FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

FIREFLY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?

Firefly, what are you looking for

in every corner of the third eye of the world?

Are you looking for the missing children

of another realm who fell into this one

through the trapdoor of a lullaby

enigmatically enciphered in totemistic code?

Are you the star someone was following

like a spark plug that leaked out of their dreams,

a swan in an oilspill? Were you unhappy

with the constellation you fell from

like one of the crown jewels from Corona Borealis,

or are you just a vagrant like me, one

of those aligned to wandering as the next place

to shine a little light on, your life like a lantern in hand,

wondering what’s been written under the leaves,

or under a bridge, that it takes a madman to understand

or it takes a whole tree to play the mystery of its cards

so far from its chest, when they’ll all be scattered to the wind

like ancient starmaps and waterlilies soon.

Insight, synteretic spark, semaphoric lighthouse,

blackout and ignition, which phase of you

shines more intensely, the light or the dark?

Do you just have the one good eye, or two?

It would take someone just as lost at sea in their awareness

to get their bearings from you, as it would

to consult the compass of a flower like a waterclock

because time, when it’s free, like light,

expands in all directions at once like tree rings

dilating the apples of their eyes in the rain,

surrounding the lore of their heartwood with growing pains.

Metaphor, glow worm, do you find what you seek,

are you a chandelier burning in the palace

of a mason jar after the last waltz has packed away its cellos,

a tear of the sun that shines at midnight

like a canary in an underground diamond mine

or do we share the same mind, one neuron in the net

reflecting the other, an effect of the optics of thought?

Intimate familiar, little prophet, rogue planet,

singularity at the bottom of a black hole,

are you looking at me, as I am you

like a thought on the outside, an underwater welder

trying to heal the damage done to the hull of the moon

crossing the Great Barrier Reef of the brain?

Wavelengths of water and light sway the river reeds,

silver the fallen limbs of the statuesque birch

that leaned out too far over the edge of the lake

to pluck the moon from the sky like an apricot.

I watch the cults and spiritual congregations of the fireflies

gather, shape and dissolve, each with its own flight path,

and I wonder if there’s a shape-shifting constellation

that would cover us all under the roof of the same sign

like a zodiac of homeless exiles we all had the keys to

but didn’t know where the locks were hidden

until we took off our starmaps like blindfolds.

No extinctions in the gentle meteor showers

of the fireflies, nor any discernible radiant,

for them or me or the universe, given

everyone embodies the whole of the Big Bang

in and of themselves, just as the New England asters do,

everyone shining for all their worth

through the translucency of their own space,

even when they’re trying to hide from their own eyes,

like daylilies at night, or the gold of full moons

under eyelids of ore, under the overturned lifeboats

of their beached hope chests that have nothing

to look forward to anymore that isn’t any further away

than the telescope they use on top of a cold mountain

to measure the wingspan of their dreams.

The light will out as if it couldn’t keep itself a secret

from the darkness it illuminates with its own flowering.

PATRICK WHITE

AS MUCH AS I LOVE THE STARS

AS MUCH AS I LOVE THE STARS

As much as I love the stars, I know

the spirit must seek its lost radiance

in the midst of the filth of this world,

even when its third eye is trying

to wash it off in tears it really means.

Under the half-closed eyelid

of the pine cone pagoda in oceanic meditation

is a fire-seed waiting for immolation

like an overdue urn about to give birth.

And do you see how the moon

feathers the waves with silver,

and the breathing waters so much

like the flesh of a woman undulating

under the caress of an unaccustomed hand

shines back like fish swimming through a starmap?

As above so below. Same with inside and outside.

Astrophysics is psychology. Noumena, phenomena.

Are you looking for a unified, field theory of your mind?

Study that small sacred syllable of a black ant

with the torn wing of a butterfly

under full sail in its mandible

it’s taking back to the heap

of a thriving passage tomb burial

like a high card it’s going to lay on the table

without intending to call anyone’s bluff.

The moon on the lake isn’t timed.

Death’s not too late. Life’s not too early.

Not all the flowers bloom at once

in a wave of mass hysteria at a sports stadium.

Time is as generous to the dandelion

as it is to the hyacinth or the rose.

When a total eclipse of the soul

can be as illuminating to a firefly

as the enlightenment of the full moon

can be to the mad at harvest time

and the night bird sings on the same branch

out of the same longing

as the mourning dove does

on the burgeoning bough,

how far must a wave look for the grail

before it realizes it’s swimming in it

and by virtue of it having never been lost or found,

like the universe you’re surrounded by

dipping its other wing in the cup you drink from

like blood from your own prophetic skull

or an elixir of love from the goblet of a black tulip,

as an antidote to falling into a cult of trances,

trying to teach rattlesnakes to ghost dance for rain

when everywhere you look as far as the eye can see,

nothing but the bleached bones of their vertebrae

crumbling like aqueducts across a sea of sand

looking for the holy hourglass to green it again?

When things are like this, why send

a caravan of mirages like thought-trains

on a pilgrimage for water on the moon?

Is a course correction more innocent

than its original direction or is it

just another change of heart on the part

of a weathervane that thinks linearly

it’s got its hand on the rudder of the wind?

Best thing to do in a storm

is let go of the wheel of birth and death

and either go down with the ship like a constellation,

or trust in a bubble-shaped universe you still might float

like a turbulent waterlily above the turmoil of it all,

anchored to the bottom like a key on a kite

to lure the lightning to your spinal cord

the way copulating snakes make their own caduceus,

twin wavelengths from the same inner matrix

ascending like helical thermals under a dove’s wings,

so that dragons are born of cosmic eggs

that know how to heal fire with fire

that can consume itself like life

without ever getting burnt out

even when autumn’s coming on

and you can begin to smell

the smoke and ashes on its breath.

Enlightenment the inspiration of the search,

the spirit returns to the candle in your hand,

to dance with the flame of life within you

on your own threshold, in your own doorway as you realize

like someone waking up from a dream

in their own bed, their head on a softer pillow

than they imagined a moonrock could be

at one sixth the gravity of earth, what

was there to aspire to that could possibly be

higher and wiser than a cloud circling a mountain

or down in the valley where the stars slum

once they get off the night shift, more compassionate

than a honey bee in the eye of a stargazer lily

smothering it in a rusty ochre dust storm of pollen

the way we prepared our dead when we lived in caves

to bloom like a hive when its spirit returns to matter

in its next incarnation as a gust of wildflowers on Mars.

Hawkweed and Indian paintbrush I would think.

And the unusual fruits and flowers that can sprout

from a windfall of intensely radiant meteor showers

flung out of the darkness by the hands of generous sowers

that were ploughing the moon for themselves

long before the ox of the mind showed up

like the blessing of a delusional dependency

that makes you think, gone to seed, you need it.

When the truth has always been mindful

and mindlessly green as the thorns and the leaves

of the locust trees in spring coming into blossom

as easily as the mindstream follows its own lead everywhere

with nothing but its own flowing for a navigator.

No gate, no lock, no pivot, no hinge, no waterclock

trying to put the fire of life out in a bucket brigade

of community-oriented arsonists, departure

never any further off the beaten path from home

than its arrival can be lead astray

by the shadow of the return journey

it casts behind it like the widening wake

of a waterbird’s wings unravelling

the flying carpet of the water that wove it

like wavelengths of the hidden harmonies

that are on your side like your eyes are

when you step out of the blazing house of life

once in a while, into the expansive solitude

of your own inimitably creative darkness,

without a candle, a firefly, a lightning strike

for a guide, and look up, just look up

in any direction you wish, and don’t pick any one

of the six thousand stars you can see

with the naked eye in the country,

no matter you don’t know their names

or myths of origin, or much about shepherd moons,

or what an antikythera is, then run around

looking for an underground circumpolar sage

to show you on a starmap where your shining is at

like the light of the star, though you cry

in bliss and sorrow, delusion and insight,

you can’t wash out of your own eye

anymore than you can Venus in the dawn

when you’re sitting on a mountain under a Bodhi tree

trying to attain the unattainable empty-handed

in the same breath that’s been giving it all away

for light years, inexhaustibly, like a flower-mouth

of enlightenment in everything you say or do,

the world in the creative wake of whatever medium

that’s shapeshifting into you like water into fish,

darkness into star, sky into a bird on the wing

in a homesick sunset, or the shining of the source

like the lantern in your hand you needlessly labour

at keeping lit to go look for it without realizing

it’s your own blazing that blinds you to the gift

of what the darkness arrays before you like candles and stars

and nocturnal waterlilies opening like a new moonrise

amazed by the occult mystery of the fire that burns

in the subliminal watersheds of your fathomless eyes.

In this boundless space, why should you be surprised

behind all the masks of God, her best disguise

when the hidden secret wished to be known

and she revealed herself, was your own face,

your eyes, your mouth, your ears, your voice alone

pouring the universe like the light of picture-music

into your own ears like the spirit of a word

that can’t be enlightened until it’s been heard by you.

PATRICK WHITE  

ON A BIG, BIG SCALE, WHAT DOES IT AMOUNT TO?

ON A BIG, BIG SCALE, WHAT DOES IT AMOUNT TO?

On a big, big scale, what does it amount to, these words,

this cooing, grunting, shrieking, howling, moaning, laughing

in a zoo at night like caged animals trying to get out of themselves?

These academics who write like yoked oxen trying to convince themselves

they’re ground breaking tractors trying to get their seed in on time

by sowing the conceptual grime of their immaculate fingernails with salt.

English ox-eyed daisies about as wild as it gets. Dead, dead, dead,

they all go into tenure arguing over what someone else said

who never had the money to live as comfortably as they do

with another man’s dread. Maggots in the eyes of the corpus literati

delectating over the cadavers of the ghost dancers who lived

off the reservation, not like the sixth pressing of palms and grapes

at a wine and cheese party, so poetically politic they’re suspicious of cutlery

even as they lick the spines of books that have broken into visionary print

inspired by the works of hallucinogenic toads that jump like popcorn

on rainy roads at night, caught in the highbeams of mesmeric headlights.

not the meaning or the madness, what torrents of love and blood,

what zeniths of agony, what nadirs of beauty endured in transit,

all the Gibraltars of doubt they had to pass through like kidney stones

through the pillars of Hercules. What was worshipped here

in these abandoned temples, these shrines and niches, altars to the heart

that was torn out of them like sacrificial judas-goats in the name

of terrors that raked their flesh with the claws of the moon,

extasis in death, life in the urns of their self-immolations like flowers

that bloom in fire once every seven thousand years, and the tiger

not betrayed by preying villagers who couldn’t kill it eye to eye.

Among the bones and broken pillars of another man’s devotion,

what are these nasty wrens and sparrows twittering about?

A writer dies and there’s an eclipse of black mold and mildew

that grows over his life as his body ripens in the earth

like an empty medicine bag denuded of the vital organs and totems

he lived by like hope against hope he hadn’t wasted his life

chanting slogans at the moon to propitiate its mutability.

Do ut des. I give so you give. Do ut abeas. I give so you go away.

Parrots of a false dawn, swinging on the faculty rungs of an aviary.

Semini sectores of editors trying to get laid like scalpels and footnotes

at the bottom of a page of mediocre notoriety radical

as the taste of radishes for six packs and cleavage. Rhinoplasty

to amputate the smell of shit out of their noses as they broach the truth

of what a poet has to live through to sing like a hermit thrush

in a snakepit of plastic surgeons under the knives and toxic anaesthetics

of their fangs and ossifying glances assessing the chances

of anyone making it through creative writing school without turning to stone.

Slim to none. The Great Barrier Reef of English Literature, dead polyps

on your larnyx, tiger mussels in the Great Lakes, semi-quavers

with their tails cut off like three blind mice playing music on the effluvial gates

of our fecal waste like Aeolian harps, I tell you, Aeolian harps

with iron staves like the baleen of expurgating blue whales

throwing up the krill they couldn’t keep down that a lecture will later distill

into the cloaking devices of perfumes that would put even Ibn Attar’s name to shame

with the stink of enlightening lies. The mythic deflation of generative stars

into planetariums of flashlights that can see about as far into the dark as flatworms.

The Beth Luis Nion Druidic tree alphabets conveniently repackaged as toothpicks

by chainsaws trying to get at the truth of the heartwood of old growth forests.

Chainsaws for the timber. Bush hogs for the underbrush.

How to make a vocational career choice out of a noble calling,

by learning to bite your tongue in the presence of a padded bibliography

stuffing a pillow of dipiliated flightfeathers like down in the mouth of the muse.

Who plucked your eagles in the forest of Teutoburg? Who crushed

the cosmic eggs of your nesting crows on offshore islands

to keep them from squabbling with the morning robins outside your window

while you were trying to sleep like a sabbatical from yourself?

Sa Bat, the evil eye of the Sumerian full moon when women bled

in isolation so we could have holydays that still don’t ring true,

and football weekends and hunting trips out in the woods

among the critical roadkill as the goats dropped their kids

to be cooked in their mother’s milk. You lay flying carpets

down in the library to cut back on the noise of life while you focus

on articulating your Latinate abstractions like a seance writing

a treatise on the history of silence in all of Shakespeare’s plays,

and six of Basho’s haiku. Que sais-je? What would you say

did your Catullus walk that way? Emperor penquins

giving singing lessons to skylarks like asmatographers with croup.

Poultry and shards of pottery with gold fillings like broken

Chanoyu teacups you’re trying to pour the ocean in one

shore-hugging tidal pool at a time like a waterclock of bottled water

without ever having gone sailing for yourself in

a savagely indignant Pacific storm because you’ve

always been the stalwart lighthouse of the norm

not the lifeboat that gets overturned in the dark night of your soul

like an oilslick of sharks with sundials and guitar picks for fins.

Cockadoodle do, my Chanticler, barnyard birds afraid of the fox,

the fisher, the wolf, the hawk, the staple-toothed serpent

on the paper trail of your peregrinating ovulations

trying to keep the rain out of your cathedral

like Brunelleschi’s Florentian dome or the polar ice caps

of the Medicean moons of Jupiter with its third eye open

like a methane hurricane rose window into Renaissance banking traditions.

Money-lenders in the temples. Banci, benches outside

the time locks on the vaults of your prodigious erudition.

Spring ahead, fall back, on your daylight savings plan as you must

like interest on the eternity of other mens’ afterlives

pressed like wildflowers in the starfields between the pages

of the encomiums of your last words like poppies between

the gravestones of funereal anthologies that taste like round-up

to the crab grass and dandelions spread like starmaps across your lawn

or the lime you throw like moonlight after they’re irrevocably dead

on the thirty-seven and thirty-nine year old bodies

of Mozart and Van Gogh thrown into a pauper’s black hole

or if that doesn’t work for you as an oxymoronic objective correlative

stop excising flesh and blood, heartbreak, and humanity

in the surgical theatre of your pathological criticism of the dead

like an authoritatively authorless first edition of the absurd

by rephrasing your experiment with poetry into the experience

of John Clare, Or Christopher Smart beatifying his cat in Bedlam,

Osip Mandlestam on his way to the gulag, Mayakovsky after midnight,

Sylvia Plath turning the gas on because Daddy you Nazi you will not do,

John Keats coughing up blood under a hawthorn tree in a mailman’s backyard

like the tongues of nightingales, Rimbaud running guns in Ethiopia,

Villon, the priest killer, mouthing his testaments to the prison walls

as he’s waiting to be hung. Ever take a dagger in the eye like

Christopher Marlowe in Deptford at the hand of Walsingham’s MI5,

be summoned like Hafiz before the Mongol vizier of Samarkand

for trading that and all the gold of India for the mole on a slave girl’s cheek,

or Raleigh in the tower after getting back with no gold for the king

from the Amazon, telling his son to give them all the lie

before he was decapitated like an acephalic iamb by the axe of James the First,

and maybe worse, Emily Dickinson suffering the lugubrious death

of lightning buzzing around like a housefly among the patriarchs of Amherst?

PATRICK WHITE

BE A FATALIST, BUT MOVE YOUR FEET, GOOD CHINESE ADVICE

BE A FATALIST, BUT MOVE YOUR FEET, GOOD CHINESE ADVICE

Be a fatalist, but move your feet, good Chinese advice.

I’m sitting here looking out the window into the dark night

polluted by the town lights, long eyes peering down the halls and corridors

of my red shifting thoughts. Relax. Ruminate. Reflect.

My way of trying to stare down a double-bladed crisis

like the axe of the moon about to come down on the nape of my neck.

Should I paint? Board’s primed and toned on the easel. Ready to go.

Or give in to another poem that isn’t going to help pay the rent and hydro

because people buy things they can touch and own, not so much

the insights and emotions they’re touched by and can never take hold of.

Don’t want to rant about it anymore like sheet lightning talking to itself.

Don’t want to take a knife and cut myself in the calf again

to suck the poison out of the snake-bite before it goes to my heart.

Not trying to make chain mail out of my scars anymore.

I’m a lot less vulnerable walking down this road of thorns skinless,

me, my evanescence and my cat, travelling light, bobbing for apples

like shepherd moons or prophetic Orphic skulls, a windfall

of dismemberments, floating like depression glass Japanese crystal balls

free of the fishing nets in this sea of awareness,

drifting pianissimo on the calm before the storm all the way

from Thrace to Mytilene in Lesbos where Terpander and Sappho

used to live. Radioactively resigned to the torment, maybe

I’m living my half-life now. I’m stable as lead. I don’t want

to write another poem where I’m sticking my head in a vise

to make me confess to things that never even crossed by mind.

No more inquistors. No more confessors making accusations.

I never could make any sense out of advice that smarted like a penance.

Salt in the wound. I’d rather brine my back with stars,

be keel-hauled across the hull of the moon like a shadow of myself

than be erosively rasped to death by termites, tapeworms, and maggots.

A bit harsh. But as I said. Radioactively resigned to the Tathagatagarba,

the Thus Come of it all. Maybe I could do a ghost dance

that will bring the people and the buffalo back if I can leave the reservation

in my thousands without making anyone too nervous. Make a war bonnet

out of my winged heels, let Pegasus lead a diaspora of wild horses

across the plains as an alternative to the wheel of birth and death.

I could shaft and fletch my arrows with alder and eagle weathervanes

that could finally fly as true as Aquila arcing up in the west

or hold my finger up like a lightning rod to determine

the direction of prayer on the wind from moment to moment.

I must have been an East Indian kalpas of afterlives ago

because I’m always trying to go cosmic as I approach

a condition of zero and eternity starts creeping into my thoughts

like an abysmal incommensurable that puts pi to shame.

One of the great graces of the empty pockets of space

is they never shortchange the stars so the light’s not living

in a chronic state of doubt. This is That. Flat out. Poems and paintings

don’t diverge as much like the tines of snakestongues, forked lightning,

witching wands or roads in a dark wood. I am the tendrils

of the wild grape vines overtaking me like poem. I am

the dancing brooms, the braided manes of my paintbrushes

trying to capture the living spirit of a wayward mirage

as the light falls upon it instead of trying to sweep it all under the rug

of some flying carpet that never gets off the loom of the moon

undoing me a night thread by thread like the strong rope of a spinal cord

to keep me from hanging myself from a starmap of northern chandeliers

or tying myself up like the hawser of a lifeboat to a fire hydrant

so I’d never have to come to my rescue again, emotionally unmoored

like the noose in the eyes of the hurricane on Jupiter

that’s been raging for the last three hundred years like a knot

in the heartwood, or the skull of a rock parting the comma, coma, comet

of a hairy star plunging into the midnight sun like the light

of my mindstream evaporating like tears of dry ice

into the air, into the ether, into the arms of a great reservoir of fire

long before it gets there like the ashes of a dispassionately posthumous loveletter.

PATRICK WHITE

THE MYSTERY DOESN'T COME WITH WINDOWS AND POINTS OF VIEW

THE MYSTERY DOESN’T COME WITH WINDOWS AND POINTS OF VIEW

The mystery doesn’t come with windows and points of view,

errors of perception, smudges, smears, labyrinthine fingerprints

on grimy glass, half-legible runes of names people longed for

last year, breathless palimpsests under a glaze of nicotine

varnishing the pane like an old masterpiece to keep it

from being washed away by our tears. Nothing to argue about.

Nothing to sour your clarity over by washing your eyes out

like mirrors with vinegar, instead of tears, wine, and blood.

Nothing to feel impure or unworthy of if you go home

to take a bath and you turn the faucet on and stars don’t pour out.

If you’re standing in a field of broken corn stalks on

an immaculate winter night looking up at the ferocious radiance of the stars

wishing you could trade your feet of clay in for winged heels

as you go inside to attend to being mortal and notice

the wheelbarrow stuck in the ice like a baby mammoth in a glacier

flowing like frozen time to calve in a sea of awareness,

your insight is no more or less pristine than a fish monger

watching the sun going down in the smog of Beijing.

The mystery floats into your field of view like a gravitational eye

that wraps itself up in a skin of oleaginous space like the silks

of the aurora borealis, a bubble of life that parts the light a moment

like the wavelengths of a lover’s hair. Comets, curtains, veils,

rivers of red cedar, the flowing of the mindstream around

the rudder of the rock, the shark fin of the circling sundial,

just to add the buoyancy of a bell to the emptiness without

weighing you down with the gravitas of starmud in the human heart.

It humbles and exalts simultaneously. Nothing to crow about,

no need to wake the neighbours up, nothing to found a cult upon

like a meteoric foundation stone entering the upper atmosphere

like a flashback of Mars throwing a rock through the window

of a glass house it doesn’t live in anymore. The wings of the housefly

and the scales of the oilslick are no less stained by rainbows

than the rose windows in the eyes of the most famous, beatified cathedrals.

Do you see the ruby-throated hummingbird at the larkspur,

the maggot eating the meat of your tongue like a sacred syllable

you could never pronounce for fear of choking on the name of death?

One’s not enlightened and the other ignorant. One doesn’t

cancel the other one out by adding a blessing to a curse,

an acid to a base, Gomorrah to Gethsemane, to nullify the bad

with the good like a pillar of salt the wind doesn’t waste time on

sowing the seeds of life like rapturous wildflowers and apocalyptic blights.

Seeing deeply into the mystery of life isn’t a matter

of choosing one eye over another. What discipline has to be mastered

to see a tree, a star, the moondog haloing the detached retina of the moon?

Life doesn’t summon you to a burning bush like a fire extinguisher

to put the fireflies and chimney sparks of insight out for fear

they might catch on. Look at how long the field fires of the stars

have been burning like revelation in the ashes of a waterclock of urns.

There’s no lost skeleton the light’s looking for to unlock

the keyholes of your pupils to open the door to the darkened room

where you live like a recluse behind your eyelids like a rose-bud

that’s going to bloom any day now if you die faithfully long enough

trying to second-guess a cultivated vision of what’s just outside your window.

What’s the difference between a deluded mujahdin

and a corporately funded cosmologist trying to tailor

the desert of stars in the hourglass wombs they were born in

to the mirages they kill professionally like scholars in the name of?

There’s no holy war between the silence and the solitude of what you see

when the mystery of life opens the eyes in your blood

to deepen your ignorance of the ineffable by suggesting in secret

there’s no need for the visionary to transcend the visual

like a moonrise on the waters of life it’s reflected on,

no need for the fish to ask what’s true or false, far shore or near,

about the oceans of wary sentience it’s swimming in.

When was the last time a dream ever lied to anyone?

How often have you known a nightmare to tell the truth?

I look at Vega in the constellation of the Lyre in the summertime

and I see the birth of a fossil of light. In the winter,

walking brutal country roads, I’m the altar of a sacrificial mailbox

shot full of black holes like rusty stigmata without a return address.

I can smell the incense of loveletters burning in the flames

at the autos da fe of old roses martyred by venerable heresies of the heart

and like a river as it approaches the sea from the wellspring

of inspiration on the mountain top it’s all one continuity of flowing

like autumn leaves and cherry blossoms on the same mindstream.

Haven’t you ever felt there was something draconian about butterflies

and pellucid about crows ever since their feathers changed from white to black?

The lustre of the empty stone, the jewel in the eye of the ore.

The bright vacancy, dark abundance of our quantum entanglement

with the full moons and eclipses of what’s arrayed before us here

like a hidden secret that wanted to be known in the stillness

of a liberated heart alone with the Alone walking beside a river

running like a starmap of ancient sky burials and resurrections of the mind

as the Pleiades go down dancing into exile like homefires on the waters of life.

PATRICK WHITE

THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

THE NIGHT WITH THE PERSONALITY OF AN INDELIBLE INK BLOT

The night with the personality of an indelible ink blot

that just leaked into my pocket no doubt trying to print its own money

as a fast lane to prosperity as the dumptrucks, snowploughs, snow blowers,

front loaders raise and lower their blades and buckets

like weightlifters with a grunt and a thump, authoritatively

clean the streets of Perth like an occupation army after curfew.

Too many windows looking back at me with nothing in their eyes

but half-priced mannequins wearing black sequined dresses

like the scales of wet rat snakes anticipating the spring.

Signs of attrition everywhere, no stars, every third store

empty or on the verge of economic seppuku, two in the morning,

purged of people, I’ve lost interest in trying to befriend

the fire hydrants, garbage bags, crosswalks and traffic lights

that never stop talking about the importance of having a function in life

as a measure of human worth while I’m going incalculably mad

irradiated by too much chronic sanity hermetically sealed

in a downscale upstairs apartment like a mason jar of firefly jam

put up in the meltdown of autumn by people who know how

to look ahead to yesterday in the eternal recurrence of tomorrow.

I’m writing poetry in self defence. I’m bailing my heart out like a lifeboat

trying to stay afloat in a squall of undermining metaphors

that want to kick the stool from under my feet like the sealegs

of a man trying to drop anchor on suicide watch trying to weather it out.

Bring on the rocks. Bring on the mermaids I once heard singing to me

in an avalanche of meteors that buried my species alive.

Of what use am I when I’m the Mohican omega of my kind? I survive.

Driven out into the wilderness to live among the scapegoats and the prophets

on honey and locusts, staghorn sumac, bitter choke cherries frozen in the snow

and not even a local Salome to go dancing with every Tuesday night

before I serve my head up to her on a platter to prove she has no reason

to be jealous of the menage a quatre I’m having with the three sybillant muses

of my solitude, silence and stillness. It’s only a lyrical fling

with the freedom to despair as I please without consulting anyone

since I was nineteen. I’m beginning to look up to myself when I’m down.

Go ask the river I nose my way along like a lone bush wolf

looking for muskrat in the cattails. No waterlilies walking on water

like jumpy stars in a telescope, I can bloom like the sail on an iceboat

skimming a patina of moonlight on the thin ice of a lake about to break

like a fortune cookie with no risk averse wisdom inside. Luck

of the abyss, I guess, because necessity says when you’ve got to jump

you’ve got to jump and you’ve got to get it right seven out of ten times

if you want to live on the razor’s edge that close to your jugular.

No odds on your side but the counter-intuitive fact

you haven’t got as much to lose living on your own

as you do when someone you love is walking out the door

because she can’t be famous in your shadow or live off the superflux of nothing

like a mystic with a fat soul. But over the intervening light years

of shining over my shoulder into the dark behind me

I’ve come to appreciate the constancy of the discontinuity of love

like the ever-fixed mark of an asteroid belt as the north star of a sonnet

whose height has to be taken with a plumb bob in a dry wishing well.

As above so below. It keeps me from being embittered by the truth

after these last fifteen years in hell paying for the virtues of my youth

bleeding out like the oceans in the rose of a matador gored on the horns

of garden snails with floral sensitivities. Now I carry two swords

like the hands of a clock in the sash of a samurai

living up to the Zen code of a warrior jester with a laughable hope of delusion

and when the hour comes around again to draw straws at midnight

I emotionally eviscerate myself on the shorter blade to save face

in the long run of so much pain I have to take a short cut

through a heritage cemetery to get to where I’m going on time.

Ah, if only it were the dark, dark, dark, of another starless winter night in Perth.

And not the measure of a man opening his heart up like a pinata

to see what his life was worth after years of living dysfunctionally

like a nightwatchman in the black holes of nirvana, trying to keep the lights on

in an eyeless space with big dreams of never waking up again.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

SOMETIMES YOU START OUT DIGGING A GRAVE

Sometimes you start out digging a grave

and it turns out to be a black hole that fills up with stars like a house well.

Sometimes you want to write something insightful, beautiful, sad,

and you end up scribbling death threats to yourself

in the margins of an eclipse. You ask the rain for a dance

and you bleed to death waltzing with a leg-hold trap in three four time.

I burn my sermons from the pulpit of a sun dial

and then some cult of shadows I’ve never heard of before

steps forward and says why did you do that?

I set out to love you barefoot on a long pilgrimage to an unknown shrine,

walking on stars, thorns, rose petals, broken beer bottles,

roads cobbled with prophetic skulls like uninhabitable planets

that don’t know what I’m talking about when I open my heart about life

and every move I make explodes like a minefield covered in snow.

I say something crazy off the top of my head

and the plagiarists accuse me of being too original.

I read through an entire library of windows just to deepen

my understanding of Orion shining over the rooftops

and I’m inundated by a flashflood of glass in a downpour of weeping chandeliers.

Try living a life of purpose as if you made a vow on a star

you intended to keep and your last words will be those

of a freak in a flea circus of the absurd on tour.

One foot in the boat, one on shore, your topknot tied

to the overhanging bough of a willow like a sacrificial comet,

salmon swimming all around like wise-cracking Druids

and you’ll break like a wishbone where the rivers meet and the roads divide

and everybody forgets what they asked for, what you died for

as if it were all for nothing. And the wildflowers in the starfields

shocked by the worst frost since the beginning of death concur.

Metamorphic wavelengths in a snakepit of terrors

that keep you awake at night like a gnawing death wish without respite

like a scarecrow banging off punchlines like a stand-up comic for crows

that sets your nerves on edge like the uprooted molar of an oak with bad teeth.

Creatively bound to the quantum entanglements of the felicitous agonies

that inspire my life, I can never tell from one desert to the next

if I’m witching for water with a hazel branch or a mine-detector

as the long nights stretch time out like an hourglass full of tar.

And, o, don’t think for a moment, I don’t try reconcile my selves

and anti-selves in a conjunction of marital bliss between

my animus and anima like the nightsweats of fire-breathing dragons

in the crematoria of dead star parts and stealth butterflies

but I’m beginning to think my blood is deficiently unpositive,

either that, or I’m trying to keep too many eyes open at the same time.

O, what I’d give to be happily unambiguous about the lies

I tell myself to get through another night of vacillating

like a suspension bridge between the tender and gruesome

where the skydivers dispense with their safety nets

to commit suicide like adrenaline junkies teaching spiders to fly.

Why, why, why is life so relentlessly this way

all these sacred syllables I keep throwing into the Bonfire of the Vanities

keep rising out of the flames like the incinerated papyri of ancient ravens

that persist in playing genetic scrabble with the cartouche

of my untranslatable name. Was there a time I believed in one goddess

pervasive as darkness like black Isis behind the multiplicity of the stars?

I feel like the obelisk of a famous gravestone carved in scars.

Late at night, in the Rubrick’s cube of a confessional

to distract myself from listening to the rats scratching

at the continental shelves of the plaster in the walls

that dried too soon for a fresco or cuneiform, I hear

the mantras of old lovers trying to brainwash their young boyfriends

with platitudes of love and life and light, and more power to them,

I don’t say a word, wryly remembering when I was with them,

barring the occasional fiasco of joy, the sweetness of life

always seemed to peak like the Mons Veneris in a hive of killer bees.

Just the same, I lick the sticky-fingered honey of my bittersweet memories

like an oilslick off the feathers of my black swans

with honourable grace and generous obsequies that bespeak

the largesse of the latent surrealism in my late Romantic ideals

about love being big-hearted enough to understand

why the intense pleasure of the mysterious rose

is pierced by the inglorious thorn of some unknown militancy

that insists it’s more existentially germane to be

excruciatingly right all the time than unconditionally loved

in a contingent democracy where everyone gets a fair shot

at being fanatically wrong. Peace, peace, peace, my troubled spirits,

my mystic orchids, my deadly nightshades, my urban guerilla sunflowers,

I’m not trying to wipe your makeup off like the face of the moon

in the two-way mirror of the muse that looks at life from both sides

not to make a one-eyed liar out of a two-eyed truth

like icing sugar on a blue-blooded steak. Eat what you need.

I’m flattered by the unnecessary attention I receive

from the two sylphs of my silence and solitude

I’m teaching how to paint rainbows in a bloodbank.

One mounts candelabra on my head like antlers on a shaman in an ice age

so I can see what I’m painting at night without being gored

on the horns of the stalactites of limestone and ashes I work in

like a the visionary medium I’m most apt to be adapted to,

or accidentally eviscerating myself on a stalagmite

like a vision of the moon trying to save her many-petalled face

by committing seppuku on the throne with the slash of a last crescent

she keeps in her sash precisely for that ghastly purpose.

And the other one? She’s a natural genius that does

watercolour portraits of me in sepia tones of rust and dried blood

then washes what she found inexpressible about me

off her brush like a sunset hemorrhaging in a coffee can.

I celebrate the likeness of her art to the heart of life

that creatively imitates a negative space that eliminates the best part.

PATRICK WHITE