DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

DOUBLE FULL MOONS IN THE THERMAL PANES ACROSS THE STREET

Double full moons in the thermal panes across the street,

elaborate fractals of disproportionate replicates

in a seasick multiverse warped by the aging ripples of the glass.

I see Li Po drowning in all of them trying to embrace

the euphemistic screening myth of his suicide. I don’t think

a lotus bloomed where he died, but Jesus has a star

where he was born, so let’s put one there anyway

for a man who sang and drank and chanced his path

through life because no one offered him a job as a bureaucrat.

I love the double entendres of the unadorned.

How the waterlilies land like migrating swans

in the wetlands of the windows, and don’t expect to drown

like Narcissus in the mirrors of their own reflections.

But then I’m not in the habit of looking at things

like the emergency mentor of telescopes that suffer

nervous breakdowns looking for their third eye among the stars

as if it were interred in neuronic masses of black matter

and you could uproot it like a grail quest for ginseng

in the deep woods of Lanark County if you know where to look.

The night hot and humid and totally unmotivated,

all the windows open, and a big fan sword dancing above my head

waiting for the thorax of the rest of the helicopter to show up,

all revved up like a propeller without a flight path to anywhere,

I’m Zen-duelling in the acephalic shadows

of my hydra-headed anti-selves

for the lack of better company

until the muse of my solitude shows up

like a knock on the door of my coffin without

expecting a cogently analogous answer.

I write her long loveletters of cedar-scented smoke

I conjure from the ancestral inkwells

of my penumbral black holes to express

the excruciating loneliness of my singularity in eclipse.

In the intense heat of frog-rutting desire

black orchids bloom in the all-consuming fire

of an heretical apostate trying to burn

his God-particles into the wavelengths

of the photonic discharge of the rainbow bodies

of the highest Himalayan rinpoches as if

the sherpas of the Book of the Dead

were way over their heads like clouds

in the mountains of the moon without an atmosphere.

Easy in public to master the mot juste of a scalpel

you can use to nip and tuck the flabby psyches

of the less beautiful among your friends, but alone,

it’s different to divest a ventriloquist of your life-mask

and express yourself in a secret grammar as twisted

as the sensibilities of the evil jesters of the times are

in the fun-filled halls of the judicious mirrors

that can only recognize you by the accent of your tears.

To bring a gravitational eye to your unworthy affairs

and bend space into conformity with the magic rituals

of a black mass in an asylum of acquiescent pharmaceuticals.

Not to talk to yourself as if you were enamelling buttercups

with imaginative projections, or immolating blue hydrogen

like wild irises breaking out like insurgent firestorms

along the mindstream of your vagrant waywardness

as if off the path were the way of the path as far as you can go

without turning into the template of a preconceivable destination.

But to see how the full moon shines in a thousand lakes,

a thousand thermal-paned windows, a thousand and one eyes

and a mystical number of poets drowning like a multiverse

in every one of them, or conversely, the moon,

as must happen in the infinite waterclocks of time,

sinking like a pearl of nacreous wisdom

through myriad incarnations of Li Po letting go

like blossoms and poems scattering before the fruit

of their inexhaustible enterprise ripening into a windfall of eyes.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN MY HEART ISN'T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

WHEN MY HEART ISN’T A HUMMINGBIRD ON A KEYBOARD

When my heart isn’t a hummingbird on a keyboard,

it’s a spider on a guitar. The long fingers of a surgeon

my mother used to say, the air bright with potential

and the creature with a purpose, a future it meant,

a destiny it was born to fulfil like a chain reaction.

Now it’s an error of evolution just to make it through another day.

And nights, sidereal ballerinas leaping like Cygnus at zenith

over the toxic wavelengths in this snakepit of street life.

Blessings on everyone’s head, I’ve shed a few lives of my own,

but I mean the nights, sometimes the nights,

scatter my own ashes over my head in mourning

like a nuclear winter that won’t let me forget.

Now there’s nothing perennial about my paradigms

and the flowers don’t grow as imperial as they used to.

Ferocious weeds spring up among the downtrodden

and swarm the gardens of the sun-king, the cattails

impaled, and the heads of the poppies on pikes by the gate.

I’m looking for new moons in the calendars of chaos

to sow the teeth of a dragon under. Soil made vintage

by the dissolution of the dead who are buried in me

as I keep on living their deaths like an impossible ending

to a recurring dream I haven’t woken up from in years.

Red alert. Don’t climb higher than the mountain is tall

unless you’ve got a star in your eye you’re going to follow

for the rest of your denatured life. But no one’s listening.

They’re all taking polls of bad examples on talent shows.

Can’t stand the artificial lights or the trained hilarity

of the audience defrocking sacred clowns at a cult ritual.

But I found a flap at the back of the circus tent

I like to slip out through and let the darkness

wash the patina of blazing out of my eyes

and encounter six thousand stars whose shining

ease the mind by enlightening its unique insignificance.

I like to blunder my way into places alone

where who I am is nobody’s business but the willows

and they’re not saying anything to the wind

that’s heard it all before. One moment you’re the canvas

and the next you’re a paint rag up to your alligators

in muddy oils trying to save an orchid from its own hysteria.

If there’s any rafter of my life left standing

it’s as fragile as a compass needle wobbling on a thorn.

One moment you’re teaching spiders to play the guitar

without barring their chords, and get rid of

those old harps of theirs that have been collecting in the corner

like dreamcatchers they couldn’t hold a note

if it were a velcro butterfly, and the next

you’re boiling strings like spinal cords in a bird bath.

But alone, where there’s no assent or denial,

and the false redeemers are orphaned

in their baskets and mangers among the hay and bull rushes,

I can juggle the crazy wisdom of myriad worlds

bubbling up in my blood like a playful multiverse

without dropping one of them, and swallow the swords

the moon lays down on the lake in tribute.

No blackboards in my freedom. No chalk fossils

among my crayons, I have been schooled

in the ghettos and still life studios of my solitude.

Here where the river emerges from a larynx of dead trees

I can think my way into the most open-minded modes of death

without having to turn around and go home again

or forget I’m just an organ of light that makes things visible

for anyone with an eye to spare, or the time

to listen to the picture-music where their senses meet

like parallel lives that have suddenly come into focus.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

WHAT I HAVE BECOME AND DID NOT INTEND

What I have become and did not intend.

Is there no end of that deathmask in the mirror?

Glum when I should be shining, bright

when it hurts my eyes. O what little blueprints

my constellations were. Still, I worked like a firefly

with the shadows of the insights I had to go by.

Some nights there’s not a dot of Braille

on a blind starmap eyeless in the east.

I try to stare these ice-age windows into thawing

in the heat of my vision but only an eddy of air

has been weeping along with the lament of my candle

like a stray thread unravelling the atmosphere,

a ghost at the loom of a flying carpet

that never got off the ground. Obviously, down,

I’m rooted like a flower in an urn of starmud.

I don’t fight the shadows. I don’t exalt the light.

I don’t try to embroider my death shroud

with finely stitched vetch. I don’t white wash

my nightmares with the upbeat needlepoint

of sweeter dreams than my prophetic skull can summon.

I offer my absence entire to the enlargement of a space

where the stars are growing further apart

and time is slowly running out of lovers and friends.

I don’t compare my ashes to the fires I could have been.

I don’t ask the lamps of my genies to preside

at the death of dragons. I don’t bear false witness

staring into the firepits of their eyes like niches

in a skull that can see better in the dark than I can

at the end of their wicks like spinal cords tethered to a flame,

something eternal that proved transitory as rain.

I have a seasonal mind. I take the weather as it comes.

Just past the winter solstice now, the days are getting longer.

Last night Jupiter and the full moon so clear

it cut my eyes like the facets of a jewel

in the abyss of a mystery that called out to my soul

with a longing that’s almost more than I can bear to hear

its voice is so impersonal, I’m alienated from the intimacy

of a solitude where I used to entertain a self

with how dazzling everything is when there’s nothing of value

to hang on to. Not an I. Not a They. Not a You.

I can swim like the comet of a Siamese fighting fish

in a cloven hoofprint of rain forever but heave myself

up over the gunwales of an empty lifeboat in any attempt

to save myself from drifting alone in the interminable depths

of another graveyard shift on an infinite sea of awareness,

and I drown like the moon in the undertow

of my own shadows looking for where I’ve gone.

I derive a strange joy from the pain I suffer through in life

like a risk I shouldn’t have taken, but did, and rejoice

in the counter-intuitive act of macrocosmic emotions

that my laughter is a mountain that can sing almost

as deeply as the bird drenched voices in the valleys of my sorrow.

The dead branch where the rivers used to meet

might break under the weight of my sacred song

but I’m not out witching for wishing wells

from the blisters of the stars on my lips to atone

for having tasted the light for myself to know

if it were sweet or acrid. Merely illuminating

or more convincingly fruitive. Bright vacancy

or dark abundance, or a dynamic equilibrium of both

for those of you still foolish enough to conceive

of yourselves as pilgrims on a middle way

mapped out by lightning no one’s ever set foot upon,

the journey’s that abrupt. A Milky Way of fireflies

signalling like ships far out at sea like the spiritual life

of shore-huggers burning their dead on driftwood pyres

that washed up onto the beach. The fire god

comes looking for fire and there’s isn’t a star

that’s out of reach. Make your oblations of ashes and smoke

and snakes will climb the burning fire ladders to heaven

like lunar spinal cords long before the elect of your matchbook

fake their way out of hell. Their candles snuffed by their bells.

Brutal clarities. Homeless thresholds. Unhinged gates

hanging on like the broken wing of a prayer

nobody bothers to close or open anymore

like the last exit out of the labyrinth of yourself

before you enter the starfields like an eye in the dark

to give the light something to focus on

like an over-exuberant loveletter from the wildflowers

wondering why they haven’t heard from you in lightyears.

PATRICK WHITE

A ROCK IN THE CURRENT, A SKULL IN THE RIVER

A ROCK IN THE CURRENT, A SKULL IN THE RIVER

A rock in the current, a skull in the river,

time patiently washing away the sidereal silt of my mind

as if insight were alluvial. You can’t keep

what you won’t give away so fling it from you

by the handful, phases of the moon, apple bloom,

fire seeds, eyes that looked through you once into

the secret life of the abyss that glyphed love lyrics

and occult zodiacs for homeless exiles across

the multitudinous firmament like a mystic tattooist

inking ice ages in caves for spiritual Neanderthals

alarmed by the approach of a tedious apocalypse,

dead shamans at the feet of defecating rhinos,

and the hunting magic that expressed the inner life

of slayer and slain in images of blood and burnt bone,

hemorrhagic red ochres of midnight, extinct

as the grammar of fire that once adorned their torches.

You see how I get carried away by the blackwater

of my visions sweeping me downstream

from these arcane symbols of self I can barely remember

except as the vague stations of an ongoing shapeshifter

who knows that all he has in common with time

is its flowing. Evolution isn’t a popularity contest

but some recollections are more violet or vermillion

than others, and I recall the features of several women,

a few kids and an occasional friend who were

more indelible watercolours in the rain than others.

Rainbows made manifest by an auspicious eclipse,

starclusters in the eyes of radiant snakepits,

the brass rings of moondogs on lunar doors

that opened like the first crescent of the knife

you held to your wrist to purge the bad spirits

as you fought for your life in an undeclared holy war

of transfiguring omens trying to seek out

the unsayable syllables of the name of your god.

Estranged lovers of mine still clinging like exposed roots

to the river banks of my shoreless afterlife

moving on in a muddle of stars leaving

dolmens and gravestones in my wake

to say where I once stopped long enough to die

to erect a constellation as a wayward direction

of where I’d gone for those breaking trail

into the available dimensions beyond

the last handprint I spray painted on the wall

of a gate you could pass through to the other side.

Enter at your own peril. No proxies or strawmen,

no voodoo dolls or false idols, no puppet masters,

no witchdoctors with elk antlers or candelabra on their heads

make it this far without being divested of their identities

like shoes at the thresholds of an interminable firewalk

that insists you take your winged heels off

like no vehicles past this point of departure

and walk barefoot over the stars scattered like thorns

along the path of a dangerous initiation no one’s ever mastered.

Here in this mindless realm genuine achievement is measured

by the aspirations of brilliant failures courageous enough

to overturn the sacrificial altars of their conscious expertise

and risk the untutored innocence and polymorphous madness

of their ancient childhoods again, the crazy wisdom

of realizing even on your deathbed as you violate

the first rule of your worst taboo, true to your disobedience

to the end, there isn’t enough time to grow old

when you’re on the run with all you can be carried away by

as eternity opens its coffin like an eyelid on the deathmask of time

and reveals the continuity of all your cosmic beginnings

expanding like a universe that wouldn’t be caught dead

standing still when there’s so much fire left forever to steal from.

Go ask the stars, if you need the affirmation of angels,

where they got their light from, or the demons,

the shining ones, who hide their radiance in shadows,

if you need earthbound followers to believe in your own eyes.

O fool, in your heart of hearts, admit what you already know.

Life is an evanescent stillness that’s been transcending itself in motion

like a secret that wanted to be known when there was no one

to listen but a void with the imagination to create

a selfless reflection of the kind of empty awareness that could.

So we all die laughing in the lifemask of a mirror

that’s never seen its own eyes except as these nightskies

of fireflies and stars we all disappear into like creators

into their own works, like children at play with our bones.

PATRICK WHITE

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I CAN STILL SEE YOU SHINING

I can still see you shining, and when was it ever not so,

like last night’s stars, sacred syllables

lingering in your voice like broken mirrors of ice

and you so badly wanting to fly above it all,

to burn like a draconian firefly that healed its heart

with a blow torch that welded you back together again

with scars of gold, to prove how intensely pure you were.

And you were o yes you were so serious,

amazingly beautiful, no one laughed,

when they saw the extremes of scorching honesty

with yourself and others you were willing to go to

to be worthy of the excruciations of your art,

and deeper than that, something you knew

was there in the dark by the weight of its eyes upon you

like a stranger with a spirit of bells that meant you no harm.

Of you, I wrote, my muse is lovelier than any running doe

because it was true and there was no other way of putting it

that didn’t blunt the shining, that didn’t cheat the rose,

that you inevitably didn’t when you were the new moon

and I was wholly in love with you like a total eclipse.

Yes, I remember how there was always more dark bliss

in the gifts of pain I received from you than I,

and you know how hard I tried to give back,

ever returned to you like a sacred grove of nightbirds.

You showed me the diamonds in the abyss of my inadequacies.

You were the peer of the mystery of yourself,

a black savage, one third deadly nightshade,

two thirds nocturnal orchid and there was nothing

strategic about your magic compared to mine.

That made you a greater sorceress than I was ever a wizard.

For me the birds sang, but you could hear the sky weeping

for things I’m still trying to understand about compassion.

When I think of the passage of beauty, you’re always

one of the last wildflowers of the fall, sometimes

the starclusters of the New England asters, others,

the last pilot light to go out on the blueweed

or one of those rare times, as I sense this is now,

I’m attending a seance of waterlilies that are trying

to call you back to life like an echo in a housewell

at four in the first October morning we spent on the farm

and were startled awake by the ghost of a white horse

drumming on the well cap in the moonlight

glowing in the frost on the ground, as if we were

both enlightened like two eyes at the same window,

burning in awe of the vision we shared together,

knowing the ensuing silence was more than enough

to attest to the truth of it like a secret that wasn’t meant for words.

Just as this isn’t, after so many lightyears

of remembering you like one of the great joys of life

that cast the longest shadows of the most poignant sorrow

to haunt me for the rest of my life like a wound

even the scar tissue of the moon can’t keep me

from flowing out of like the source of the Nile before Egypt.

God, how I wish every time I reached out for you

the stars didn’t burn my hands like snowflakes and doves.

There must be some other way to kiss the spirit

of evanescent things without putting your lips

to a sacred fire in an ice-age as if you were kissing

the head of an oracular snake like the eyelid

of a lover you were trying to wake from a dream

that lasts forever like a garden you’ve been shut out of

because you’re still alive, and foolish enough to love

what can’t be helped or forgotten because it’s gone.

After the storm surge, in the gleaming facets of sunshine,

death dries its outspread wings like a turkey vulture

at the top of the totem of a pine that’s been broken by lightning

and you lose your faith in the thunderbirds of aquiline evergreens.

At least, I did for awhile, looking up at the stars alone

at twenty below, impossibly trying not to accuse the gods

of anything they didn’t mean, as I grew

colder than liquid nitrogen on the inside, and my tears

shattered like crystal stalactites in an ice storm,

or sublimated into wraiths of dry ice I exorcised

too dead inside to be haunted by your memory just yet,

than any void I’ve ever tried to fly through like space

as it was turning into glass. This, too, will pass is not always true.

Eventually the wind stopped snarling like a barnyard dog

as I began letting go of you, and the pain thawed,

and the hawks were unlocked from their aviaries of ice

in one long shriek of liberation that tore my heart like a talon

because my grief was the last of you I had to hang on to

and I couldn’t use the permafrost as an excuse

not to properly bury my dead where they’d asked me to,

as I did you, facing east toward the lustreless black pearl

of the new moonrise of my heart on the threshold

of a black hole as if I had nothing left to lose but loss itself.

And who could have imagined that time would cling to me

as it has, a habit that distinguished it from eternity

like fresh water from the salt? Or I could be so exalted

to that palace of stars your spirit took up residence in

like a squall of fireflies the wind played with like chimney sparks

from the dead furnace of this house of life we once lived in together?

The morning glory’s overgrown the gate. The palings

of the fence I built are down like nights and days

crossed off in a calendar. The window we looked through

is smashed. The housewell lost in the rising tides

of the wild grasses learning to write on the wind.

And that last painting of yours you gave me,

all those truncated trees, lepers and amputees

grotesquely gathered on an island in a bay

you lavished in soft placental violets and greens,

Persian silks, and auroral saris for mutilated mannequins,

I left on the wall of your studio like some kind of seal

on the place breaking up like Pangea into

continents of plaster. I pried it loose from the ice

of a snowbank slumped in the corner opposite

that small open window you stared out at the world through

like a portrait in a picture-frame I’m still trying to get right,

and I hung it back up counter-intuitively as I imagined

you would have done, something incomprehensively beautiful

and strangely evocative of a gesture suggestively perfected

like a long misunderstood labour of love, masterfully abandoned.

PATRICK WHITE

I'VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’VE GROWN OLD REMEMBERING YOU WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG

I’ve grown old remembering you when you were young.

How much wiser we were then though we didn’t know it

than I am now, or you would have been, had you lived.

Ignorant of the outcome of desire, sometimes it’s better

to drown, than learn to keep your head above water, or swim.

I made a liferaft of my bones to get to the other side

of my heart. Like the moon, one half bright, the other, dark.

I’ve knocked on so many doors the past left ajar,

but for a long time you never answered.

Looked into so many eyes so far from home,

hoping to catch a glimpse of your shadow

moving past the window like a waterbird backlit by the moon,

and though some of them had your mouth, some, your hair,

some your earlobes hung with silver chandeliers of rain

falling from your wings like a broken rosary of waterdroplets,

none of them had your soul, none were as lost

and inimitable as you unanswerably were.

Street rose, how is it my tears are still pierced by your thorns

after all these years? Out of the midnight blue,

without warning, idling among the river reeds,

or rooted in the wavelengths of the mindstream, some star

spears me through the heart like a fish on the barb of the moon

and I have to sit down among the rocks at the water’s edge

with a vision of beauty and love and the passage of time

too unbearably immense for flesh and blood to carry

like so many other empty buckets and sad bells back

from the abandoned wishing wells where the ghosts gather

to recall what it was like to want something once.

Long for someone so badly you would gladly

have endured a thousand spiritual deaths and metaphoric rebirths

as I have done, for one life of being wounded and healed,

exalted and terrified by the mystery of what or who

you truly loved like the eclipse of a moonrise in your blood

more indelibly than death itself appears in the black mirror

when you look deeply into it like a starmap of music

as your last futile hope of bringing someone back

and your eyes freeze like star sapphires deep underground

with what they see like fireflies and lightning in the sockets

of prophetic skulls whose eyes are the jewels of the dead.

Perpetual muse, you, unnamed, who distinguish my words still

with the intimacy of your absence, daughter of the abyss

I was left with when you lost your nerve and collapsed

like a suspension bridge over the moonlit thread

of your spine below when the safety web broke like the illusion

of a dreamcatcher, like the beads of the constellation

the sun belonged to when we first encountered each other

like alien planets driven out like black sheep of the solar system

and looked back at its dwindling light from a long way off

and knew of a certainty, you were, as was I,

alone in this remote space with each other,

estranged companions for life. Was it not so,

and has it not always been in its own unique way as it is now?

Between your silence and my voice have we not evolved

a dream grammar by which the living can speak to the dead?

Do I not hear you in the broken-hearted train whistle

mourning into the distance with no help for its sorrow

and in the long mantra of the wind in the aspens

and the gaping mouths of the waterlilies awed

by the symmetrical similarity of their astonished silence

to that of the stars looking ahead in wonder

at what they’ve been flowering into for lightyears.

Long after your ashes were scattered with beautiful sentiments

mingled like rose water in every one’s tears

to bless the flightpath of a fire bird’s return to the elements

from a precipitous cliff out over the sea at night

as if we weren’t saying farewell to a woman who had lived

like one of us, but were attending the sky burial of a comet

who had made a Tunguskan impact on everyone she encountered,

was it not me, when all the other listeners

thought they’d heard the whole of the message you had to say

and left you alone in the dark in an empty hall

that first perplexing night of being dead among the stars,

who went on listening to your omens as if there

could never be an end of the flames and feathers of meaning

that unfolded in the wake of your passage across

the desolate seas and annulled atmospheres of my lunar heart?

What pain, what joy, grief, loss, enlightenment,

life in death and death in life have I not endured,

what loneliness not embraced as if it were

more deeply exiled from everything it had ever known

than I was when I blew out the last candle of votive fire

like a broken dragon missing one its own in its reclusive solitude?

Even the ashen sages weep like urns of wisdom

for the extinction of the light that taught them

to see in the dark with a compassionate heart

that insight walks the same path delusion does

and attachment, too, is another paling of moonlight

on an open gate that all humans must pass through

to pay homage to the fountains and watersheds

love brings to flower in their gardens and cemeteries alike.

Many times I’ve sensed your tenderness in the sensitivities

of the carillons of wild columbine that rang

discretely in the silence like rain chimes in the spring

and I came to understand it was you, whenever

I wandered along the river like a troubled sleepwalker

through the mystic cults of the woods at night

into a clearing like the third eye of the torrent

that roared all around me like a wounded black hole,

it was you in the sanctuary of your concealment who revealed

that thoughts and emotions like the unsanctified oceans

of tormented stars I wanted to drown in, weren’t

static states of mind where space turns brittle

as the looking glass you get locked into,

but dynamic events of the heart that shatter

our crystal skulls into unknown configurations of light

rising like new constellations out of the regenerative chaos

that watered the old gardens of our starmaps

with the splinters of broken chandeliers that cut our eyes

like tears in an early spring thaw. It was you

as surely as it was the clear light of the void within me

who whispered to me that night I was on the verge

of liberating the past from the future of a bad precedent

that we don’t live separately from the dead,

that each of us is the embodiment of the longing

of unnumbered myriads who released their hopes

and dreams and prayers like smoke and birds

and cedar boughs of incense on the wind

knowing they probably wouldn’t be there

to hear the answer if one ever did come back again.

Where else but now is the future made manifest

by the summons of the past in a voice

we recognize as everyone’s including yours and mine?

Just as I see your eyes in this insight like the occult bliss

of the dawn at midnight writing immanental love lyrics

in the journals of nocturnal wildflowers confiding in the moon.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

IF ONLY I COULD REMEMBER YOU AS YOU WERE

If only I could remember you as you were

for a few, brief radiant moments as indelible

as light in space and not as time would have it

the way things have changed. To see you

lingering in the doorway on a winter night,

the snow lying lightly on your hair like the Pleiades

over your shoulder descending below the treeline

as if it knew more about saying good-bye than you did,

and o how I loved you for it. If only I could

remember that lonely ghost of a mirage

that hovered over the watershed of your tears

and looked at me like the first lifeboat

you’d seen in a thousand years respond

to your s.o.s. in a hourglass. If only I could remember

the fragrance of the summer rain on your skin

as if it had mistaken you for one of the flowers

and how I used to like wiping your tears away

with my opposable thumb like plum blossoms from your cheeks.

Eternity coming to the surface of time

like old corduroy roads and bones in a makeshift graveyard.

Not likely I’ll ever see you again in this life

but if only I could remember you before circumstance

underwhelmed itself and killed the ambiance

of our last dance by turning all the lights on at once.

But there you go, no help for it. The nightbird

transits the moon and the eternal sky as is said in Zen

doesn’t inhibit the flight of the white clouds.

And this moment, too, though it’s endured

a thousand deaths to come to this afterlife,

always saying good-bye to some aspect of you

that symbolizes the evanescence of love and life

in metaphors that buff the open wound

like scar tissue on the moon, like fireflies

welding living insights into the dead brain coral

of this encyclopedic coma life

can sometimes seem without you, even after

all these ensuing misadventures it would take a fire

and half a dozen bottles of wine to tell you about

if only I could remember you as you once were

like the lamb that laid down with the lion without fear.

For light years, images of you have flashed out of the abyss

as sharp and quick and vital as moonlight

wielding a sabre, or a bird quickened by a purpose

out of the unknown into the unknown

and I recognize them as blossoms that have blown

far from the tree that was lovelier

than the whole orchard to me, though angels

attended upon it like scripture from its roots to its leaves,

you were the locust tree with your demonic thorns

I wanted to tear my heart on like a rag of blood

on the galactic razorwire that encircled your heart

like a storm of dark matter with unlimited potential

for creative destruction that got the light out of the way

long enough for us to see what glowed behind it.

If only I could remember you as you were

when we both made eye-contact with each other

like exo-planets in the void, and understood spontaneously

it wasn’t going to take much of a wavelength

for either of us to understand this immediately

as if we could read each other’s shadows like Mayan calendars.

Water hemlock, wild parsnip, sometimes

the memories scald like volcanic dew on bare skin,

but seldom have I ever regretted

that I lived through you for awhile,

when the stars raged in my heart like a madman

obsessed by the crazy wisdom of a woman

who had the wingspan of a bow on a bent event horizon

but knew enough about compassion

to push the burning arrow of my fascination with her

all the way through like a blood sacrifice to love and life

and the mystery that moved in the darkness up ahead

like the fork in the road that separated us,

like a wishbone that had granted all it had to give.

How tenderly painful the brevity of what

we actually relive again as if some moments in life

are illuminated by a different light than that

we read by in bed late into the night

looking for translucency in the windows of insight

that keep on opening their eyes in this recurrent dream

like the black waterlilies of new moons coming into bloom.

PATRICK WHITE