COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

COMET IN THE WEST JUST AFTER SUNSET

Comet in the west just after sunset

between the Great Square of Pegasus and Pisces,

breath on a windowpane, a smudge of light

as a warning, a blessing, a curse, the Ides of March,

a flightfeather releasing as many doves of meaning

as anyone cares to give it walking into the woods

along the packed-down wolf paths to see,

while there was still light, resolve in my legs,

if the red-winged blackbirds had returned yet.

What the river had been doing in my absence

that would help me take my mind off the world awhile

and forget there’s more pain in my laughter these days

than the joy of freedom from being me that used to

efface me with a smile that had travelled lightyears

from where it was born, a message to a man

who was still a child at heart, who could read

comets and smiles like keys to the indecipherable art

of bridging the gap between them like a unified field theory

of metaphors that could sing to the stars

as if there were a patina of meaning and beauty

that made everything glow with radiant significance

in the mystery of being alive in love with a muse

who traded the moccasins she’d walked a mile in

to know me, for a pair of winged heels, easier on her feet

than the long firewalks of thorns and stars in an ice storm

she used to have to take to follow me into exile barefoot.

Gone like a loveletter I once received in a dream

and set fire to like a poem I meant to keep

in the urn of my heart forever like a dragon

in a deep sleep of oblivion it never wanted

to wake up from disenchanted by the awareness

of what haunted it like the ghost of a lotus

at a seance of the sun. Gone those nights and days

that ran their course like the draconian serpent fire

of scarlet runners entwined around my spine

as if the axes of the earth were three poles in a garden.

Gone the long soporific nights with the cats and the dogs

brought in from the cold beside a woodstove you could trust

like a habitable planet orbiting Aldebaran in Taurus

before I had a vision in high definition of the Burgess Shale

in colour that made everything seem as vital

as the aspirations of Opabinia with its five eyes

and vacuum hose with claws in the brine seeps

of the Middle Cambrian taking the high, hard road

up the mountain that below might be as above.

Comets, smiles, the metaphors that unite them,

Pikaia gracilens at Pika Peak in Pisces, chordates

into backbones, fragile filaments, the spinal cords

of life, light and love, the hair of a star on the shoulders of night

like the sign of an ongoing love affair

with the depths and the heights of who we are to each other

highlights of the downtimes plunging

like angels and heretics, new moonrises

into the ageing dawns of the setting sun

between the eyelashes of the treelines beginning to sing

like red winged blackbirds on the dead branches

of seasoned guitars leafing into spring.

PATRICK WHITE  

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

SPRING RAIN IN THE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING

Spring rain in the small hours of the morning,

exlixir of leaves, tears of anthracite on the asphalt streets,

drumming circles rippling out of every pulse of the heart

that makes an impact, ghosts of gasoline thrown

on the pyres of the rootfires trying to ignite the lampposts

that have never known what it was to shine on their own

like daffodils and crocuses, trout lilies and wood sorrel,

without someone else telling them when and when not to.

Water music in the iron vocal cords of the gutter

free-flowing into its own underworld echo

like a mind stream making found art out of

accumulated garbage that announces it has no soul

though the dolmens of the pygmy fire-hydrants

stubbornly refuse to believe it. Some nights so brutal

the moon knocks its teeth out trying to take a bite

out of the curb like a crust of bread made of cement.

Corpses of soiled swans sculpted by the rain

lying like road kill in the parking lot of Mac’s Milk

like a ghoulish leper colony in fluorescent light.

The powerlines weeping like mandalic spiderwebs

on their own, melancholic dreamcatchers letting it out

like broken necklaces of tears filling the moats

around the throats of crystal skulls losing it

like glaciers to global warming, prophetic windows

thawing out their frost-bitten eyes by disappearing

from sight as the cedars sweep chandeliers of light

from their wings as they try to take off the lake,

the rain packing down the starmud of the path

they were meant to take, their feet on the earth,

their heads in the clouds like totem poles and pagodas.

Soaked to the skin, the bloom of the rose with thorns

like silver buckles off my black leather jacket

heavy and sodden as the flesh of a rat snake

that’s been run over by some stupid farmer

as it was coming out of hibernation like a wavelength

pariahed by rainbows, as water droplets tap

their fingers on the rim of my gangster hat

tilted on its axis like a total eclipse of the rings

of Saturn trying to look tougher than it actually is,

there’s nowhere to go but down to the rising river

where the willows are rinsing their hair

under the faucet of a kitchen sink the way

my sisters used to before our blood parted

like the waters of the Red Sea that never closed up

behind me like a wound that’s gone on hemorrhaging

for lightyears like hydrocephalic Al Gol in Perseus

holding his sword down like the reflection of a headlight

trembling in tribute to the ladies of the lake who hold

their bare arms out like the boughs of drowned trees

to receive it. The snowman with eyes of bituminous coal

disappears in a bath of warm, carboniferous tears

that appeal like black diamonds to the evergreens

for understanding and compassion not to come too late

as I open the floodgates of my heart like a lockmaster

white water rafting the spring runoff in a lifeboat

he’s trying to bail out like a waterclock that’s jumped

an hour ahead of itself to wander in the light

like the narrative theme of a real dream character

trying not to drown in its own mindstream

this close to waking up like the ghost of a sleepwalker.

No one in my bed I long to return to like a shipwreck

No poem in my heart I’m trying to protect

like the dishevelled bouquet of a wet matchbook

trying to keep love alive like a dying art long enough

to catch fire like the vernal equinox in the imagination

of an underground flowergirl setting my roots aflame

with blue hyacinths and wild irises of tantric sex.

My solitude seeks no mercy from the rain.

No dilution of my blood that runs like a watercolour of pain

vainly trying to unskein the black and red threads

of a passion for life from the bass riff of a death wish

blinded by the approaching light of the eerie beauty

of the black sun eclipsed at nadir in the Circlet of the Western Fish.

PATRICK WHITE

THE RICH WON'T EAT WHAT THE POOR DO

THE RICH WON’T EAT WHAT THE POOR DO

The rich won’t eat what the poor do.

The rich have always thought throughout history

the poor are why they suffer.

The rich pass laws in frozen Toronto

to have the homeless picked up off the streets

like dog poo they don’t want to step in.

The rich don’t pay taxes

but they bitch about a mother on social assistance

receiving fifteen hundred a month

while they wait for billions on Wallfare.

And it’s socialism for the rich

like a tax break on a corporate lifeboat

if they go under

and free enterprise for the poor

whose bodies are washed ashore

like jellyfish on public beaches

where the rich don’t swim in their own pollution.

The rich believe they’re a season unto themselves.

They resent the poor like winter.

In all kinds of private weather

the poor must suck

the milkless dugs of the earth

like a foodbank with empty shelves.

The rich sink their money

into old continents like Atlantis

christening the hubris of another Titanic

with champagne on icebergs

and when the market panics

feed the children of the poor

to the jaws of the economic laws of a praying mantis

then jump ship like plague rats in Genoa.

The poor know that most of the rich are thieves.

Like the Inuit do for snow

the rich have twenty-six words for greed.

The poor have one for need.

The rich think you can turn a maggot into a butterfly

if you invest your worm in the right cocoon,

that you can wash blood off with blood

and dirt with dirt

with the shirt off another man’s back.

But even when the rich reek

like waterlilies in a swamp

trying to pretend they’re loveletters they’re not

the poor can still smell

the stench of the rot they’re rooted in.

The rich indulge in plastic surgery and Hollywood implants

and lavish their poodles on manicures.

They give their death masks a facelift

and change their socks like chins,

but the poor can still see the lies in the eyes

beyond the cosmetic spin

of the tucked-up buttocks

of the tight-assed politicians.

The poor know their are cures in the world

for what kills their children,

they know there is food to eat

and water to drink

and land enough to build a house

on the ancient cornerstone

of the unshakeable mother

who shelters us all like a planet.

The rich take up both sides of a war

like a nightshift quota of guns

to arm the poor against the poor

by the hundreds of millions,

children against children like hand grenades.

The rich give the poor cancer

and then sell them bandaids.

The rich have only one answer

when poverty questions privilege.

An air force general in shades

with a camera crew in a bombed-out village.

The poor eat bitter bread with the dead.

The rich eat the living like locusts.

The crumbs of the dreams in their eyes

when they wake up to the next nightmare

fill the larders of the poor

with a harvest of thorns

as if there were no past or future

in the timeless plight of the moment.

The rich fill their siloes with missiles

that live off the fat of the land

like serpents live off liposuction

or surgeons off the thighs of Rhode Island.

The poor plant their seed in quicksand.

The rich plant theirs on the foreheads of the poor

and breed their young to feed

on the nanny of the living host

like a caterpillar with a butterfly ghost.

The rich have lawyers to break the law for them.

The poor are doing eight to ten

in a maximum security pen

with razor-wire and weights.

The rich are swinging golf clubs at the moon

without fences or gates

doing their time like June in a white collar

laundered like the crisp new dollar

that feathered the misdemeanors of their fates

like summer snowflakes.

The poor come to the garden

like birds to the leftovers

that have fallen to ground in Eden

from the tables of the rich

who trickle down the foodchain

like mosquitoes in a gangrenous ditch.

The rich say to the poor

the more we eat

the more there is for you to taste.

The poor say to the rich

thanks for the shit sandwich.

You could educate a province or a state

with what the rich waste.

The ants tax the poor like aphids.

The poor have a monopoly on despair.

The rich are still rich without money.

The poor swallow killer bees with their honey.

The rich invented evolution

to justify the ways of their species to the poor

who live like Neanderthals on the brink of extinction

who bet on the wrong bear

to survive the genetic distinction.

The poor are too often corrupted by compassion.

The rich feign poverty like a nose-ring of fashion

that pays the children of the poor

to put holes in their clothes

in the sweatshops of Hong Kong for Armani.

The soles of Nike running shoes

have more of a fingerprint

than the logoless identity

in the eyes of the skinny kid who made them

so that the rich could stay fit.

The rich sport full bellies in heaven.

The poor are boiling dice to make a thin soup

of the snake-eyes

that scaled their seven come elevens

like bad risks in the back-alleys of paradise.

Heaven’s the slumlord of hell

where poverty’s a vice

and there’s no doorbell.

The poor experience the worst.

The rich quote chapter and verse.

The rich build Taj Mahals of the spirit

with other men’s hands.

The poor build their own hovels

in ghettos of consumer quicksand

that anyone can own without warning.

The rich tell the poor they have a future

that looks like them in the morning.

The poor know how hard it is

to make the most of a present

like a dead lottery ticket

where everything is missing.

How can you get from now till then

as if less were truly more on easy street

when the future’s already been turned out like a whore

on a sleazy block of sexual charades

where the rich pimp their floats

like civic parades they ride

like golden chariots through the slum

that came of the kingdom on earth

the poor were promised

like the afterbirth of their afterlives hereafter.

In the house of life

the rich know they’re the rafter.

The poor know they’re the falling plaster.

Flesh and bone.

Blood and marrow.

One, a limousine.

The other, the empty stomach

of an overworked wheelbarrow

that’s been coupled like a locomotive

to the front end of the gravy train

for the long haul

up the world mountain

that keeps avalanching like Sispyhus

down upon all of us

like a banking failure

that walks all over us with our own feet.

The rich sell hope to the poor like the front door

on a piece of real estate.

And over the full moons of their harvest plates

the rich say grace for what they’ve received.

The poor curse the blighted grain of the pre-emptive eclipse

that swallowed the moon like the cosmic glain

and disgorged them like the withered shells

of cosmically empty wallets.

The rich squeak like the hinges on a prison door

to the poor about liberty,

but the poor are not deceived.

They take their seat

below the salt of the flat earth

like anxious dogs under the table

hoping some scrap of life will fall off

like the fat of the superflux

from the overstated laps of luxury

where one planet’s never enough

to fill the insatiate siloes of a black hole.

One, a peacock with Persian eyes.

The other, a star-nosed mole.

The rich are the new theocracy of economics

and free enterprise the creed of their holy war.

Pleonaxia is a Greek word

adopted into English to denote

the disease of more and more and more.

But the poor understand the politics of the trough,

the bread and circuses,

the breaking of loaves,

the fish and the fishing nets

that drag the Dead Sea for humans

and how the laziest lions are first to the feast

and the vultures and hyenas and jackals

must wait with the worms

to snatch their fill of what’s left,

knowing full well that one man’s meat

is another man’s roadkill

and the obesity of the glutton is a kind of theft.

The poor understand the free-for-all laws of supply and demand

are subjunctively simple and neat.

All over the world tonight

if the poor weren’t hungry

the rich wouldn’t eat.

PATRICK WHITE

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

BEAUTY IN THE ALOOFNESS OF MY USUAL SORROWS

Beauty in the aloofness of my usual sorrows.

A respite in time and care. A hole in space

I can escape through without setting off any alarms.

And I don’t care what this poem is going to be about

I can write it with no preconceived deceptions,

no utilitarian intent, no split lip ego-defects.

For a moment, the ice age is thawing

and the blue chicory and English ox-eyed daisies

like the taste of the air, and the drainage-ditches

are a riot of Queen Ann’s Lace and Viper’s Bugloss.

Temperate consolations modify my mood

into a truce with the bleaker conditions of life.

I’m gulled by the sunshine. I’m a schill of the mindstream.

The killer bees are away from their hives.

Amber tears of Baltic honey flow in my veins

without attracting flies. Life is unconscionably reasonable

in the efflorescence of its mystically specific details.

Even my dragon skull basks in the beatific wavelengths

of a better attitude toward its own martyrdom

in the greener fires of earth like salt in a flame.

And later tonight, if I’m still so entranced,

I’ll make my way down to the Tay River

to see if the fireflies are out dancing pianissimo

with the abandoned lighthouses of the stiff-necked cattails.

I’ll sit on a rock that doesn’t aspire to lord it over

anyone’s kingdom, and I’ll stare at the stars

until they’re tattooed like an indelible starmap

on the back of my eyelids, to keep my tears

from diluting them like smeared watercolours

or my more igneous aspects, from shattering them

like the menagerie of a zoo with glass bars.

And o, basking in the freedom of my own madness,

hilarious as peace, the infinite homelessness

of knowing I come from everywhere all at once,

and there’s nowhere I’ve walked alone in my life

down any road beset with assassins, or feathered

like strippers in boas of white sweet clover,

I haven’t been stepping across the threshold

of another wilderness always as vast

and cautiously intriguing as I am mysteriously lost

when the human intimacy of a longing heart

encounters the sentient impersonality

of an infinite mind that isn’t aware of anything

the heart doesn’t bring before it like a child’s drawing.

And there are themes you can follow

like bush wolves through the back woods

trampled down by the padding of their circuitous descents

into the dangerous pantries of the farms

pseudomorphically nestled between the hills.

It’s an itinerary that’s serviced the pack for years

with a sufficiency that’s got them this far against the odds.

And each to their own way, go with the gods

and I’ll rejoice in hearing you howl among the trees

to the chagrin of your detractors listening

with a begrudging admiration a civilization away

from what’s been bred out of them like freedom

under a full moon in heat. As for me

and my homeless approach to the ghost towns

of future zodiacs, I never want to know where I’m going

until I get there inconceivably as the only path

I could have taken in the first place,

because that’s always the way it is

even when you delight in the wiles of going astray.

Signs of your emptiness in the midst of the great unknowing.

Time and space mindscaping the exploration

you keep thrusting into the dark like the light and the lamp

of an estranged nightwatchman, hoping

you haven’t been here before, and anything

worth keeping an eye on has already been given away for free.

PATRICK WHITE

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

MAYBE IF WE ALL STARTED OUT

for Pat, Jeremy, Sarah and Sean

to the memory of their mother, Linda Robertson

Maybe if we all started out relating to each others’ deaths

we’d do a lot better loving one another while we’re alive.

Even in the heart of the swallow, the great finality

of our blood dropping the heavy red curtains on the play

stepping out of them from a womb like the sea

contained in a medicine bag of water with nine holes in it always

leaking out of itself like a body learning to walk on land,

loosely mastering one medium after another, water for land,

land for air, air for space until we get to the gateway

of the clear light of the void where the masters unlearn

their wisdom to go skinny-dipping in their eyes again

forgetting everything about what it was they were supposed to know

as they revel in being more buoyant than innocence or bliss.

Before we step back behind the curtains to listen for an encore.

This is the floating world where the waterclocks

run like wavelengths, serpents, Pleiosaurs, Loch Ness monsters,

as if someone were stitching the seam of a lake up

like a sail they intend to raise like a moonrise

on the masts of the tree line anchored in earth like a fleet in port.

And the waterlilies rooted like the rigging

of our lifelines, umbilical and spinal cords

to our starmud, are what the hands of a clock do

in their off time, or when they withdraw their shadows at noon

and time stops as if its petals had returned

to the bud again like a snake with its tail in its mouth.

Dark abundance fulfilling the potential of its bright vacancy

over and over again like a stranger walking down

a long road alone, all her thoughts and feelings,

shadows of the moon, stars breaking unspeakably beautiful

through the crowns of the trees intimately whispering

to one another, Who is she? Who is she?

As her imagination welds the wounded shards

of the constellations, gathers up every splinter of a star

she’s washed out of her eyes in tears, or plucked

like a thorn from her foot that pierced her

like the path she was on at the time like a firewalk

and makes of all that light, not a broken starmap,

but a mirror she can see her face in like a housewell

scanning the sky for fireflies like the first signs of her arrival.

Who among the evergreens has ever been

so intimate with death they know enough to fear it?

Hasn’t life been carrying us forth as long as death

has been eloping with the bride? The empty bucket

of the new moon tangled in morning glory

is lowered like a coffin into the dark waters of life

and winched up by the wheel of birth and death

comes up like the lost coin we retrieved from the river

like the one they place between our teeth when we die

full and bright as the harvest moon everytime

we take a bath in our own graves without holding our breath

like pearl divers seeking the white and black eyes of the moon

in the depths of their souls as we rise and fall

like Orphic skulls, shipwrecks and eclipses

bobbing and sinking on our own thought-waves,

the mountains we climb as high as the valleys we plunge into

are deep and inexplicable. Everyone, even a Buddha,

is a sophomore of life on earth. Foolishly wise, wisely foolish,

but look how dangerous it is to send our children to school

to learn about death as if it were something

you couldn’t hide from them by closing your eyes

like the happy ending of a fairytale they’ll out grow

believing in like garden snakes shedding their skin

as if you lied to them without meaning to because

death isn’t anything you can live your way through

without accepting the dark wisdom of the enlightened eclipse

even at noon that folds the tents of the flowers up

and sends them back to their beginnings

like the unopened loveletters of the pine cones

that bloom in fire, and the night lilies that open

the eyes of the water to the mysteries and metaphors

they hold in common with the root fires of the stars.

Our seeing is a living turmoil of mud and water

not a glass shard we’re looking through darkly

to protect our vision from the sun in eclipse

as if you had to wait till you got to heaven to clean your lens

or wipe the dirt and crumbs of a bad dream out of your eyes.

Whenever we occasionally come to peace with ourselves

like a sea of awareness on good terms

with its own mental weather, kingfishers in the sunlight,

skimming the fire-gilded waves, or no one

in the wheelhouse of the zodiac in a great, Pacific storm,

everything is reflected clearly in the stars and the clouds

that pass overhead like the prayer beads of the Canada geese

returning like empty urns in the spring to gather up

the dead again when the leaves begin to fly in the fall

and take them somewhere eternal where they get

to shine a light on it all like a new medium

they’re learning to work with to express themselves

as sentience always will like a hidden secret

that wanted to be known by whispering whole galaxies

in the black holes of our ears listening like seashells

on the far shores of the islands of light we’re washed up on

like a message in a bottle we sent to ourselves in a past life

like the Cutty Sark, and arks of doves and crows under full sail

we sent out looking for land, knowing full well, one

would be delayed by what it found as its feathers changed

from white to black, and the other would be sent back

like a sign of peace that rinsed the bloodstain of the red sky

in the morning like a false dawn out of the white flags of surrender

that blow like curtains of snowbunting and white star

from the open windows of spring gaping in incredulity

at what time it is with so many hands of the wildflowers

pointing at all hours of the clock, day and night, as if there were

time enough for everything when the mindstream

weathers the flashflood of its own tears and comes to rest

like the Burgess Shale at the top of a mountain far to the west.

Sophocles once said never to have been born is best

as if death were the solution to the tragic horror of a painful dilemma.

When has life ever not been just as open behind us

as it is up ahead? But surely his one-eyed advice is the crutch

and flying buttress lambda leans on and not to die

like the Conservation of Data Principle in a black hole doesn’t

is the better of two worlds when less is more and more is less

and death doesn’t spread the lungs of the hourglass out

like the wingspan of a blood eagle or the waters of the Red Sea

closing up after us like wounded curtains healing after the play.

More like immortal bees returning to their hives at night

to churn honey out of the eyes that looked upon them in the light

and tasted the sweetness of life at work in the starfields

in the belt of Orion, in the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades,

in the Mons Veneris of the Beehive star cluster between

Regulus in Leo and Castor and Pollux in Gemini

gleaming like first magnitude insights into why

we die to live and live to die like fireflies and stars

rising like new constellations over the event horizons

of our eyes that never fail like waterlilies to take us by surprise.

PATRICK WHITE  

I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I HAVE SEEN THE STIFF, BRITTLE LEAF

I have seen the stiff, brittle leaf that clung

to the tree of life throughout the unforgiving winter

like the flagging page of a gnostic gospel at half mast

drop off in the spring to make room for the green underneath.

Strange timing, as the stars give up the nightshift

for the graveyard, Virgo complementing Pisces

on a colour wheel, but maybe its poem

were meant for the snow as it lingers in the doorway

of a long farewell, a faithful flame of the burning bush

in the annals of fire, one last testament to love

as if a silver tongue in the moonlight couldn’t say as much

about the mystery of life as the sacred syllable

of one old woman dying in an albino hospital could

as if time itself would be uprooted by her death.

The saying and the said. The coming and going

of stars and waterbirds, the searching tendrils

of words from the heart that reach out to touch

the grieving world like grapevines reading Braille,

like the promise of chandeliers of new planets

growing like wine under the wings of their leaves.

Sometimes best just to sit at the edge of a death bed

like a Buddhist monk and say nothing about

where the ghosts of those we love go uncoiling

like the smoke of a candle as if the nightwatchman

of a passing wind had just blown all the stars out

as the exhausted pain in the eyes of the morning

comes on like the numb grey of a hollow dawn

too early in the spring for the shepherd moon of the heart

to wholly thaw, for the exile and the orphan to weep beside

the rivers of Babylon like glacial windowpanes

calving into a sea of awareness like an ice-age giving way.

The mind peeks like a skeleton through a keyhole

into an abyss into the green room of an oracle

that’s taken off her wig of snakes offstage to remember

in the black mirror of her ambivalent prophecy

that doesn’t lie about such things, who she is

under the deathmask of the moon that falls

like the crone phase of a blossom from the dead branch.

Unborn it’s been said. Unperishing. No more

waxing and waning of a pulse, no more sunsets

and nightfalls under her eyelids, no more dreams

of waking up in the morning exhilarated by starlings

nesting in the calderas and chimneys of the old crematoria

that made ashes of her passions, and sowed seeds

in the starfields of the wildflowers in the wake of the fire

that consumed her evergreens like heretics at the stake of themselves.

Are we awarded wings by the wind for enduring

a lifetime of the transitory like a rock in the river of time?

The deathshead of the Hell’s Angels patched like colours

to our back, or the flightfeathers of mourning doves

returning to the green bough of a black walnut tree,

our coffins smothered like underground guitar cases in the decals

and leaves of the places we’ve been to sing ouR hearts out

in one station of life to the next along the road

that always leads us like the voices of nightcreeks

through the woods to clearings we’ve never stood

and looked up at the stars as if we’d never seen them before.

Like faces in the audience waiting for us to open our mouths,

like willows tuning the strings of our battered guitars

as if they wanted to know what it was like to weep from the heart

like a human growing soft, blue shades of stargrass

on our graves, or the flowing jewels of the sad, sad, eyes

that kill us back into life with the beauty of the melancholy

we’ve conjured out of the ore of our scars, as if our tears

were water-gilding the treble clefs and kells at the beginning

of every lyric we sing, leafed in gold sprouting

from the sacred letters of the alphas and omegas

running in the rain like an alphabet of blood freaked with light

not even death can wash out of the sheets like the music of life

burning its face like a moondog into the shrouds of our cloud cover.

As if it were nothing for us to leave our fingerprints on the air

like our names written in our breath disappearing on cold windows

like the last word of the moon’s lost atmosphere leaving home,

like the pollen of auroral roses dancing in delight

for the midnight sun like the undulant veils of the wind

that reveal us to ourselves like the sea to a widow walk,

parting the constellations, spider webs and fishing nets

in the unfathomable depths of our eyes we’re entangled in

like Delphinus rising over the fossilized remains of the cedar trees

standing like burning ladders up to heaven in the rootfires of earth.

Our gravestones can’t say but a whisper of it all.

They don’t speak for what lies under them.

Their rumours of life don’t travel very far compared

to the myth of origin of the dandelions that grow

all around them, scattering their seeds like stars with parachutes,

letting the light fall gently like down from a nest

or Leo in the west just after sunset or east of the dawn

when the cock crows at midnight and the owl wakes at noon.

PATRICK WHITE

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I FEEL THE THORNS OF THE ROSE MAKING INKWELLS OF MY EYES

I feel the thorns of the rose making inkwells of my eyes.

It’s me that hurts. But without meaning to,

I’m bleeding for everyone. A watershed of blood and tears.

A reservoir of pain. Not all my own, I drink

before anyone like a hummingbird, or a canary in the mine,

to make sure it isn’t toxic. No goat skull in a well

of rotten water. No blood on the horns of the moon.

What a disgrace it is to be a human sometimes.

What a sorrow when your heart wobbles like a drunk bell

and there are perturbations and precessions in your orbit

it’s hard to explain except as the flawed configuration of a dream

with your waking life, though they’re both just two waves

of the same sea of awareness, feathers and scales.

Oxymoronic maple keys vertiginous as Sufis

at the crossroads of everywhere and here. My heart

is a bone-box full of elegies for Arctic swans

shrinking like ice-bergs from global warming.

And I’m not as mindless in love as I should be,

though a muse is still pure oxygen distilled

from a thousand undiscovered plants in the Amazon

as beguiling as the ghosts of the fragrances

along the Perfume Trail. And sometimes, I swear,

I can smell the weeping of wild blackberries

eclipsed by the shadows of voracious crows

pecking out their eyes like dark jewels

in a crown of thorns. And there’s a feeling

with too low a frequency for words like the afterbirth

of an orphaned universe that resonates within me

like the poignancy of the embrace of one

of the saddest graces of compassion limning its tears

with a star’s worth of beauty glowing through the clouds.

And goodness arises within me like a loaf of bread

left out to cool on an August windowsill, and I’d

break it into as many pieces as my heart to share it

if only for one instant, with the hungry and the suffering

as I’ve heard several people did inconceivably even in Auschwitz,

just to make things better a little bit, if I could,

though I feel like fog trying to put out a forest fire,

knowing among the selfish and indifferent,

a gift is a kind of minority protest

that you have to keep an eye on before it gets out of hand.

Reality’s just a truce people make with the way things seem

and what they don’t understand, a consensus

of poll-watching dilettantes who average out the crucials

in advance of random happenstance. Perhaps.

Reality can be any kind of copulative verb it wants,

The chimerical fire is whatever you imagine it to be,

but what it does, whether you agree or disagree,

is what moves me to underground rivers of tears

that flare up like the pale fountains and grails of the morning glory

to want to put it out, snuff it like a black candle,

or smother it in a pillow of its own smoke.

To die, yes, the wildflowers can do that better than us,

and the animals enter death as if they were observing

the protocol of an instinctive nobility greater than ours

but to die, to suffer and die inexplicably, to see

the labour of billions of light years of stars, enduring

extinction after extinction to express their shining in us

as if we were the content of the message

they sent on ahead of themselves and we can read

so much so intimately like the ancestry of the universe into it

like a child’s eyes, or the luster of a lover’s hair

in a moonrise, or the second innocence of an old man

who smiled upon us because he knew he was younger

than we were, and the return journey

was better than the first because from cradle to grave,

he knew the beginning walks with us all the way

like a star through the leafless trees

that’s following us home at night down

one long, shapeshifting road of shadows and dreams

to one particular gateless gate that unlocks us from our chains.

To die in ignorance of why, though we guess convincingly.

To love deeply and see what we’ve cared for,

unspared and squandered as if time had no more use for it

and there was nothing rare or precious that wasn’t rendered

more fatally vulnerable than a bubble in a world of thorns

for the cherishing of it. In the brevity of our becoming

who could ever claim they were who

they were supposed to be in the eyes of the mystery

of what we’re doing here in the first place

trying to wake up in time to find out why we doubt

our own presence sufficiently to labour a lifetime

to love the unknown well enough like a stranger in passing

we’ve never met, to enlighten our disappearance?

What doorways of farewell must linger in us yet

for all the graves we’ve already filled

with everything we’ve ever loved, autumn after autumn,

like wild grapes or a waterclock of hearts,

each trying to fill another’s bucket of emptiness

with the rush of their own blood

like the emergency exit out of a burning theater

featuring a seasonal re-run of the lies

we tell ourselves in the dark to make it through another night?

Yet here we are, like it or not. Unborn. Unperishing.

Delivered and flawed. Mortality longing for eternity

like a darkness it’s already the ore of waiting to be refined

like stars emerging in the night, flowers

from the starmud of the earth and though

we have unbelievable conceptions of ourselves

that are capable of breathing in the light

of mystic atmospheres one planet isn’t enough to cling to,

most of us still candle back to the earth we arose from

like weather balloons with the tail of a comet between our legs.

As a playwright looking back in anger once said.

Poor bears. Poor squirrels. Compassion kisses the burn.

We get lost in ourselves looking for the grails of better days.

The secret’s out in the open which is the best place to hide,

if you had a mind to, in this spiritual lost and found.

Now you see it. Now you don’t. It sees you.

And you draw the blind. But the sunflowers

turn with the sun, and the waterbirds wait for the moonrise

and in the autumn of our lives, the flowers are extinguished

like the blue fires of the wild irises along the Tay River,

and there’s a scent of smoke in the air

that makes your soul weep for the evanescence of life

and how there’s even a palpable beauty in the passage

of the fallen leaves among our gravestones

that’s always a prelude to the great unknowns ahead

that can’t shake the habit of haunting us like a ghost

from the future, summoned to this seance of now

by a mind reader channelling the wavelengths of the stars

light years before either they or we will even know we’re dead.

PATRICK WHITE