UNLOST WHEN I'M WRITING

UNLOST WHEN I’M WRITING

Unlost when I’m writing, the going’s enough

and any path will do for the shining. Everywhere

space for the mind to move of its own accord,

dead bodies in the tide, waterbirds returning to the lake.

The pictures crowd together in the flames

and a flower blooms in the fire the fire cannot burn

and myriad themes are mingled in the same fragrance.

How else say it? I’m an alloy of stars, a weld

of metaphors that healed stronger than the original wound.

I don’t wholly understand this, but I’m changing

bodies on the fly, dying even as I grow,

and the more radiant I become the less visible I am.

The mindstream in its flowing is a flying carpet

woven of eddies and currents, of thought, of feeling

the heaving, fall, and rush of many waters

animated by the going, inspired by the approach,

and some bring an easel, a loom, a telescope

and when the moon is shining, there are feathers

scattered on ten thousand lakes at once

as the night writes starmaps on the eye of the seeker

all but the most middling minds follow like a dancer.

I live between the coming and going like a gate,

like the breath in my throat, the systole and diastole,

the ebb and neap of my heart, between the open sky

and the canning jar of a telescope full of fireflies

like a prism in a spider mount bending light through my eye

like a goldfish in water. The full moon, a coin

lost in the river that cannot be retrieved from the river

unless you grasp it without using your hands.

The way a bird on the wind enlarges a space within

and you can hold it a moment like the sky it disappears into.

Comes a swallow at dusk and a nation at noon

and you feel the easy parity of the two as if

they were both of the one intangible fleeting substance,

a birth-sac of dew about to let its water break

and bring forth the world as the youngest child of all.

An abacus of tears, worlds within worlds,

oxymoronic unions dispersing like somnambulant bells

into more inclusive realms of understanding

where every grain of sand is the cornerstone

of the cosmos elaborated out of it as if

neither small nor large, partial nor whole

one word is a myth of origin, and two,

the whole of its long history without end.

Transformative stillness, kinetic mutability,

I refine the ore of an old wisdom

in the crucible of my heart and pour it out like stars

into the available vacancies of space and time

waiting like a waterclock of begging bowls

for their emptiness to shape the tools they’ll use

to plough the moon with a sail and a rudder into fish.

How life gets around is the way I’m moved to think

in fireflies and maple keys, nebular intuitions

of the Pleiades rooting like rain in clouds

and clouds of unknowing where there’s nothing

to take on faith but the small voice on the hidden hill

calling out to you like an empty lifeboat

drifting through the autumn fog an eerie morning.

I lay my madness bare and offer you a scalpel

like the bud of a narcissus, and say cut here, cut there,

slash at me like a corpse in a surgical theater,

remove my skull cap like the lid of a cookie jar,

break it open like a fortune-cookie or a surrealistic lullaby,

a lottery you couldn’t lose, or American pie,

and don’t say anything teleological to me

about what you find, if there’s anything to find at all.

And then add me to the sum of educational body parts

on a river barge that’s going to scrape them off the plate

far out at sea in a feeding frenzy of marine life.

Star meat, my flesh, I’m adorned by the mud of the earth,

and my mind, who could find that, when

there’s so many more places to look than to hide?

Lightyears back I blundered into the open

like a tree on a hill in a field, running from something

ahead of me, when I discovered in a flash

of Druidic tragedy just how vulnerable words were

to the emotions I invested in them like ashes in urns.

Great dragons of passion that imploded on themselves

like caldera and women and meteors on the moon,

kissing stones subsumed in their own wombs

like nanodiamonds of insight into the impact.

And I might seem a lot gladder than I used to be

but there’s still too much to forget to be happy.

And I’m not truly certain I have the right to flaunt

the strange gifts that have given me the most joy

when the night comes on like the pheromone of a firefly

and I hear the unmighty groaning in their rooms to endure.

No trick to this. No elixir, no potion, no Latinate abstraction,

no apprentice, master, or skill, I could be making

straw hats among the enlightened conifers of Japan

on a mountainside where the old stones break into laughter

and the samurai class of the grass wants me to teach it

how to fight without regard to winning or losing

no matter how many times I’m killed unceremoniously

like the Buddha in the way of some fool’s redemption.

And if the king comes to your house, don’t

put out a serving, put out a feast, and move on

empty-handed as a man who’s given it all away

just to spite the keepers at the gate searching your exit.

You can buff a Druid into a gleeman like cut cocaine

and then you can step on it again like a court jester

and if you really want to feel sacrilegiously holy

you can burn him like a martyr at the stake of a cause

that accuses him of going to extremes to avoid the law

and then invite him to a reading to scatter his ashes on the wind.

And then beatify his spirit like a white stag you hit with an arrow

fletched by sparrows with the charisma of crows.

And that’s an end of what was so mysterious about him.

That’s an end of his ambiguous glaises, alphabetic trees

and golden sickles castrating fertility gods so there

was dew on the grass in the morning when the moon

gave birth to a swan in heat before the wheat

could turn from green to gold, and the Fertile Crescent

was fecund with dismemberment and bleeding mistletoe.

Death of a poet. What a small shadow among the gloom.

The eclipse of a lunar pearl in a coalpit.

And the greatness of the perennial mystery

that seeped into his blood like the effluvium

of the dark mother’s afterbirth, merely the cosmic hearsay

of what he hoped it would be, up close and intimately.

And his star, now, a cold furnace, and all the warmth

of his violated human nature, a curious atrocity

of the times that are these times just as readily.

I salute the madman addled by creative chaos

like a spear of light in a storm, like a spiritual warrior

who fell upon his own heart like a hand grenade

to save some ingrate his delinquent day of reckoning,

to temper the karma by rounding out the crucials

with compassion and liberated tolerance

as swiftly as his savage indignation killed

the nude empress of pornographic frogs with a kiss

back into her old life in the nunnery of a neurotic narcissus.

And he looked for the moon in a window of a room

in a brothel of experienced muses who didn’t

beat around the bush when it came time to ovulate.

St. Francis dances in the dust at the crossroads with the Sufis,

talking to the birds like David, and consulting the wolves.

Rasputin gorges on the flesh of the rainbow light body

glowing in a mystical aura of sex and death

like the dark rapture that embraces him

in the circular bow of the angel of infernal revelations.

And his accusers whip his eyes

like bi-valved goose barnacles

flagellating their feather dusters in the corals.

But there are some things that move inevitably like glaciers.

PATRICK WHITE

AND SHOULD I ASK FORGIVENESS

AND SHOULD I ASK FORGIVENESS

And should I ask forgiveness, who do I ask it of

and for what, being unredemptively what I must be?

Descending into moonset or failing to rise?

Maybe my eyes let the stars down somehow,

for all the years I’ve been intrigued by their shining,

sat by rivers in the deep woods, cherished their names

like the legends of jewels in a thousand and one Arabian nights,

but wasn’t dark enough inside to feel them

burning in my blood, reconfigured like a starmap

that turned the light around so they could see,

not just the radiance, but how I’ve embodied

their shadows as well. No part left out, included

so many eyeless nights, so many occultations and eclipses,

the broken plinths of the all the sorrows of a lifetime

attached like thorns to the charred rose of my heart.

I was the child whose innocence was cast aside

like a momento mori of a lethal sword dance

that wished without intent I was buried along with it

because it was pain to look upon me and remember

the union of blood indissolubly holding hands in me

when I was a symbol of happier, more hopeful times

and it didn’t hurt so much to love me. Human enough

in the mysterious irony of being cast out

like the collateral damage of incommensurable lovers

trying to turn their evanescence into tangible flesh.

By seven, I was already a failed experiment

and the sea that surrounded me like an island,

a desert of salt on an alien planet for wounded pariahs

that had been driven out by other people’s sins of omission

at the cleansing of the temples. One of the untouchables.

I hope it’s wisdom that it doesn’t matter much anymore.

That I don’t accuse the universe for the way things are

and, perhaps, who knows, had to be because

that’s the way they irrevocably happen when paradise

is flawed enough to have a falling out with itself.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger for more of the same.

You end up ploughing a garden on the moon with a bayonet

to avoid the plagues of locusts that beset the earthbound.

You come to regret your strengths in a left-handed solitude

that leaves you stuttering like the vocal cord of a nightbird

struck by lightning like a weathervane in the heartwood

of a burning guitar. Absolute among zeroes your compassion

grows cold as the world view of a telescope

with a diamond lens that will eventually melt

if you look at the stars long enough from a parapet

on a palace of salt where your mindstream meets the sea

like a waterclock of myriad moments where time

has no future to speak of and the past is the mere muttering

of troubled rocks in their sleep in a homeless shelter

for dispossessed rivers of thought, besieged by exiles.

Once you’ve suffered through your own life enough

your eyes are clarified, though you don’t know why or how,

by the blood that’s been flowing from them for lightyears

like the secret wound of a prescient mirror

that picks up the pieces of a war torn chandelier

and reassembles them into the shattered menagerie

of a starmap smeared by the silver lipstick

of morning snails fallen to the ground like the dew

of dirty kisses sticky with life in a Sunday cemetery

where the dead are buried like teen age Neanderthals

with gravestones on their chest under an avalanche of cherubs

the ice and the rain are performing crude autopsies on

like the cadavers of roadkill along the byways back to heaven.

That said. A young man shows up at my door,

at eight in the morning, a brain-blasted poet,

surfing his dopamines like a shipwreck jumping

from plank to plank in a torrent of free association

to borrow fifty cents and read me a poem

he’s written for me in praise of an elder mentor.

Not bad for a voodoo doll in a bullfight with a matador,

pierced through the heart by the seven swords of the sun.

He used to belong to a cult of treacherous doves

but now he realizes how clearly the fire of love

burns in the solitary intensities of a cold-hearted dragon

that never wasted his life by not telling him the truth

about being driven out of the nest like a scapegoat

bearing the impurities of wingless serpents

that sting like poisons crazing your heart

with the terror of going mad alone like a mirage

in a desert of salt with an open wound that pours you out

like the taste of bad water, toxic as the skull of the moon.

I can tell by by the unhallowed soil, the carved turtle,

the crow feathers he’s placed in the medicine bags

under his eyes, he’s suffering. He’s disintegrating

like the golden ratio on the event horizon of a black hole

pulling him down into the grave of his messianic devastation.

He talks about the anti muses of his creative dismemberment

as if things were about to go Orphic. He’s bitter and resentful

but tries to pale his feelings like black dwarfs

in the dawn of transcending everyone he’s ever tried to love

who’s misunderstood him, through the new salvation

he’s discovered in his heart like the false promises

of poetry and painting. I listen, unemotionally compassionate

as if I were thirty years younger than tomorrow.

He says he’s amazed I’ve lived as long as I have

like a hermetic revelation in a cosmic cave in a desert of stars

which makes me feel like an astronomical gnostic gospel,

but I can read the loss, the sorrow, the confusion in his eyes

like a dead language no one’s ever spoken before.

And it wasn’t a bad poem at all, so I say,

by way of returning the gesture like a subliminal question

trying to play on my vanity like light on the surface

as if I still had any faith left in my susceptibility:

Young, you’re a passionately, excitable mammal

apprenticed to the evanescence of your heart.

Older, and more of a non-entity than when you were born

you look upon this long discipline of life and art

through the clear eyes of a master of selfless beginnings

with the equanimity of a reptile born of rock.

PATRICK WHITE

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