COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

COMPASSION IS THE SWEETNESS THAT ENTERS

Compassion is the sweetness that enters

the wounded apple of knowledge after

you’ve taken your first bite out of it.

It’s not an antidote to the facts of life and death.

And you should know by now if you’ve suffered at all,

and it’s impossible not to from the moment you open your eyes,

the night is not a reward, nor the lantern of the light

that goes before you on a graveyard shift of the stars.

Compassion is the oldest instinct of the heart

and first muse of the mind that can taste only

the blowing blossoms and bitter green apples of the spring,

gripe brain, before it ripens like a sunset in your blood.

That’s why the heart knows more about it than the head.

And I expect, on that basis, no one is more capable

of loving us who must doubt that we’re worthy of love

to live up to the truth of it than the dead who can open

the tiny koans of the seeds at the core of things

like the lockets of fortune-cookies that break

like twisted cosmic eggs in a rush to spread their wings

like waterbirds who write the lyrics of their songs on the fly.

Words for the eye. Words for the ear. Words

for the voice of the wind like black walnut trees

and kites in a storm. And if you really know how to listen,

I mean if you can hear the wavelength of a black snake

swimming across your blood like a mantra

of terrifying, beautiful wisdom that keeps its secrets

to itself, or hear the unfathomable oceans in the black rose

whose petals and eyelids are always smashing

like white eyelashes in a squall of sunbeams

against the breakwater of a white dawn that passes

like an albino eclipse in a moonlit leper colony

of extinct black rhinos. If you even remotely

hear what I mean when I speak like this sleepwalking

through a dream grammar like a prophetic skull in a trance,

words that dance like light on the mindstream

rejoicing in the clarity of the voice that expresses

the hidden message encoded in the genes of the fireflies.

You have mouths. Speak for yourselves.

Some like lighthouses along the banks of life.

Some like thieves with searchlights for eyes on a bomber’s night

when everyone is underground and the bummers are out

plundering the evacuated houses of the zodiac.

Might be the ravings of a star struck maniac talking to himself

to make sure nobody else is listening. Might be

the surrealistic lament of a Dadaist night bird

singing out loud in its sleep for things it doesn’t know

it longs for, or maybe a lunatic is waxing prophetic

in a labyrinth of his own echoes trying to sound his way out

of the mountains without end he’s being trying to befriend

like a cloud or an eagle silvered a moment

like the ore of a dream in the corner of the eye

of a moonrise coming on like a hurricane

with a black pearl in its teeth. The eclipse of a sacred lie

compassion concedes to an alibi without a myth of origin.

Compassion is the child of imagination that identifies

with its simulacra of suffering by applying the heart

like a bloodbank to the wounded eidolons of eyeless images

that didn’t know how to bleed, or breathe, or cry or see

until compassion tempered their impression of themselves

as paradigms of rationality, by shedding real tears

in an ice age of lenses that kept their illusory distance

from the stars that came out after the rain, wet and shining,

laughter radiating through our tears, because life isn’t a dry fire.

It’s the hand on the rudder of a lifeboat

that keeps you from drowning from the day you were born

in the undertow of the tides of the new moon

until the night of the full when you haul everyone aboard

who’s been swimming through glaciers of tears

like baby mammoths for the last twenty-five thousand years

afraid of extinction if they ever stopped to catch their breath.

Compassion is accepting everyone’s death as a portion of your own.

Everyone’s life as your third eye, a vital organ of your own body.

Compassion is an undisciplined action of the heart.

Compassion arises like a moonrise of inspiration

in the eyes of the older sister of the muses

who walks too much alone as if she’d devoted her solitude

to the suffering of a wounded stranger she met along the way

when she let her hair down like willows of rain

to cool the scorched earth and slake the roots of pain

until they bloomed like foxfire in the shadow of her passing.

Most poets sit around the lesser fires of their art

trying to divine the smoke of what’s burning in their hearts

like autumn leaves they’ve heaped into books

that smoulder in tears more often than they break into flames.

But if compassion turns her eyes toward you

like a star in the darkness beyond your blazing

the Milky Way runs like a bloodstream through your veins

and you see in terrifying clarity the great mystic details

in the deep watersheds of picture music efoliating

like wildflowers and galaxies, grails, fountains,

lunar herbs, and starfish raised up off the ground

to take their place among the shining, radiant with life,

in the low valleys and high fields of an imagination that heals.

PATRICK WHITE

INDELIBLE, THE SALINE TASTE OF THE TEARS

INDELIBLE, THE SALINE TASTE OF THE TEARS

Indelible, the saline taste of the tears

like words you can’t get out of your mouth

at the bedside of a dying swan,

slowly turning into the summer stars

forever skimming over the Milky Way,

wings outspread, as if childhood

had been a lonely dancer and now age

had made her bones and tendons ache

like tent-pegs trying to keep a night sky

over her head, her head above the waves

of an ocean of skin on her body

to keep her from drowning in her own flesh

as she shed what she used to be

to make a vast space in her heart

to embrace what she was becoming.

A gazelle of light on a bridge

that could leap with taste and art

like the moon from one shore

to the next, as if her last breath

were a gust of stars that kissed

all her weeping mirrors on their foreheads

like the lunar dew that used to renew the morning.

I watched her breathing disappear

like the warmth of life in the Orion nebula

on a window colder than a smudge of blood

that won’t come out of the sheets

of a universe hung out to dry in hyperspace.

I grieve the smokey ghost of a dead candle

that tied itself to its own body, the stake

of a heretical dancer consumed with keeping

a single-petalled rose of fire alive

even as she drowned in a lachrymal pool

of her own flesh like a star that could walk on water.

Inviolate, the mystery of death. No one knows

where the waterbirds go with our unburdened souls

once they’re over the hills of where they were buried.

I’ve spent my life looking into mirrors

I ground like templates of death with corborundum,

gazing into eyes and stars, the faces of strangers

I was never convinced I could call my own,

and death, always death, somewhere

in the silvered patina of the background

like the cosmic hiss of the Big Bang, the white noise

of an auroral afterbirth washed up on the shores

of my island instincts, a sea star

learning to breathe in the galactic waters of life

breaking like the skin of a grape

into undated dreams flavoured like a wound

of ripened wine with the untimely joys and sorrows of night.

O brave housefly, buzzing at the windows of death

you’re never going to penetrate like the black dwarf

of an insight that burned out with exhaustion

long before you were cancelled

like an underfunded experiment to prove

the will to absurdity is pangenic to all life.

Our eyes go extinct in the midst of the vision.

Immaculate death, like a vow of silence

in a cult of old ladies, first word of creation

to cast a shadow of life like an aspersion on the abyss

that couldn’t care less whether they existed or not.

I listen oceanically to the stars in lonely clearings

out in the woods where just to stand alone

like a pillar of solitude in a forgotten temple

is to summon the more intimately compassionate feeling

we’re all in the same lifeboat together adrift

on the same nightsea of heart-wrenching awareness

calling out in the fog to voices we’re sure we overheard.

Delusion, dream, or some transubstantiating hallucinogen

distilled like a love potion from the tears of life,

I swim in the feeling there’s something perennial

about the human experience of just being here

that isn’t the passing rumour of a false superstition,

but an insight younger than the dawn of time, more ancient

than the fossils of dusk embedded like constellations

in sedimentary starmud at the beginning of life

well before the universe became conceivable.

Old women don’t just kick the bucket

like a waterclock of wombs bearing the waters of life

back like mythic mindstreams from their own wellsprings

weeping their way down into the valleys of death.

They go on flowing like rivers of light brimming

over the distant horizons of themselves like moonrise.

Or the spiral arms of the Milky Way dancing

with starfish and the sunflowers of the golden ratio

waltzing under the subtle chandeliers of their discrete tears

breaking into fireflies, their eyes damp with prodigal atmospheres.

PATRICK WHITE  

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

SOLITUDE AND SILENCE

Solitude and silence. The emptiness of the living moment

subsumed in the mundane middens of the soul, clam shells

and sheep bones, the shucked content of the heart

cherished again as the afterlife of the evidence

I once lived here along with everyone else.

Before I write, this archaeological seance I hold with myself,

this ingathering of everyone I’ve ever been

flowing back into me where the mindstream meets the sea.

The continuous stillness of this contiguous awareness

where everything is a symbolic event in a dream

trying to wake up from itself to set the dream people free.

Emotional effusions of the moon bleeding among the coral.

Solar flares of conceptual insight returning like ingrown hairs

to the source of their deception like unwanted children

though I’ve franchised orphanages all over my mindscape

to shelter my rational thought from the persecutions of my intuition.

Serpent’s tongues that have been struck by black lightning

humming like a choir of tuning forks half a note off

like a lie they told God, they’ve been living ever since.

No piety. But a natural kind of reverence for the life of the mind

breathing me in and out of my body like a bellows

trying to boil spiritual gold out of my default metal of lead

as things begin to heat up like the tongue of a sword

on the anvil of my voice. And by that I know

prophetic heads are going to roll on the growing edge

of an imaginative insurgency nothing flammable with life

can resist for long. I know anything I say about this,

if experience hasn’t cooked you in the same cauldron

I was born in, will seem unpatently absurd, but then

so are thermals in the open fields just before sunset

and the hawks that ride them for the sheer joy of airing their wings

unperturbed by what’s moving in the grass down below.

Infinite grammars. Myriad alphabets. Space talks in tongues.

Everything that is lives and isn’t intelligent, but intelligence itself.

Chaos the mercurial cornerstone of an order that’s lost

the rhythm of life trying to syncopate its heartbeat

to the unmusical paradigms of stone-eared preconceptions.

I see crows with rubies in their beaks as if

they’d just isolated the gene for symmetry.

In this miasmic swirl of images and wavelengths,

third eyes coalescing like starclusters

out of clouds of unknowing breaking into light,

and the shadows they cast no less prepossessing,

how uninhabitable I feel as a planet hoping the night

will prove me wrong and make all things

communicable and clear as a mother tongue

I’ve been speaking for years without knowing it

even when I exile myself like the sacred syllable

of a native son wandering the earth like a rootless tree.

And there, do you see that constellation rising

like a distillation of the starmud I’ve walked in all my life?

Doesn’t it make you want to dance under it with the wind

like a chandelier you’ve thrown rocks because it’s beautiful,

as if someone were standing in it like a window

with the elevated perspective of the Pleiades

shining down in equanimity upon its desecrants

as if by their fruits you shall know the luminous generosity

of a windfall of light that falls at your feet

as if someone were germinating star sapphires in your bloodstream

to give you something higher to aspire to

than just teaching fire how to swim through the blues?

Inside the allegory. The logic of metaphor.

Hidden harmonies in synchronous pictographic fields

that resonate like cave paintings with otherworlds

that are not occluded by the imposition of space and time.

The younger ore of the outer world smelted down

like imagistic strokes of luck into the visionary elders

that transform them in the fires of their imaginations

into the igneous bloodlines that pour out of them

like the mystic metals of swords descended from ancient stars

that can give and take life at the same time

in these homeless realms of sacred ambivalence

before the dark mother tempered the forms she engendered

in tears that broke like the waters of a docetist womb.

Things here don’t relate like thought-trains on parallel lines

that never meet, whatever the destination, they associate

like chords and keys you can hear with your eyes

and see with your ears in a synteresis of the senses

that wash up on the shores of cosmic, island consciousness,

all wavelengths of the same inexhaustible oceanic mind

that doesn’t make things appear so much as emerge

like species efflorescing into the medium they’re working in.

Alloys of light and earth. Hybrids of water and fire.

The sky calling its birds. The river its fish.

And the longing of time in the mouth of the earth

to call us out of the starmud and bathe us in the rain

gentled out of her atmospheric acids so as not to burn

the tenderness she lavished on us like eyes and skin,

a new kind of shining to enhance the radiance of the stars,

light upon light in the skulls of the unbegotten ancestors.

This is the morphological matrix of knowledge forms

shaped to the organs of perception like neuronic synapses,

enjoining efferent axons to the walls of nervous villages

waiting for the news of what they’re experiencing

from the abstract receptors of oracular impulses,

construing the world as a dendritic grapevine

tendrilled like Celtic silverwork throughout the mind

rooted in space as the closest similitude

to the emptiness that is the ground of its being

and the great commingled watershed of its subconscious commons.

The simpler the window, the cleaner the view

so I attend to my seeing like a nightwatchmen

attends to his own eyes like the glow of a lantern

warns and reveals the shadows of his presence in the darkness.

Eye to eye with the sky at either end of the telescope

things of the world are things of the mind,

cosmology the bubble-brained psychology of the multiverse.

And there are some nights, waiting for a poem

to bloom like a flower in the flames of my intensities,

I swear I can overhear from stars away

the exhilarated echoes of alien voices ruminating

on how we might have changed the gestural expressionism

of our shapeshifting, river-turning, morphotic souls in their absence.

Probable concourses of multiplicitous insights

into the jewel I’m turning in the light of my mind

like the sun and the moon at midnight and noon

when the measure of words is the wingspan

of whatever sky I happen to be flying in

like comets and birds and maple-keys

that have unlocked my heartwood and set me free

to blossom like an alphabet on a pilgrimage of trees,

to express myself like an inconceivable wind

with wings on my heels in the hermetic shrines

of this unearthly solitude, this estranged silence.

PATRICK WHITE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

LISTENING TO THE NIGHTSONG OF THE SILENCE

Listening to the nightsong of the silence

in a clearing in the woods that used to be

a field someone rocked and ploughed for cattle corn,

and left the crooked timbers and fieldstone foundations

of a log cabin to be swarmed by the rat snakes, their blood

as the cold comes on, slowing down into

long red wavelengths of hibernation that drives

the raccoons, the bears, and most of the locals

who can’t afford migration, to dream half the winter away,

soporifically numb by the woodstove, or numb outside

from the air gnawing at their fingertips and noses

as if they were being whittled out of ice

or numbed by food, sex, alcohol, gossip and drugs

into the Land of the Lotus Eaters in the middle of an ice storm.

Chronic boredom of a white screen they’d

rather smear with something than look at nothing at all,

whether cadmium red on a blank canvas,

blood on the snow next to the hollyberries

the foxes and blue jays have been feasting on,

or the mythic inflation of their own personal offal

gone viral on an internet of a sky full of stars

spreading the rumour around. Wonder what

the drunk loggers of Burridge back in the day

when the cops were afraid to go there,

would have to say about their whiskey barrels

being sawn in half for flowerpots of flagging petunias

and forlorn coleus on the streets of Perth today.

Or me out here on my own looking

for the Orionid meteor showers where the dark

hasn’t been distempered by the bottled light of the town.

After thirty-five years of living among these woods and lakes

I still come here as an unrooted stranger to the place

who finds it easier to relate to the wilderness

taking its own back, than the ghosts that abound

like Huron women in the moonlight

beating the wild rice at the edge of the ponds

into the bows of their spectral canoes

silent as waterbirds parting the veils of the waves

before smallpox, Jesuits, and the Iroquois wiped them out.

And yet how beautiful the stars are above the birch groves

just before moonrise, when you see them in isolation,

and you feel your heart gripped by a sense of wonder

so transfixing and sublime, you embody it immediately

as the deepest intimacy of time you’ll ever experience

in your passage through it. And it doesn’t matter

what the message is, whether you can interpret

the signs or not, or come away any wiser for the sight,

or mistake a knowledge of starmaps and constellations

for real light, you’re assured, without ambivalence

of the mortality of the witness, as a deep humility

startles your flesh into realizing its tenuous brevity

is only a temporary deferment of death, long enough

to be stunned by the profundity of these fireflies of insight

as if you’d just dug up your own prophetic skull on the moon.

Death soon. No need to make a fact morbid

by denying it. Right now I’m still a seance

of living fire in the woods the shadows of those

who dreamed and fought, wept, longed, loved,

lived, laughed and died here competently long before me

gather around as if a whole beehive of ghosts

turned out to bid the last flower of the fall farewell

or I were the axial blackhole at the nave

of a prayer wheel galaxy flowing into me

as if the black queen of the sweetness of life

were founding a new colony of natives, exiles,

and immigrants deep inside my soul like the portal

to another world than this one that exhumes and exorcises

all that lives like starmud in a repatriated body.

Or as the Ojibway figured out, ten years

of leaving me food and cigarettes at the sunny side

of my burial hut before my bones turn to dust

and my ghost is free of my fire, before the Canada geese

embody my migratory soul on a long journey south,

there are rituals and protocols of life and death

that must be upheld with a patience and grace

born of understanding how vital it is to adorn

what can’t be understood with osprey feathers,

cedar boughs, sage and sweetgrass, growing wild

in the starfields of our dream mothers

leafing the alders in the spring with new metaphors

for the wind blowing through the catkins.

In the beginning was the imagination.

Imagination is the mindscape we’re all aboriginals in.

Reality is still a theory fasting on a mountaintop

looking for a totem of itself while it remains awake.

Imagination is a three-feathered chief at peace

with whatever it dreams, even if it dreams it’s awake

when the elders gather to name the newborn

after the dancing waters and fire talkers

consult the wisdom of their silence and solitude

in the presence of the inexpressible events

that create the things of the world

like the sensory simulacra of a story

that always dying to be told around the fires of life

in a voice full of distance and time and sorrow

like the wind blowing the blossom of the moon

out of the leafless crowns of the trees

so death might wax fruitful when life is all ears.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

as the arcana of a discipline you gave up trying to master,

because you could only see into the matter

as far as the light you were given to go by.

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

to keep it burning like a night light among the stars,

or a lighthouse paling in the full glare of the sun.

Off the path is the way of the path.

How can anyone be lost? Or found, for that matter?

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

like auctioneers that don’t have a thing to sell.

No one’s footprints to follow in. The way things

turn out, at best, a wolf path through the snow

gone by spring, or where you bent the waist high grass

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

is a mental event, if not open, unknown and empty

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

The mystery manifest as it is and that’s the whole of it.

What more of it is there to reveal, than the rocks

have already said? Real, not real, the flowers bloom nonetheless

and you’re free to make or feel or think or not

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

of the flowers in a passion play as old as the stars

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

the mirage of the dark mother who eats her own like time.

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

accommodate itself to like a child’s drawing of the universe.

You can elaborate the roots of a tree like a fractal into

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

for the blue print or starmap of the house you’re building

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

the vagrant threshold of a tent in the moon’s back yard.

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

if you’re too afraid to accept it as the mystical mundanity

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

to counteract the laughter at the expense of his own wounds.

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

as if no one else in the world can do your seeing for you

and you won’t see anything very shocking to be afraid of.

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

you have to get at the guts of like a turkey-vulture.

And if you feel compassion, and it’s natural you should,

it’s because there’s something communal about the random

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

You want some good spiritual advice to get you in the habit

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

the palatial playhouse it was born into? When occasion arises,

and when does it not, learn to call your own bluff

and sit down on the ground, and have a good laugh.

PATRICK WHITE

WHAT'S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

WHAT’S BEYOND THE TRUTH ALWAYS MAKES A LIE

What’s beyond the truth always makes a lie

of what you can say about it. You can feel it

even as the words fall from your mouth like a bird bath.

However beautiful, however clear, translucent, well-meaning,

there’s always one syllable more that’s missing

that everything turns on like a black hole at the nave

of the wheeling galaxy, an unsayable singularity.

Love the radiance of the spokes, but where’s

the vehicle you were trying to assemble

from the yarrow sticks in the Book of Changes?

We get as far as the scaffolding we piece together

out of the bones of the snakes and ladders

we climbed up on like monkey bars to paint

our last masterpiece, and when it’s done,

however admired, it’s a paint rag of the original vision

by comparison with what flashed through our heart

like the spearhead of a life-changing insight

into the nature of chameleonic shapeshifters

mimicking our gestures like mirrors in a game of charades.

I’ve spent most of my life listening like a liar

to what I can’t say. The eclipse of an ink blot

on the silence even when the hummingbirds

gather like tuning forks to sample the larkspur.

I can say it like a star, a flower, the black swan

of a new moon making its first incision of light

like the slash of a scalpel across my throat,

but when the summons of the nightbird

stops singing on its green bough, realizing

no one’s ever going to come who understands

the inspiration and the longing, the Slavic solitude,

for all that I’ve tried to express as lyrically as I can,

I still feel the inarticulate urgency of an abyss

with its tongue cut out of what I tried to say

kicking me from the inside like the embryo

of a stillborn sky burial silently mouthing the wind

like the autumn leaves of a lonely death song.

Always an ear out of reach, a flightfeather

of a voice shy of the saying, a secret letter

of the alphabet without a likeness born of the eyes.

As if I used a blackboard and a bullet of chalk

as an understudy for the shining of the stars

or gummed the anthem of the sea like a brittle-lipped shell

I found washed up among the sea stars

like a larynx at my feet. Though I can sing

like the trees in the morning without forgetting

that every aubade is also a farewell to the stars

as sincere a field of nesting skylarks as I try to be,

my earthbound starmud rising like a constellation

of arcane serpent fire burning at the eastern doors

of the black wisdom of life arising out of the death

of what it engendered it. As with the flesh, so the spirit

salvages the detritus of what remains of its disillusions

and labours to enclose its emptiness in a chrysalis

of meaning and matter that might induce a transformation

of nothing into dragonflies. Stranger things have happened.

Truth is, according to the uncertainty principle,

the universe isn’t a metaphor, it’s a simile

for something you can’t quite put your finger on

like mercury trying to keep a starmap together in an earthquake.

I’ve looked into the future through a window

into an empty room no one’s booked into yet

and I’ve sometimes felt the same agony of stillness

being prepared by space and time as an available dimension

life hasn’t arrived to occupy yet, too busy in the present

to anticipate what’s coming like luggage from the past.

Words were the negative space. I worked in absence.

And something would always be missing. Words

were quantumly entangled like fish in the nets

of assent and denial, like spaced out fireflies on their way

to the stars, enmeshed in the torn spider webs

dripping under the weight of the panicked choirs

of dissonant frequencies strung like trashed guitars

with stagefright at the karaoke microphones of the streetlamps.

The medium beats around the message like nocturnal insects

against a window screen between them and a scented candle.

Young, my words were Luna moths and astronauts

that ached to immolate themselves in the stars

but as I got older, looking back over my shoulder

at the ashes of the winged heels of my nobler aspirations

compared to this long firewalk I’m travelling barefoot now,

and the largesse of the mystery that tunes celestial spheres

to the sound of mosquitoes whining in the woods at night

like dental drills and the villanelles of pubescent poets

that set your teeth on edge, I realized, at best,

words were just a way of whistling in the dark

with the rest of the nightbirds when the stars were out

and the moon was casting shadows as revealing as the light.

That’s when it began to dawn on me the worst lies

are always the clearest, simplest, easiest to understand

like straight lines to curves, highways to serpentine rivers,

things seen retinally from the outside like artists

with eyelids like the shutters of cameras with no feeling

for what they were looking at like reptiles

with third eyes that rarely ever blinked at anything.

Eye on the object reality when poets took notes

in white lab coats as if they were experimenting with fruitflies

under a lens instead of experiencing life as a vision

they’re collaboratively involved in like the dream grammars

of zodiacal alphabets written like eleven dimensional starmaps

on the backs of their eyes, hidden harmonies of the unseen

shining from the inside out like an emerald star

in the heart of an apple, under the skin of the sunset,

liberating the seed syllables of new myths of origin

from the straitjackets of a dysmorphic reality

that insists it’s the true shape of the universe

when it’s only another mirage of water trying

to put out a cosmic root-fire of underground stars.

Listen like an empty lifeboat to the mermaids

singing in the fog. Turn the light around and see

the evanescent shadow of smoke emerging

from the urn mouth of the chimney silhouetted

like lyrical dark matter on the roseate field stones

of a new morning closer to the vernal equinox

raising the level of the bright vacancy of consciousness

even as it lowers the dark abundance of the night

in a lock of light across the street opening its floodgates

on the walls of a heritage bank like a rite of passage.

Here on earth I’ve learned to reason surrealistically

according to the logic of asymmetrical similitudes that occur

in the dark of the mind like starfields of fireflies

all talking to each other at the same time

in a conversation about the next constellation

they might possibly be and what to name it after

once inspired by the muse of their prophetic memories

to remember what associative insights they forgot

when they first learned to write like cracks

in the archival creekbeds of their neo-cortex.

Next time you put words to a page like a loveletter

to a mysterious black rose that’s eclipsed

by the light of a one-eyed liar, trust your own nose

and ask yourself if they’re alive enough to smell the silence.

If the absence that surrounds them lingers in the air

like the aurora of an ancient solitude fragrant with light.

If there’s any joy of life in the starmud you blood with insight.

PATRICK WHITE