A SEANCE OF SPRITES AND GHOULS IN THE CABALS OF EMPTINESS

A SEANCE OF SPRITES AND GHOULS IN THE CABALS OF EMPTINESS

A seance of sprites and ghouls in the cabals of emptiness

as the train whistle mourns across town out of the darkness

looking for its lost child somewhere along the tracks

where last night’s waning moon put its head

down on the rails as if it were swanning on the block

like an uninhabitable planet jumping orbits

to coyote into the Goldilocks zone like an illegal alien.

O let the midnight special shine its everlovin? light on me.

Not the first time I’ve been up with these novice ghosts

in the darkest hours of the early morning and felt

this relentless sense of incompletion aching in the air

like dry ice in the tears of frozen mirrors locked in grief.

I’m a halfway house for successful suicides and my abyss

is their abyss and that’s about as close as they’re ever

going to get to the flavourless taste of death again,

clinging like old gum to the underside of their vacant desks.

I let them terraform moonscapes out of my starmud

on the dark side of things as if they were sculpting

life-size glaciers of themselves hoping they might

thaw out like crocuses and early waterlilies in the spring,

but they’re only irrigating their birth canals with glass

like Schiaparelli’s Martian aberrations on the lens

of an extinct intelligence that left signs of itself

in the wastes of an occult catastrophe that has yet

to be determined like the history of a future

that happened only yesterday in an ice-age of desolation.

Even in the dead of winter, I keep a green bough

in the leafless tree of my voice should anyone remember

the lyrics of the nightbirds they were once a moment ago

when they longed for things they didn’t know

how to ask for, or were refused, from the people who

were suppose to love them and did, or didn’t

and still don’t though it came as a shock to their indifference

how feeble and transitory the webs and mandalas that bind us

to one another are and how little it takes

for a squall of stars to sever them like

the Medusan wavelengths of Al Gol in Perseus,

or spinal cords and the coinage of new moons

and total eclipses holding their breath as death comes on

like a punchline to the perils of Pauline in parallel universes.

How much respect we accord the dead

than the little they received in their lives.

How easy it is to open our eyes like windows

balanced by lead coffins lowered into wishing wells

and take the executioner’s hood off the bird cage,

the sky off its perch and let the spirit of life spread its wings

and fly with Cygnus and Aquila on a brilliant seeing night.

I crack the seal of the past like the plack of old paint

supergluing my eyelids shut with thick-skinned dreams

like a massive picture frame that squints like a postage stamp

through the keyhole of an astronomical view

of a shattered mindscape lightyears beyond the windows

I let the birds and the fireflies bearing the souls of the dead

whose bones are chalk dust on the moon come and go by

in a riot of spontaneous mayhem full of vital possibilities

acutely aware of the chaos that troubles their graves.

With every breath they try to take like a candle in a vacuum

that abhorred its nature enough to deny the moonrise

passage through the whitewater turmoil of their apple bloom

scattered by the cold-hearted gripe of bitter green winds,

I try to mingle a lost atmosphere or two of my own

hoping they can cling to that for awhile like shepherd moons

trying to reanimate the dragons in the ashes of their urns.

I let the dead dwell within me in the empty warehouses, silos

whiskey barrels, abandoned hives and aerodromes whose wings

have lost their flightfeathers like grounded maple keys,

so they can still taste a patina of the honey and firewater

that remains like an echo of the longing to live again

like the lyrics of the excruciating nightbirds

that destroyed their voices crying out for the unattainable

like a crosstown train keening like a hopeless wind

through an unmarked cemetery of palliative road kill.

PATRICK WHITE

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

THESE WORDS ARE NOT MEANT TO BURN YOUR SMILE

These words are not meant to burn your smile.

I lay them gently like cool herbs on your cracked lips.

This light takes its shoes off before it enters your eyes

like shrines to the apostate darkness that lives within you

and waits for the moonrise to gentle your Vesuvian wounds.

Pompous to call myself a healer when all I am

is a confabulation of lyrical cures for what ails you

but I call the wind to the winter willows

and the taste of rain in the air washes the blood

out of your hair like a painter caressing a watercolour

with sable brushes that bleed like dusk on the river.

Let that man pray discretely no evil comes of his words

when he speaks of love as if his heart knew

what he was talking about so I will not tell you

to exit by the fire-escape the next time he fire-bombs

your palace of water gardens with emotional phosphorus.

You take that up with the silence of the abyss

you’re already pleading for consolation answers from.

It’s your light and the way you bend it like a gravitational eye

is how love can wander like a straight line for lightyears

without realizing it’s always been a special form of a curve.

Even with a chubby lip and that orchid of a black eye

that will descend like a moonset into a bruised eclipse,

wounded so, whipped like a rose by a comet

disappointed by the lack of spectators who anticipated

being more amazed by the light show, your beauty

is still an unspoken assumption that pervades the air

like the vulnerable fragrance of a woman mourning

the death of a dream that made the lesser nightmares tolerable.

I can hear the understudies of the mermaids backstage

trying to overcome their stagefright, and, sweetness,

it would be so easy at this station of my life

to include you in my aniconic pantheon of mystic influences

that have been shapeshifting my heart like renegade muses

as wild as they were dangerous in their heretical solitude

for more inspired memories behind me of what was

with no rancour denouncing what could have been

than there are creative eternities ahead that will be validated

by the annihilations I’ve suffered through to aspire to them.

You’d be the right door but I’d be the wrong threshold

you need to cross right now into an abysmal absence

that makes even death wince like something paltry

by comparison, and immolate yourself in the intensity

of the clarity to sort through your ashes to see

what hissed and evaporated like an exorcised ghost

from the green wood that smothered your fire

with the need to possess a life to make up

for the neglect of its own squalid smouldering.

Spontaneously distinguish the star sapphires and emerald lakes

the white gold of your burnished bodymind could swim in

like the plumage of the moon unfeathered like a peony

on the supple waters of life whispering a secret

that has slept like an ocean in a seashell waiting

for you to remember it when you first picked it up on the beach

like a little girl wondering why something so beautiful and strange

came such a long way for you to find it like a kiss

you could hold in your hands like an eyelid

or the petal of a nacreous rose in your palm.

When your prince proves something less than mortal,

appeal directly to the fire of the dragon

to refresh your innocence in the rain

that will fall shortly after as if it just discovered

the sacred syllables of lunar flower seeds

in a desolate garden trying to bloom like the palings

of a closed gate and you will be received like a messenger

from another state of seeing with crucial news

about how love can root in the shadows of desert seabeds

like a mirage of waterlilies that actually float

like stars on the wavelengths of unmapped rivers.

Risk the fear of being who you are even

when the voices of the dead have your best interests

at heart, and gibber about not making the same mistakes

their authority rests upon like resolute quicksand,

and don’t scorn the pettiness of what people

are willing to die in the name of, but turn your face

like a sunflower toward the sublime perils

of what you’re truly inspired to live as

with no gap between your imagination

and the shadows of reality it casts on the clouds

like the penumbral wisdom of compassionate dragons

passing over your intertidal moonscapes

like the eclipse of a dark blessing that buries

its shining like a loveletter in a black envelope,

serpentine jewels in the ore of the night

that will flood your eyes indelibly with the mystery

of being illuminated by the light of your own heart,

galaxies of fireflies reflected in the sea stars at your feet.

PATRICK WHITE

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