THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

THE NIGHT THAT HEALS THE BROKEN DAY

The night that heals the broken day.

The dark that mends the shattered lamp.

The moon that salves the puncture wound.

The star that welds the injured eye

into a stronger bond than the original vision.

The silence that tempers the battered heart

in its own tears like a sword of light it fell upon.

The word that tends the forsaken voices

in our ears, like water whispering

into a dry wishing well on the moon

or bees and hummingbirds come like shibboleths

and sacred syllables to the larkspur and hollyhocks.

Down by the river where there are no mistakes

I can sense the long sorrows of the willows

making preparations for spring. The dead branch

troubled by a dream of leaves it didn’t expect.

The ancient hills washing their own corpses

laid out against the skyline like anonymous chthonic gods

led out of the labyrinth of their watersheds and roots

by melting snow welling up in their eyes

like the first signs of life coming out a coma of permafrost.

There’s a renewed hope in the lyrics

of the night birds exorcising the echoes

and mirages of this albino desert of ice

from their leprous solitude growing back

new limbs and flightfeathers at the approach

of the vernal equinox, moved to sing more earnestly

for reasons quite beyond them

because there’s no logic among the muses

anyone can follow like music rationally for very long

without getting lost in a starmap of metaphors

like a field fire burning off the short straws

in the hands of isolated scarecrows on nightwatch

all winter long, as Virgo offers them all

another chance to feel the wind caressing

an ocean of starwheat again like a new riff in the urn

of a greening guitar sprouting out of its ashes

like the first note of orchards, windfalls and harvests to come.

Soon the sun will treble the clefs

of the wild grapevines like tendrils

and the mushy raspberry flesh of the old women

grow firm again and the green-stick fractures

in the hospitals of the birch groves

raise their branches up to the sky

like wands of wine witching for stars.

And the young will be exhilarated by seeing

everything for the very first time

like new lamps for old and the geni within

understanding why it’s cast aside by their elation

will smile with the affectionate wisdom

of a third eye that’s been watching

this riot of apple bloom and trout lilies for light years.

And the rain will root like wild columbine

on the skulls of the moss-pated rocks

and the cochineal crocuses in the dilated pupils

of the wide-eyed snow will put their petals

together in prayer like eyelids appealing

to a stranger in passing like white water

over the rocks in the wake of his heart

and say, hey, mister, please, we could use those tears

if you’ve got no further use for them. Come here

and help us turn the waterwheels of the eternal recurrence.

Or lend us your breath, if you’ve forgotten what it’s for

to enhance the shining tenderly burning in our starmud

by blowing on the kindling of the fires of life

like a volunteer arsonist attending a nesting pyre

of yarrow sticks from the Book of Changes

we can lie down upon like the phoenix of the sumac

refeathering its skeletal wings in fledgling flames.

The ant that repairs the tunnels and doorways

of its snow-covered barrow to let the light dispel

the shadows from the bone boxes of its dead

like a stem cell happy to be at work again.

The red-tailed hawk repairing the burnt rafters

of its last sky burial by shouldering the wind

upon its shoulders as if the earth weren’t

such a heavy burden to bear as it sometimes seems.

The scarlet cardinal that kept the memory

of lost poppies alive like the lantern of a dream

burning in the windowsills of long, dark nights

of returning one day like a prodigal

to the firepits of hell to discover

they’ve been sown by the dipeptides of meteors

like circular gardens bordered by

Martian fieldstones lying like the kissing stones

of black Kaabas in Antarctica to celebrate

the renewal of life and the return of the light

to the radiant gateways of the trilithons of Stonehenge

where any place you shine like a firefly on the horizon

face to face with the night is the true direction of prayer.

The pine that sweeps the needles from the stairs

like the rusty eyelashes of shipwrecked compasses.

The blue shift of the Canada geese beating their wings

like a drum circle of wavelengths on the eye of the lake.

The garter snake that slept for an eternity

with its tail in its mouth ungnarling the knots in its hair

to seek its own equilibrium like water

in the tree rings of a warmer rain

rippling through archival calenders

like a higher frequency of life in its heartwood.

The thorns that stung like locust trees

beginning to take down the Chinese lanterns

of the hives of the paper wasps and replace them

with the blossoming pinatas of honey bees

singing in a beatific cloud of unknowing

to the metamorphic glory of compassionate mysteries.

The dragonflies drying their wings in the light

that wipes the tears from the eyes

of the rubble of fortune-cookies they emerge from

like gerry-mandered shrines of transformation

with stained-glass windows cracking like old paint

to open themselves as wide as they can

like an aubade of pagan totems at midnight

to the lifespan of the sun enlightening the moonrise

with prophetic fire flowering in the eye sockets of an eclipsed skull,

chandeliers of votive candles burning in the sacred niches

of a holy wall of secret messages riddled with nesting swallows

like waterlilies and love letters from the distant stars.

Breaking like the womb of a beaver dam

with the waters of life flooding the roads

we have to take to make our way here as we are,

the broken tea pot of Aquarius that mends

the continental shards of the rifts of old ostrakons

like Pangea in the spring with scars of gold.

PATRICK WHITE

ALWAYS WRITING IN THE SHADOW OF AN AVALANCHE

ALWAYS WRITING IN THE SHADOW OF AN AVALANCHE

Always writing in the shadow of an avalanche,

ashes on a white page, miscarriage of an urn,

are they mine, a freak of time, Stonehenge around a firepit?

My ears pinned flat against my head like a brow beaten cat,

waiting on the next move of a meteor shower

that’s been pummeling me like a clapper in a bell tower

that’s gone a couple of rounds too long

without calling off the fight. Firing squads

taking tickets and standing in line to shoot the stars

out of my eyes, like a repeating decimal, and here I am

writing another poem like a bird at the bars of a prison.

Beats staring down the plaster walls, the deserted street,

the middens of the Hooker’s green garbage bags

leaning against the parking meters like the afterlives

of prophetic archaeologists scrying my remains,

or trying to retain my composure in a snakepit of anxieties

like the third eye of a hurricane of razorwire

heading my way like a skill saw in a morgue

trepanning my skull cap off like a hard-boiled cosmic egg

to relieve the oceanic pressure of my underground madness

like the surface of Europa flowering

like a fountain of the sulphurous waters of life.

I was born trying to return to some place like a salmon

through a gauntlet of grizzlies, rocks, and eagles

as if only exiles find their way back home

from this turbulent sea of awareness upstream

against the flow of the mind to sort the swimmers

from the drowned. Have I spawned? Is it time to die?

Is my genome satisfied? Are the water sylphs

of the sacred pools gathered from the tears

of all those who cried out in vain for the unattainable

happy with the ingot of moonlight I’ve returned to them

like the blunted edge of a silver sword I will never

be called upon to use again like a third feather

in defence of the tribe in a hermetic holy war with myself?

I’ve always remembered what the garden-master asked

when I was boy. What’s madness but nobility of soul

at odds with circumstance? Meaning hydro, the rent, the heat,

the need to eat minimally, clothe yourself in the raiment

of the flowers of the field, keep the bearings in the wheel

of birth and death well-oiled to keep from seizing up

like the surgical amputation of my brother’s diabetic leg,

or the black dwarf with a clenched fist at the centre

of my solar system playing Russian roulette with itself

to clarify my nirvanic response to the trivial and tragically mundane

by showing my brain what an astronomic extinction event

looked like to the dinosaurs after years of volcanic activity

poisoning the atmosphere like acid rain thrown in the eyes

of the wildflowers learning to read the stars for themselves.

The night is cold and dark, eyeless, starless, indifferent

to people pleading at their windows for whatever they need

to survive their own minds in a sensory deprivation tank

of another night on earth of going without in the name

of an ambivalently greater radiance that can’t be measured

in candle flames and starmaps, but the light so pervasively intense

even your diamonds evaporate like dry ice and carbon directly

into the spiritual life of a lost atmosphere on a shepherd moon

that opens its heart like a meat locker to the question marks

it’s hooked on like a Sioux warrior at a sundance in Leo

with crescent moons pierced through its chest like a fish

acquiring prophetic powers in the rapture of the pain.

Angels singing in the autos da fe of unconfessed heretics

in an ancient agon of draconian flame throwers

and monkish fire hydrants outside the Scotia Bank across the street.

Scotia, the dark one, watching the watchers from boreal caves.

I don’t ride golden chariots through the slums

blithely dismissing other people’s pain like a new age

bureaucratically quoting their post-graduate karma

like a correct choice of shoes they made that don’t pinch

or slash your calves like first magnitude spurs

on your winged heels that at least get off the ground

as if a spiritual life were just a matter of footwear

and never walking anywhere barefoot with your own starmud

oozing between your toes on a long firewalk of ghosts

rising up into the air like smoke from the distant fires

of sea stars and galaxies flowing across the firmament

like the spilt milk of a lactating rheostat nursing Jupiter

in a cave in Crete to keep him from being eaten alive by Titans

lording the paternity of time over the maternal instincts of space.

But sometimes everyone needs a voice to ride with them

through the inverted arches of their triumphal defeats

to remind them they’re not mortal after the gates

close behind them in the wake of a book of poems

someone gave them to read like the heartwood of a sacred oak

standing up to the lightning in courageous dread

of what’s about to befall it like a crack of revelation

running like serpent fire from the roots up

to the sword that hangs like the Orion nebula

above the grailquests and cosmic eggcups

of Cygnus sticking its long neck out to swan

for the double-bladed axe of the waxing and waning moon

threshing the pawn shop mistletoe of the globular streetlights

with a golden sickle, coming and going, while I’m ploughing

lunar boustrophedons like the runes of retreating glaciers

into the mute rocks of the Canadian Shield weeping

lakes full of stars in the scars I’ve kept like vows

to get some sleep being carried home upon it

like Scutum in the southern hemisphere or the stretcher

of another poem by a conscientious objector summoned

by the siren of a singing ambulance, bound to the mast

of a shipwrecked world scuttled high and dry in the mountains

after the flood, apres moi le deluge, like the ark of the Burgess Shale.

PATRICK WHITE  

ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

ACCORD ME A GENTLE THEME

Accord me a gentle theme, just for a moment, let the world

touch me lightly as if I were a burn victim.

Too much hate and pain, the chronic atrocity

of everyone acting as lame as Jacob, Vulcan

and Richard III before they’ve even tried

wrestling with the angel in the way. I’ve deepened

my defeat. I’m growing immeasurably stronger.

I don’t insult the light by passing it through

phoney diamonds softened like processed honey

by mechanical bees with artificial sweeteners.

My eyes aren’t blunted and blurred by the foggy roses

of impressionist cataracts. Cataracts in the eye,

flowers in the sky. Flowers in the sky. Cataracts

in the eye. I don’t launder the grapes

or bloodstains on my auroras by pressing them

through the rollers of my mother’s washing machine

to keep them clean for houseguests who look

at the nymph of the moon as if it were always waxing

like first crescent, and forget the waning of the crone

and both those claws, like the thorns of a rose,

have been blooded in the human heart like the cold shock

of a plinth of glass when the stars shatter.

Just for a while, let me fly like a bird

into the eye of the hurricane without washing me out

like a cinder from seeing the world is a house on fire

lying on a funeral pyre of crutches carved

from the heartwood of a tree that blossoms beautifully

but never shakes the superflux down to drop

like a windfall at the feet of people who are hungry,

so there’s no way of knowing by their fruits who they are.

Sweet river, let me ride your scalloped waves

all the way to the sea like the pentatonic scales

of a black snake freaked with stars, uncoiling

like dark, soothing music from a syrinx releasing

the healing from the herb. Let’s exchange metaphors

like knowing smiles between the crazy and the wise.

My heart’s pitted by self-righteous meteors

that are always the first to throw stones at the earth

when they’re challenged to remember their own transgressions.

Let me taste the milk of human kindness

dripping like snowdrops of anti-venom

from the nightshift syringe of your other fang.

Isn’t that you shining like the caduceus of Draco

helically coiling like a stair well around the axis

of the windmill earth quixotically tilting at dragons?

Can you hear me like a muezzin calling himself to prayer

from the station of the last chakra above my prophetic skull

petitioning you to live up to the legend of your serpent fire?

I won’t forget the children are starving or neglect

to scatter their ashes like mourning doves on the wind

from a high precipice with a lordly view of the valley

like those two who died of scarlet fever a hundred years ago

I found buried under an oak tree overlooking the beaver marsh.

My heart’s breaking like frost-bitten twigs in an ice storm,

but I promise to thaw them out like kindling

and start a new fire in an oil drum for the cold and homeless

they can hold their fingers up to like a candelabra.

Show me the wild irises again and let me compare them

to the blue-white stars of the Pleiades. Let the tendrils

of the wandering grapevines take hold of me again

like the veins and arteries of an elated bloodstream.

Let me hear my own longing in the urns of the nightbird

and not try to reword its lyrics into something happy and untrue,

but add a few of my own like peace, wisdom and compassion

to share the sadness of being alone like the voice

of black walnut tree that didn’t make it through the winter,

crying out in the wilderness like an acephalic seer

without pretending, irreconcilably, that it doesn’t hurt.

I want to sit on this rock like the immutable foundation stone

of the vicarious world and not feel the rasp

of stars and sand waterboarding my throat

like an hourglass that’s making me hoarse with time,

calling out like a lifeboat with a leak in it to the drowned.

PATRICK WHITE

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