THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

THE DAY WITH NO AMBITIONS. GREY. GREY.

The day with no ambitions. Grey. Grey.

Stained-glass stars chained at the window,

Medusan mobiles hang like jellyfish,

motionless solar systems frozen in time,

mystic blue of burned out candle holders,

their flicker of light, a Monarch butterfly

in winter, perfectly intact, a wick in a pool of wax.

Sunday morning. Five churches open.

No carillon of bells. Four liars and one

that’s trying to face the facts. Bank, cafe,

Mac’s, gas station, a hospital with a landing pad

helicoptering the week-end’s heart attacks to Ottawa.

Soiled snow slobbering in the gutters

of a bleak street. Heritage fieldstone

refitted with aluminium windows, grandpa

in sunglasses where the old meets the new.

Among the local tribes, Scottish settlers,

Irish immigrants, British half pay officers,

even if you’ve lived here a hundred and fifty years

you’re still passing through. Good-bye. Good-bye.

Not enough dead in my past to be one of you.

A chubby adolescent primes his black baseball cap,

hitches up his pants, swings the door open

to the crowded cafe where there might be girls

as lonely as he is, and makes a hopeful grand entrance.

A grey haired woman darts from the bank

like a sparrow who knows her business.

Retirement capital of Canada, things advance

from accident to accident like the old woman

last summer who stopped her car without warning

in the middle of the road and got out to ask

the passers-by if anyone knew how to park it.

The lamp posts straight as florist’s daffodils

but one uprooted by a drunk, leaning like a mast

to starboard, counterpointing the upright by contrast.

An orange cone, thumb-tacking the spot

something happened out of the usual to make

Sunday worth talking about after the plates

are pushed away and the waitress comes to the table

knowing what everyone takes in their coffee

without having to ask if they’re from here or not.

Everyone lives as if they’d just read The Love Song

of J. Alfred Prufrock, though I doubt they’ve heard of Eliot.

You can tell by the way they walk how long

they’ve been landlocked beside the Rideau Canal

without mermaids, though they stock the lakes

with fingerlings of small mouth bass for American fishermen.

All well and good, I say, all well and good

though the suicide rate among the teen-agers

is the highest in the valley, I’m not passing judgement

from the God’s eye view of my upstairs apartment window.

I’m not logging the cadavers of dead trees

in the cemetery of a frozen swamp in winter.

I’m not trying to thaw the dreams of the mosquitoes out

beside the stove. Life here is a home remedy

for everything, mystic bumbleberry pies cooling

on the farmyard windowsills of rustic sibyls

who usually know more about what you need

than you do in the afterlife of some psychic catastrophe

and more often than not are uncannily right.

When it’s not being shown how to do things the smart way,

talent is quietly scorned by the schadenfreude

of incontestable skills that know how to fix it on their own.

Confess your helplessness with inquisitive humility

and everyone turns into Aristotle in a teaching cave

and shows you how to patch a leak in your radiator

on the cheap with eggs and pepper, or keep

the window in your woodstove clean by making

a paste of its ashes and rubbing it into your third eye

to get the soot and creosote off the way a poet

looks at things sometimes like an ambassador in chains

through a glass darkly, burning like a cubic cord

of green wood hissing at what the nightbirds used to sing

before the chainsaws showed up like a chorus

of morose delectation in the perils of insufficiency.

Better not to wear your surrealism on your sleeve

and keep your longings to yourself. If you get caught

crying out loud over some real or imagined agony

and you’re not a girl, things can get dismissively rougher.

Real men don’t waste their time feeling things

that can’t be fixed with tools. Fortunately for me

I’ve got a paint brush and a canvas I stretch

like a tarp on a pickup, though the poetry’s

harder to explain than the logic of metaphors

in a hardware store with emergency generators on sale.

Isolation’s just a red shift in solitude and my loneliness

is a small price to pay to get a lot of work done

like Roger Bacon in a woodshed without being accused

that often, of witchcraft. More hermetic by acclamation

than intent, an occupational hazard of what I do,

I’ve always got the river at night if I need someone to talk to,

and the companionable eyes of the stars to overcome

the cruelty of my cosmic cabin fever when space

turns to glass, and it gets so cold and impersonal in the abyss

even death shudders like a calving glacier when it realizes

how much holier things seem in my absence

than it could ever hope to be while I remained alive

to put the lie to it, like people in a small town, who survive.

PATRICK WHITE  

THE MILKY WAY LEAVES A TRAIL OF MIRRORS LIKE A GARDEN SNAIL

THE MILKY WAY LEAVES A TRAIL OF MIRRORS LIKE A GARDEN SNAIL

The Milky Way leaves a trail of mirrors like a garden snail

across the night sky. After the wounded joy. The scar

of enlightenment on the waters of life. A flash of insight

many years ago when a firefly emerged from the shadows

like a mandarin of Zen after a lightning storm and there’s been

no starmap for the creative turbulence in the valley of my heart

ever since I graduated with thorny laurels

from an abandoned schoolhouse of doors

that taught me to open them for myself. Now I’m the master

of a shipwreck under full sail on the moon.

But don’t be dazzled by all the hype. If you die into living

more immensely, even the apricot blossoms

when they come to the green bough with the incredible voice

after the marrow in your bones has been frozen

like the plasmatic slush of a winter dusk on the road,

are mythically incomparable to the cool bliss of the stars

that illuminated the afterlife you lived before this that made

every spring thereafter seem a post-mortem effect by contrast.

Meditatively I sit on a tatami mat of rusty finishing nails

practising the suppler Yoga of pine needles

under a broken evergreen with casts of snow on its branches

on an outcrop of rock over a lake I keep returning to

as if I lived here once like a waterbird and left something behind

like a reflection of mine with eyes that drowned in me

when I was walking on thin ice in the dark that growled

like an unchained dog, to get to the other side

of swimming like a hourglass with waterwings for lungs

on the estranged side of the moon, without hope,

when the silence forgot how to sing and every lightyear

I sank deeper into exile with an uncanny smile on my face.

The bush wolves howl. And everything that is

sad, mad, wild and lonely about me answers back

as if time were trying to express what it’s like to be mortal

and have a past it’s sometimes hard not to miss.

Wolf moon, snow moon, hunger moon, waxing,

Spica in the hand of Virgo, Capella and the kids,

Regulus, Aldebaran, Sirius, Orion and the Lion

the Pleiades garlanding the horns of the Bull for sacrifice

to the chthonic goddess of the island in the bay

that’s more witch than warlock by the way

the cedars thicken like mascara on the treeline.

I look at stars with the same anticipation I felt

when I used to check my flowers first thing in the morning

to see if any had opened like supernovas in the night

while I was dreaming about the light being a gardener that transplanted

hydromorphic constellations into a starmap that never uprooted its weeds.

Detached and free enough to be emotional about the dead

I scatter the ashes of my heart like things I’ve felt and said

swept like a gust of stars and snow off the thresholds

of my seeing by the silver green brooms of the moonlit junipers

that try to keep the flying carpets of the hillsides clean

of the Arctic mirages the mind tracks in like a zodiac

with bestial house manners, wherever I think it might do

the undernourished roots of the waterlilies of dark matter

the most good. I mulch my solitude with autumnal memories

of equal nights and days at the crossroads of my ecliptics

and celestial equators like the tree rings of spring in my heartwood.

Though my tears keeping jumping orbitals like ripples of rain

there always a discharge of light out of all proportion

after a quantum release of every mystic singularity

of a firefly at the heart of the galaxy from a black hole of pain.

I don’t cling to my leaves in winter, nor grieve when

the blossoms of spring let go of me like thousands of poems

free as geishas in the gutters of my starmud to shine where they please.

Like one old mushroom once said like the bald head of a man,

the birds are flying in my roots, the fish are swimming

in the crowns of my trees. And I know as well as he

what hour it is. The midnight sun breathes in its sleep

through the gills of Pisces. A virgin sows

the unploughed moon with beards of starwheat.

PATRICK WHITE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

ACUTELY AWARE OF THE ONCENESS OF LIFE

Acutely aware of the onceness of life, one

of the many shadows that followed me for lightyears

was the terror of wasting it on myself and not

the mystery of what it is to be here knee deep in starmud,

up over my head in a fathomless atmosphere of awareness,

knowing I was going to leave my body behind

one day like gumboots. Any moment now.

The green light of the firefly about to change to red.

In the last flash of insight to cross my mind,

which could well be, as it has been here,

the foundation stone of a whole new universe,

I didn’t want to get caught, one foot in and one foot out,

trying to weather the storm like a lifeboat

still moored to the dock like an apple in winter

on the tree of life, not risking what I had to let go of

like seeds that abandon the rafters of the tree to be true to it.

Some people trip, some fall, some plunge,

some swan-dive into the abyss. I made

a big black hole in my heart and let all the stars

leak into it like the creative side of the light when it

turns around to look at itself without being rebuffed

by its own reflectivity. I’ve danced under the chandeliers

in the blue-white palaces of the Pleiades

when the air was full of mirrors, and that was

as elegant as a graceful woman on the verge of tears,

and often, I’ve worn my eyelids like hoods and eclipses

over the falcons of my eyes to keep the lunettes of my talons

from seizing the heart of the dove like a bouquet of blood.

Like the gutter receives the spent flames of the leaves

and the Japanese plum blossoms, like the baleen

of a blue whale harvests the krill and knows

by the taste in its mouth whether it’s autumn or spring,

when they were tired of shining, I let the stars

go slumming in my humanity as if I were a spiritual nightclub

where they could let their hair down like black dwarfs

sick of photo-ops and burn out alone at the bar

like bruised black and blue flash bulbs any way they wanted to.

I brought the stars back down to earth as often

as they raised my skull up like a grail

they poured themselves into until my eyes

were brimming over with their radiance and never once

did I ever hear them say when. Or enough is enough.

My capacity for emptiness was and still is limitless.

How else could you hold all that shining within yourself

and not go blind? How could you ever hope to know

what hour it was like the zeitgeist of the times at home

in a material eternity if you didn’t live space

like an intimate experience there were only the stars

and a few nightbirds you could tell it to who could understand?

Though the signs were everywhere like a secret

that wanted to be known. All you had to do

was open your heart and take a look through the third eye

of a black hole dilating in the middle of your iris like a new moon

climbing the rungs on a ladder of event horizons

as if it were crossing the thresholds of each house of the zodiac

back into the burning arms of the black sun no one could see

that wasn’t intrigued by the mystery of the dark eyes

behind the veils and lifemasks of the light

that paled them like nightwatchmen making

their final rounds on the grave yard shift

turn their lanterns down like stars in the dawn.

Acutely aware of the onceness of life,

I cherished my fingertips, not what they touched.

I exalted my seeing, not what it saw. I honoured my voice

for the nobility of its calling, not what was said in my sleep.

I gathered up all the myriad thoughts and facets of mind

like wavelengths of the omnipresence of the universe

like fireflies and lightning, and delighted and horrified

as I was by what they revealed, looked deeply into the eye

of the one jewel of the world concealed behind all the shining.

I’ve firewalked the Milky Way on a pilgrimage

of ghosts and smoke and taken the hands of many lovers

as if they were my own like an Orphic leper

come back from the dead like a moonrise silhouetting

the green boughs of a tree that had suffered many dismemberments,

to revel in the return of life to my limbs like an orchard in spring,

not the windfall of the fruits of the earth that fell out of their sleeves

like cornucopias, wishing-wells, and the caressable magic of lamps.

Though I praised the fountains and goblets, the flowering

of the starfields after the ice-storms of Orion thawed

like a chandelier over the candelabra of the trees

I drowned in the godhead of the dark watershed like the source

of the great rivers of my life returning to the sea

like the stray threads and frayed deltas of my blood

reworked into new flying carpets on the loom

of the lunar ebb and neap of my tidal heart

seminal with life along the island coasts of consciousness

when the moon is in the corals like a sower in the fields.

But more than desire itself, I celebrated my heart,

not for what it longed for, but the art of love that mastered me

like a down and out stranger I once met in West Van

when he saw I was out of cigarettes, and opening his hand

like an ashtray of butts he’d been picking up off the streets,

and saving for himself, picked the longest one out

and gave it to me as freely without forethought

as any highroller ever shot the stars as if he had no limits.

PATRICK WHITE

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I COULD ALWAYS TELL WHEN YOUR EYES HAD TOUCHED SOMETHING

I could always tell when your eyes had touched something.

The stars were dazzling through the tops

of the pagodas of the pine trees airing their wings

like totem poles carved into the features of moonlight

on the distant hillsides that swept up from the lake

in waves of stone that broke like an avalanche against the sky.

And by the number of miracles under your feet

as ancient as the wingspans of the stars

I knew all the paths you’d taken like the lifelines

in the palm of the alluvial deltas of my right hand

to make your way to the sea like a leaf with a flightplan

laid on the mindstream like a Nazca pictogram

as if you were waiting for the return of the plumed serpent

like the feathers of the highest weighed

on the scales of the lowest dancing on the balance beam

of the unitive life of a draconian oxymoron.

Per ardua ad astra, I couldn’t look at the starmaps

in your eyes without seeing the blueprints

of a successful paleolithic attempt at rocketry

celebrated by a fountain of fireworks like falling stars

that quickly exhausted my heart of myriad desires

trying to wish upon them all like meteor showers

in the Heavy Bombardment taking the shape of the earth

I was standing on like Stonehenge at the winter solstice

when you reached out and touched my skeleton

like spring in the bone-box of the vernal equinox.

And there were signs of a mysterious calligraphy

on the petals of the roses in your blood

I couldn’t see that directed the sweetness of life

like bees to your heart of hearts. I could never tell

for sure, if you were the spirit of life within me

or the runaway daughter of a wayward muse

that cherished your creative freedom above all else as I did

the inspiration that kept my fires burning long into the night,

trying to write odes to your beauty in evanescent alphabets

in cedar scented smoke from candelabras of driftwood

I burned like the bodies of the drowned that made it all the way

to this far shore on an enlightenment path of their own,

like overturned lifeboats rowing toward land like arthropods.

Sometimes I still wake up out of a deep sleep and think I hear

the clacking of the shells and crutches the sea

handed out like drafting compasses with knee joints for legs

so when they made a side-ways move they clicked their heels

and snapped their claws like the castanets of Spanish dancers

at a bullfight in one of the cratered arenas on the moon

where the shadows drive their dark swords into the hearts

of solar matadors that taunted them with the capes of red poppies

bleeding out in the sands of the gored hourglasses of the dead.

I could easily follow the echoes of your voice after you’d spoken

and left the rest to the silence to explain because

it never took any of your dream grammars long

to master me fluently whenever I tried to open my mouth

to say something when I realized immediately

my vocabulary of sacred syllables stuck in my throat

like tarpaper eclipses of creosote compared

to the inflammable starclusters of your astral eloquence.

You spoke in the tongues of flames that healed

the heretical sunspots on my heart by setting my body afire

and leaving me your spirit to follow suit

as if Joan of Arc had turned pole-dancing

into the religious art of two wavelengths

of healing serpent fire entwined around

the axis mundi of my spine and I were chalking

pool cues with the open chakras of my vertebrae

getting ready to put some English on the planets

in my solar system and take a long shot without sinking

the eight ball of my prophetic skull in the black holes

of the side pockets on the elemental table against the odds

of ever making it without a lot of luck and a kiss

from your risky lips like a chance I was willing to take.

PATRICK WHITE

IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

IS IT IN THE NATURE OF LIFE AND LIGHT

Is it in the nature of life and light

that if you look deeply enough into their eyes

eventually you’ll begin to cry?

If you turn over enough skulls

in a cemetery of shepherd moons,

if you exhume enough gravestones

it’s not the angels that keep their ancient places

but maggots in a charnel house with no return address?

Fountainheads of enlightenment

rooted in a watershed of sorrows.

I’m tired of bringing bouquets to the dead.

Listening to the lies we’re compelled

to tell ourselves like waterlilies in a swamp.

Lachrymae rerum, some nights life shrieks

like a mother that’s lost it’s only child.

Try being blissed out in a secret garden

in Auschwitz as if morning glory grew

on the barbed wire fence. It was ashes, not snow

that fell on the dungheaps of human flesh.

Lampshades of human skin that flowered

on the desks of bureaucratic offal, not chrysanthemums.

So much innocence swept aside before it was born

like the rape of a bride by the mirages of power

that claim the right of prima nocta to the waters of life

on the first night. Lion kings kill the progeny

of the old to put their genetic seal on things

in gules of blood on the claws of dynastic genocides.

Disneyland specializes in pseudomorphic fairytales for the kids.

Politics, court intrigue in a cloak of creosote at a dogfight

for the amusement and profit of savage fools.

Justice a screening myth for the real play

that goes on behind the scenes the curtain

never goes up on like the permanent fix

of an eclipse of blackflies blotting the sun

like the inkspots of unprincipled signatories

to see who gets which half of the cadavers of Poland.

Hitler sleeps with Stalin. The red army stalls

outside the abattoir of Warsaw burning

then Churchill sneaks off to the same brothel

without telling the Americans he’s got loose morals

as an iron curtain falls across Europe by rhetorical arrangement.

The history of the world. Mining gold teeth

on a battlefield. Old men and women

metastasizing their avaricious senility by sending

the young and poor of one gutter

to redress unemployment in the slums of another

as the factories work overtime on behalf of the rich

on the patriotic nightshift to stick their thumbs

in the profiteering pies of market shares

improving the instruments of death

like a windfall of plums and cluster bombs

the growing limbs of children play among like Orphic dolls

you can’t call back from the dead like the songs

you used to sing to them as they lay in their deathbeds.

The night appalls and after sixty-four years

of swimming in this ocean of toxic fumaroles

I’m numbed by the effluvium of megalomaniac volcanoes

erupting like boils of capitalitis and commucarcinoma

of deficient immune systems on the skin

of the body politic lionizing plague rats

according to the effect they have

on the general well-being of the public.

The shilling under the arms of those who died for money.

The tubal ligations of budgets like welfare mothers

by the eunuchs and castratos of fiscal tapeworms

against the propagation of any but their own kind.

It blisters the eyes out of my soul to be irradiated so.

To walk among the houses of the zodiac alone at night

even out in the woods where death has a more honest smell

and know it’s only the earth among planets, fouling the footpath

with corpses it hasn’t got enough body bags for.

Free people fighting and dying, giving up the gift of life,

in the vital interests of a few who take from the many

the morgue of birthrights in a time of plenty

defended by a holy war of lies to death against

the infidels of perjured ideals sacrificed for the common good.

Labyrinths of vertiginous spin at Sufi crossroads

and the crooked path out of here baffling the starmaps

of the direction of prayer like aluminum constellations

of confetti foiling the radar of early warning systems

of pink mornings like cherry blossoms in hell.

Fireflies, stars, compassion, illumination, poetry,

the disarming generosity of genius in a few humans

with hearts large enough to think bigger than an ego,

wildflowers in the eyes of certain women

who intrigued me like hidden secrets I longed to know

like the dream grammars of sacred syllables

in sensual temples only the wind and the nightbirds

knew all the lyrics to. The candlepower of mystic insights

embodied in the starmud under my fingernails. Now

were it not to leave forensic evidence of my homicidal silence

I don’t even want to write this in tears of blood.

And I’m trying to hang on like a weed that’s never known

its proper place in life except as a cosmic diaspora

in the context of everywhere, but they’re killing the bees

to protect the genetically modified crops of the parasites

that own them like oil in the flour of bad bread.

The pleonasts are abusing the antiseptic honeys of life

with corporately commiserating insecticides

who say, even so, in the peacetime atrocities

perpetrated on the elemental joys that combat

the blight of the private sadness in the superstitious facts

of the public madness, by law, not love of the land

nor what lives upon it, you have no choice,

despite the stingers in the poisoned apiary of your voice,

despite the hand you put over the mouths of your abducted hives

to keep them from giving themselves away

to the leaves and flowers that lie in ambush

like judas-goats bleating to kiss them on the cheek

like a patent on a garden on a hillside of skulls

blessed by the money-changers on the benches

in the the temples of life for thirty pieces of silver

and the noose of a chromosome to hang from

like seedless fruit in the medicine bags of their funeral bells.

PATRICK WHITE

PAINT ALL OVER ME, FLAKEY NIGHT SKIES

PAINT ALL OVER ME, FLAKEY NIGHT SKIES

Paint all over me, flakey night skies

and the histrionic hemorrhage of red roses,

blue bruises, violet orchids under my eyes,

Hooker’s green brooding in the foliage

of a rootless man who greys the spring

with the cadmium orange of burning maples

subjectively correlating my autumnal moods.

Motley to the crowd in the deconstructed rainbow

of my Joseph’s coat, the cobalt blue on my jeans,

conveniently sincere, I may look like a palette,

but I’m an oneirologist at the bottom of the well,

who can interpret dreams in jail.

Plagues of famine, plagues of the fat kind,

locusts and snakes and olegarchic corporations,

blights of the heart, when has it ever been else?

Don’t like your nightmares? Change pillows.

I put my ear down on the rock of the world at night,

disgusted more by what I see in the light

than I paint in the dark. Maybe Rothko was right.

A black hole is the only way out of here.

It’s funny how the liars are always the ones

trying to make things clear. I keep

the savage indignation of my pit bull on a leash

though I want to rip and tear like the French revolution.

Beauty is truth. Truth is beauty. That is all ye know

on earth, all ye need to know. I love Keats

but that’s pure bullshit. An allergic reaction.

I know a woman, twenty-six, skeletal with cancer,

with two kids she’s been raising on her tips as a waitress

since her husband committed suicide at Christmas.

She knows more about the debts and depths of life

than most poets bleeding to death like paper cuts,

diluting the wine of poetry with the bottled water

of unvivid prose and opinion, clothes pegs on their nose

to avoid the smell of life, no lightning singeing

the positive ions of their happy, happy atmospheres

the poxy moon would rather do without, than breathe.

Sometimes it’s the skull of the earth, not a pea

under the bed of the princess who frets over

her hyperbolic sensitivities at tea under the willows

just like Rimbaud or Van Gogh. How do you scoff

in terza rima without coming off as a cur

chained at the gates of hell because you know

you have to wake up lost in a dark wood

before you can ape and gape your way into paradise

and the rungs of the burning ladders up to

the seventh realm of light aren’t trellises of scarlet runners?

Spare me the narcissistic visions of your tiny crucifixions

flying into the third eye of your Cyclopean anti-depressants

looking for a gold rush in a dust bowl on the verge of extinction.

There are thieves at your side, dadaphors,

a binocular way of looking at things, one torch up,

one torch down, where parallel lies do meet

in a single focus lightyears out of your field of view

that work like hinges on a door, wings on a bird,

two feet going in opposite directions, one mile east,

one mile west, exit and entrance, to the end of the journey.

All true mystics are misfits in an uneasy truce

with what’s popular. The frauds are huckstering

scented snakeoil on a midway of miracles

where the penny of the full moon gets you in

for a peek at the freaks you astigmatize

by closing your eyes to what’s ugly about you, not them.

PATRICK WHITE

MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

MOST DAYS WENT BY LIKE THE HELICAL COILS OF THE SUN

Most days went by like the helical coils of the sun

slowly crushing the life out of you, a ton of chronic anaconda,

swallowing you heart first, not the occasional

lightning strike of a rattlesnake shaking its tail at you

like dice it was keeping warm for a left-handed throw.

Childhood horrors I’ve spent the last forty years

trying to shine like a star in the eye of as if

I were trying to stare down a snakepit to see

which one of us would turn to stone first, me

with my silver bullet, bright shield, and winged horse,

my boyish notion of heroic redemption,

or Medusa loose in the aviary of my voice.

A strange stillness overtakes me in the false dawn

of anticipating my mother’s death, knowing

it must come soon enough, an astronomical catastrophe

to a species already struggling for its life.

And as then, so now, I’m impotent to help

this woman from Queensland who

shipwrecked herself like an island on the moon

we could all live around like fish taking shelter

in the niches of the Great Barrier Reef

she turned her body into, though she had been

beautiful and wild once, an artist, a dancer,

playing strip poker with American cooks

docked in Sydney Harbour in World War II

for a bit of extra food. And seldom lost.

No garden of Eden in my life, but she had Brisbane

as she remembered it more and more as the years went by,

a place to return to, sanctuary for a burdened heart,

all mangoes and passion fruit and bougainvillea,

low hanging fruits of the earth ripe for the picking

as we had the apples, plums and pears

of the abandoned orchards of Victoria

swept by field fires of Plantagenet broom.

A welfare litter of five we came upon food in those days

like birds to overgrown gardens or fish

that nibbled at the drowned when the tide came in.

My mother practised survival like a Zen discipline.

Even when we were wearing our hunting masks

she taught us all to laugh at the crazy things

we had to do to live and say, Paddy, you should

write a book one day and I guess I’ve being doing that

for the last fifty years. And it still isn’t finished yet.

If all the seas were ink, and all the trees were pens,

dusk after dusk, morning into morning, it never ends.

I keep gleaning those gardens, searching

the acres of book-sized stovewood doomed to burn

like the Library of Alexandria, checking out

the back alleys, the back doors, the nightsky

liberating its stars above the condemned houses

smelling of the salacious mildew of beached mattresses

rotting on the floor like washed up whales

dying under their own weight as if they had

their anacondas too in the form of deep sea squid, looking

for words, always words, they pay me for in beer bottles,

words that might make a difference somehow,

though it’s always a toss-up between snake eyes and hope,

to inadvertently help someone get through the rest of the month

and, who knows, maybe a little extra to spend on themselves

like a new pair of shoes that fit, without feeling guilty about it

as my make-do mother always did until she couldn’t walk any more

because she had bunions on her feet the size of gibbous moons.

The palette of the rainbow she put down has reappeared

like a moondog in me, and insufficient in my own eyes,

for not foraging more loaves and fishes to break with her

than I should have, given what I do for a living, trying,

this late February night knows how hard I’ve tried,

to write something so compassionately sincere and compelling

it would bring tears to your eyes as you laugh out loud

at the spontaneous improvement in the quality of anyone’s life

as a standard of the earthly excellence I pursue like a calling

to celebrate even this harvest of shadows and eclipses

in the empty hands of an eldest son’s love of his mother

like chaff in the grain, magpies and kookaburras

in the gum trees of Brisbane, little Edens like fireflies

in every moment I’ve hung on this southern excruciation

of jewels in the ore of the underworld, Aussie enough

to bluff a pair of deuces like snake-eyes

into a royal flush that takes the table and keeps

the clothes on our backs like the feathers and scales

of the best we found in the heart of the worst,

blessed by what we cursed, and could not live without.

PATRICK WHITE