

There are no visionaries in the eyes of your dice.

You might be buried alive in an avalanche of prophetic skulls

or roaring in the mane of a Leonid across the atmosphere,

but you’re still heaping the corpses of your constellations up

on the pyre of a starmap administering last rites at a sky burial.

The words might be yours. But the voice that animates them isn’t.

You can say to the starclusters of the New England asters

when you’re startled by their wild beauty like a new tenant

in the organic apple orchard you inherited with the house

one early autumn morning these are my eyes, but the seeing

knows different. And the being you are is still a stranger at the gate.

I’ve always tried to live in such a way that my ghosts

were proud of me, though I know how nostalgically absurd that is,

an immaculate misconception of my own ignorance,

an affectionate preference, if nothing else, it gives me an excuse

to celebrate the qualities the dead have incorporated into my life

as effortlessly as the air I breathe for all of us awhile.

And not just the angels, but the demons as well,

the lucidly dark gifts it takes more courage than wisdom to accept.

Compassion continually enlightened by its own delusions.

Inimitable starlight hidden in the glitter of tinfoil.

The inconceivable revealed by the unattainable

like the memory of an event that had already occurred

and been forgotten in the rush to understand it.

How we throw ourselves like keys into the grass at night

and down on all fours begin a systematic search

even when there are no locks on the doors

and everywhere is passage, no exit, no entrance,

out in the open as obvious as space with nowhere to hide.

We fashion compasses and destinations out of

our labyrinths and cul de sacs. We lose ourselves

so deeply in what we’re looking for we’re dying of thirst

immersed in it like fish crying out for lifeboats.

One mile west. One mile east. One step back as

the other moves ahead. Progressing backwards,

in a looping universe is as good as regressing forwards

whether you’re walking with galaxies along the Road of Ghosts,

or standing in your own way without giving your assent

to the creative potential of coming to the end of yourself

like an unassailable impediment, an undeniable fact

that returns you like a key to the open gate

that’s always been yours to enter by as vagrantly

as the map of a lost leaf on the mindstream

that’s been following you blind for lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

THE CATASTROPHIC INSIGHT

The catastrophic insight. The black hour

on the widow’s back, spirit of ice-picks,

and my blood, my nerves, split ends

of red lightning freaking my flesh

with burning rivers of fire that clings

like tar and creosote to the shrieking skin

as if sound could be cold, silence so mad

peace is a high pitched truce between wars

coiled like the mainspring of a chromosome

in a wind-up alarm clock mistaken for the heart.

Moments of aggressive impersonality,

angry houseflies electrocuting the window

with black power surges in their downed powerlines

as they die on the windowsill, the exhausted words

of some black dwarf of a world that imploded

on itself, baffled and betrayed by the sky

that one day out of the blue, just said no to the light,

no to the houseflies, no to the broken neck of the wren

against a brittle mirage of motiveless clouds

that wrote their names on a black list

that denied them their alienable rites of passage.

Vicious carbon of martyred scarecrows

who insisted they were the favourites of God,

after walking in the brilliant starfields

among the resurgent lyrics of the wildflowers,

I can sense the emergence of mini blackholes

sinking my solar system like eight balls

in a pocket too deep to be retrieved from.

I gnash at nothing as if there were an immaculate intent

behind the brutal venality of random circumstance.

I’m restrained by a straitjacket of killer bees

like a gamma ray burst of toxic thought-waves

that don’t mean anything more than the usual extinction

but reek like the post mortem effects of a curse.

Even an abandoned house that’s burnt to the ground

can give shelter to the sacred syllables

of the song birds that used to sing

from its green rafters like the boughs of my bones

before my mouth was stuffed with ashes like the urn

of the asmatographer I was last week before

I was scalded in this acid bath of a dream fever

that revels without joy in the perverse glee

of disillusioning my will to fight for life

by whispering to me like the chorus line of a snakepit,

you may be strong, you may be immunological fit,

but there’s a limit to how many times you can be bit

and not succumb to the delirious radiation of the melt down.

When your dream of amelioration turns on you

like a pet python in your sleep and presses itself

like a pillow full of fledgling flightfeathers into your face

and says the more you try to believe you can fly

the more I’ll swallow you whole in a single gulp

like that vast sky and all those stars you keep lit

like a nightwatchman of lighthouses and fireflies

along the shipwrecked coasts of your consciousness

deluded by the radiance of their rescue and warning,

the beauty of life and light stepping out of the dark

as if mind were the happy exception to the undeniable

and not the rule as perilous hope wilts like a flower

of crazy wisdom in the eyes of an ailing fool.

And I shall reply, as I do now in this poem

from the deepest watersheds of my volcanic solitude

because I’ve been alienated from the surface

all my life, let despair do what it must. I’m sick

of cringing like a bubble in the shadow of its thorns.

I’ll fly like a cinder of a dragon in the eye of a hurricane.

I shall enlist an army of heretics and lead them

in a holy war against recalcitrant hypocrites

who haven’t got the imagination to stand up

for their wardrobes and personas when depression

pulls the plug on the applause of their pollsters.

Being true has got nothing to do with being right.

Though the road I’m on be trampled

into a bog of starmud and snapping turtles

pull my wild constellations down like swans and eagles

I’ll remain shining as sidereally

as a blade of mystically surrealistic stargrass.

I’ll make a faith of my spite, a religion

of all the most cherished mistakes I’ve made

believing in life as the most inspired child of the light.

Though spurs of razorwire cut the tendons of my winged heels

I’ll morph into a clubfoot dancing with fireflies

in the condemned ball room of a homeless starmap

and I won’t think twice about the worth of the sacrifice.

Even when death holds its dress sabre

up to my jugular like the last crescent of the moon,

I’ll remain the unkempt buffoon of my upbeat futility

and smile like an eclipse in face paint as if

I knew something absurdly wise about being alive it didn’t.

PATRICK WHITE

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE

THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

THE LIVING WAX MUSEUM OF THE HUMANLY GROTESQUE

The living wax museum of the humanly grotesque,

the affable mutants, the butterfly minds

armoured by their innocence against their deaths,

bells of fat that responded to everything they were asked

like jocular coffins at ease with their catastrophes,

and the tough made shy by the nemetic streets

and the city roses that came in different shades of lipstick

and chirped about the brutality of their boyfriends

celebrating their psychotic jealousy like a badge of love

as the snake they tried to domesticate by kissing it

on the locket of its head as a sign of respect for death,

the lingham in the yoni, struck them repeatedly in the jugular

like the tinfoil shaktis of black and blue working girls

if they so much as looked at another man

for anything more than money could buy for half an hour,

one ray of light awry, and back to the end of the line.

And the scorpions who administered justice to the poor

as if the law were just a special form of betrayal.

And the commissars of good who stepped

on other people’s hearts to reheel their boots

in the name of their militant ethics slumming

for a photo-op among the peasants they recruited

to sacrifice their lives on the altars

that fattened them up awhile to send their alien gods

a loveletter like a rose of blood from an abattoir.

And those who suffered the afflictions of Job

quietly in the corners out of earshot of the violent ones

away from the shadows that sought them out

like spiders with compound eyes and ice-pick fangs

blooding their colours in gangs of arachnids

that came up on you from behind under cover

of a moonrise that violated the sanctity of your asylum

with the pellucid integrity of a rabid syringe

anaesthetizing you with fear like an ice-age

afraid of water. And the daughters who slipped

through the labial tent flaps of the surrealistic circuses

where they tried to ride the snake like ballerinas

on horseback, but wound up being trivialized

by ringmasters with whips and hoops of fire

they jumped through like caged tigresses

for the amusement of their terrorized kids.

Old men like potatoes who’d worked hard all their lives

watching their lives leak out like the waterclocks of urine

they couldn’t hold back like time anymore

without wetting their pants on the porch

as if they were chronically afraid of something.

And the snowbirds and dandelions gone to seed,

old women worn out like looms, crone phases of the moon,

embroidering their pillowcases trying to

surgically stitch up their inoperable dreams

with threads of fate too weak to heal their wounds anymore.

They’re all still here in my mind staggering

under the heavy lift and load of humanity they shouldered

like the bearers of burdens and drawers of water,

slave nations in the ungrateful lotteries of the chosen ones

that buried them like the Burgess Shale

in the Cambrian depths of my mountainous past,

broken, lost, rejected, bent, predatory, victimized,

used, abused, forgotten and mocked like the spiritual duff

and social detritus of last year’s effluvial autumn.

The indelible shadows of a darkness I couldn’t shake off

however many books I read, or languages I mastered

to baffle what whispered in my exiled heart

in the towering shadow of Babel, or poems I wrote

in pursuit of an earthly excellence I could lavish

like my aristocratic poverty on the esoteric beauty of the stars

as I laboured to squander my genius on mystic insights

that kept me from soiling my lunar flightfeathers

in the tarpits and sticky eclipses of starmud that clung to the past.

Freaks, pariahs, outcasts, the insensibly crude,

boisterously loud about their garish bodily functions,

the mad visionaries whose febrile skin always smelled

like mildewed rags however many baths

they took in their graves like compromised shamans

still trying to get their spirits to come clean

with the animal world long after it had gone extinct.

How far, how long it is from childhood that it’s taken me

all these labyrinths of lightyears in a leper colony

trying to grow a new head on a hydra to replace

the prophetic skull that could speak of a future

in the ancestral tongues of the dead that up until now

excluded you from the graveyards of my occlusive heart

like the sacred syllables of creosote and crows

caught in my throat as if my voice cherry-picked

spiritual vowels from the bruised windfalls

of my earth bound consonants grubby with life

shaken from the green boughs of the tree I sang in

above the damaged roots of the humans I sprang from

like a sapling from the heartwood of a decaying stump.

And embrace you, I do. At last. Deservedly or not.

As a sign of self-respect. I celebrate the lustre of the ore,

the flawed jewel, the rusty cankers on the sword,

the missing links in the foodchain of toothless carnivores,

the luckless wishbones that broke like the bull harps

of private Babylons buried in the deserts of the moon

where there is no wind and the sterility of the silence

has never carried a sound like a waterbird

disappearing like a song waning into the distance.

In a prodigal flashflood of compassionate insight

I flow into the dry creekbeds and stagnant tidal pools

of your disembodied lives, the hollow carapaces

of your false dawns gouged out like eyes of loaded dice.

Scorned, humiliated, alcoholic hierarchies of feudal squalor,

I observe the fragility of your baronial protocols

so as not to begrudge you a shadow of the splendour

of your belated normalcy, your upgraded mundanity,

the under rated privilege of being overlooked

like everyone else in the greater scheme of things.

Excruciating agonies of isolation en masse. Status, at last.

PATRICK WHITE

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

ENROBING MY NOBILITY

Enrobing my nobility

in the aloofness of a spurned beggar,

or a musician on a street-corner

opening the coffin

of his exhumed guitar for change

to keep his humilation

enraptured and alive,

his song denied its bough

by a warning

from the window of a squad car

enforcing the petty complaint of the loveless

who douse

the flaring of the flowers in law

as if all that unimposing ecstasy

were merely another match

that failed to consume them,

I conceal the generosity of the stars

that urgently lavish their light

on the deepening night that reveals them

in the lordly pockets of my impoverished repose.

I want to want something again

that isn’t an expletive of acquisition

that ages into the accusing silence

of an unattended toy.

I want to knock down all the probabilities,

all the odds and evens

of the gravestones placed like bets

in a cemetery of bookies

that have hedged their deaths

with double or nothing on the long shot.

Love bides its time in me

like fire in a stone

that rings the ashes of its last revelation

and over the clamour of ghosts at war,

I try to live up to myself in the silence

like the impossible conditions of an unsigned truce.

I have plucked the wings of angels

and feathered my heresies

in the tars and flammable shadows of the night.

If I have withdrawn into myself

it is only to advance and transcend and array

like a wave or a breath

when the abyss gathers me into its unassailable immensities

and then sprawls me out like a map

on the shore of an uninhabited island

to discover what I’ve buried.

I am always curled

like the sickle of a harvest eclipse,

a question-mark, an imported executioner

over the pure, black point of my existence

even as I offer myself up

to the hidden face of the moon

as the first, shining stalk of wheat

to venture out of the tomb

under her inscrutable auspices.

But I am not the redivining of an old sacrifice,

I am not a child in the attic

playing in the valley of the kings

with the castaway cargoes of a rudderless moonboat

scuttled in time;

I don’t dress up in the abandoned wardrobes

of the oversized past

to practice the mute afterlife of my future.

Denied the bough of the day,

I am the nightbird perched in your roots

and singing,

not to summon,

not to warn anyone away,

and even less to convey

the bitterness of unrequited beatitudes

or the serpentine intoxicants of unanswerable longing.

Sometimes it feels as if

I were an extremity of fire

frozen in the ice of hell,

or I find myself lingering

over the petals of the pimped-out magnolias

like the pages of a torn book

or old Venetian blinds askew at the window,

to look for eyes between the lines

I might add to the watersheds of my seeing like rain,

but I’m never a pilgrim on a road of smoke for long.

And I don’t know

if I have enhanced the waters of life

with the tears that fell inwardly

from the lightless side of my eyes,

but I am not the urgent miscellany

of the misunderstood

and I have always been suspicious of the bread

that calls itself good

and founds its thunderous, empty silo

on a curse in the cradle of the grain.

I don’t peck like a pigeon

in the holy squares of the doctrinal,

and it’s been an ironic consolation at times

to wryly affirm with a quizzical smile

that only my uncertainty is certain.

My life may have been blown about

like the windswept froth of a pathetic guess,

and everything I know

be phantoms of foam clinging to ruinous rocks,

but I have that in common with the stars,

and there are tides I ride bareback without a bit

like my own bloodstream

that fly like wild horses on the moon,

muscling the dead seas of the heart like waves

that expound no more

with the gavelling of their hoofs

than the astounded pulse of the running.

I am no longer estranged

by the parsecs of solitude

that are the true measure of my age,

once I realized

it was my only way of meeting everyone.

And I have never mistaken a chain

for the rosary of a dead liberator

and linked the name of God

to anything that is bounded by what it binds.

My freedom is slanderous,

lightning and a star,

but my devotion glows like a firefly in a jar

when I consider that I owe more

to the things I got away with

like a fugitive

compelled to cross the unknown badlands

by a posse of judicial compasses,

than I do to the foghorns and lighthouses

that bellowed over my unsalvageable corpse

because it rose on its own

like an unschooled coast,

and there’s still a morning in my smile I can’t regret.

PATRICK WHITE

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage

to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light

that shine down upon the earth awhile

whether anyone’s watching this time of night

or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse

of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods

in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast

like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic

strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder

as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because

we were born too early to walk on another planet

surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes

of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs

that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.

Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.

The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.

A curse of distances that left us spell bound

by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating

the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick

to return to the original fire wombs of our shining

instead of being marooned here burning our ships

on the beach of a circumnavigable island

as if we could do nothing but under reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster

in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light

and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things

and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.

That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance

of their emphatic absence in my life was to

humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors

that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals

like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts

of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could

from the brevity of our unbearable passage through

the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,

I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels

of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes

aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage

from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star

through the heart, and the childhood fever

of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist

with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies

for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space

you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude

and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me

and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals

in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,

fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,

in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist

with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since

like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.

Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,

and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark

where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not

the insights that are revealed along the roadsides

of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers

that our divining aspires to, not the lamps

of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure

the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,

light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes

and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds

and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces

at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened

by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,

burning in the window on the grave yard shift

long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.

PATRICK WHITE

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