THE WORDS MAKE IT SOUND BREEZY

THE WORDS MAKE IT SOUND BREEZY

The words make it sound breezy, but experience

chafes our visions of love as if it were sandpapering

our eyes with stars. Graduated grades of carborundum

grinding our parabolic mirrors into subtle refinements

no more than half an angstrom wide. So we can

see each other more clearly out in the open away

from all the light pollution. You want to see

God from this distance you’ve got to stand

on the top of an immaculately dark mountain and wait

or turning the light around meditate like an observatory

with an immanental self-reflecting telescope on clock drive.

Until you see the Beloved in a stillness and silence

deeper than your own solitude, the abyss within you

can’t be fulfilled by her presence resonating through space

and we remain as we were at the gates of her mystery,

intimate strangers with our own intelligence

because we long like nightbirds in the spring with our mouths

not our hearts set aflame like flowering stars.

You can research the sacred syllables of arcane dream grammars

until you can’t help but sing in kells of dragons and grape-vines

that bind your lyrics in golden tendrils as securely as chains

to the age they’re rooted in, as if now were all time to come,

but the wind knows the deserts of love better than to elaborate abstractions

beyond necessity. True blue star sapphire seekers travel light.

Love is tough. Not the downy fluff of a nebular flightfeather of light

you can brush off your shoulder like a snowflake

but the arc of an eagle-eyed arrow with an obsidian point to make.

The heart burns, it doesn’t smoulder like a tear-soaked loveletter

trying to get a fire started in the rain. It’s first mandate,

the acceptance of pain and courage in the face of happiness.

I’ve seen more cowards run from joy than fear.

Union is an oxymoron of the far come near. Love pours

stars in your ear like the flavours of dreams

you can taste on your tongue when you wake in the morning

urgent to write your love lyrics down like a falcon of blood

the hood’s just come off, and the dawn rising

like an English skylark that’s been nesting on the ground too long

trying to remember all the words to the song it used to sing

before it perched on the dead bough in the aviary of its voice-box.

Love is the white heal all of the moon in early April

not a way to rustproof the lilacs from decay nor yet

an hermetic science for mutating into the immutable

turning your back on evolution and change

like the first principle of a dead language in chains.

Or a miracle that’s outlived the ghost of its afterlife

like a candle watching its soul drift away like smoke.

The mystically specific details of love are not smudged

by mundane generalities blurring the starmaps with chalk dust

on the Burgess Shale of a blackboard fossilizing sea stars

inspired by a Cambrian explosion of alternative life forms.

From the alpha of the male to the omega of the woman

who gets the last word in like a farewell that says it all,

from the beginning to the end, love is always protean,

shapeshifting like stemcells repairing wounded hearts

like wishing wells the bottoms fell out of like buckets.

The bower of love isn’t a waterbed of writhing wavelengths,

not the warp and woof of a loom weaving snakepits

into a flying carpet the waning moon unravels at night

like a strong rope into a million sectarian threads

staking Gulliver to the ground in the Land of the Lilliputians.

Love isn’t petty like that. It’s fulsome in its shining.

It’s closer to your jugular vein than Occam’s razor

in the hands of God pruning roses in her secret garden,

not by the number of thorns they sport

but by the flagging eyelids of their dozy blossoms

that couldn’t stay awake long enough to see the moon rise.

Beware of love’s excruciating unconditionality

if you’ve never suffered transformatively in the name of it

and you’re happy enough o happy enough with the shame

of the truce you signed and sealed in the blood of a rose in the snow

that will never get to root deeper in your heart

than the permafrost that isn’t thawed by the hilarity

of the spring run off riding its own impetuosity to the sea

in the glee of daring the danger-fraught mystery

of whitewater rafting its own mindstream at the flood,

taking a chance your yellow, plastic, hockey helmet

might be dashed like the yolk of an egg on the rocks,

or overturned and swept out of the eye of the hurricane downstream

you’ll come up under a death trap of overhanging trees

and drown in your own odyssey beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

Could happen. So what? Love isn’t the slow erosion

of a cultivated lifestyle you’re hanging on to like a kayak

or a paper birch canoe gathering wild rice in the moonlight

for a wedding of warriors with the brides of a ghost dance

whose euphoria has been unwisely tempered

by a pragmatic approach to misery that surrenders the whole

heart by heart to the crows like bitter chokecherries in the fall.

Inspiratrix of scarlet maples when the trees burn

their poems in the bonfire of the vanities in an oil drum,

love isn’t consumed in the flames of its own intensities

but rides a dragon out beyond the wild starfields

where they pasture the winged horses they put out to stud

Libyan mares turning their backs on the north wind,

as if they were playing hard to get like gypsies in the caves

above Malaga, dancing to the snap of their lobster castanets

as they stamp their feet crushing hearts like cigarette-butts in disgust.

Sometimes love flaunts its freedom like a death sentence.

As the quality of the inestimable golden fleece

can be assessed by the character of the dragons

innocence summons to the nightwatch to guard it

like skeleton keys with a mouthful of tabooed eye teeth.

Whether you call it a spell or a force, love

is the strong magic that binds the atoms together

like shepherd moons alchemically experimenting

with the waters of life heated by the fumaroles

of volcanic puncture wounds hemorrhaging with life

like the black new moon of the Mithras bull

letting go of the rose that bloomed in its heart out of love.

A sacrificial silo of grain the snake and the dog and the scorpion

all partake of as if love fell like rain in a desert

on everything alike, as the pyramids melted like quicksand

or castles in the tide, and the wetlands of our starmud

were silted by alluvial flood myths in the deltas

of our Aquarian afterbirth that made it all the way

on the crests and troughs of her breaking waters to the sea

of sidereal awareness beyond the split hairs

of our distinctive nervous systems piloting our mindstreams

from conditioned consciousness into the creative extremes

of chaos thriving in the unlimited freedom

of immersing itself wholly in its own fathomless depths

without fear of drowning in a world that floats.

PATRICK WHITE

I BELONG TO AN INVISIBLE CULT OF THE AIR

I BELONG TO AN INVISIBLE CULT OF THE AIR

I belong to an invisible cult of the air, a seance

of fragrances, a coven of spirits exiled like sparks and stars

from a fire they had to steal for themselves from the gods

before they could heretically burn in the flames

of their own flowering and feel at home on the thresholds

of their sky burials roaring like dragons on their deathbeds.

I’ve sat here at this desk for fifty years like a runway

of Nazca lines and tarantulan geoglyphs guiding

more advanced extraterrestrials than I am like a starmap

of power-totems I intuitively puzzled out of my shining

that keep shapeshifting like the zodiacs of mandalic sand paintings

as my colourist deserts at dusk keep going abstract on me.

Thousands of faces, dead and alive, phases of lunar apple bloom,

sages like fallen leaves, strangers I cherished once

with a familiarity that assumed I knew them, though

the longer they live with you like constellations

that follow you home to your doorstep as if it wasn’t

as much your house as already theirs inside your heart,

you realize how uncannily unknowable anyone is

whether they’re lying there in front of you in their death mask or not

waiting for you to wash their corpse in the living room by the fire

or follow you up the highway in the rear view mirror

disguised as a ballet of ball lightning showing off.

Solitude puts everything on an equal footing

like an egalitarian diaspora of gypsies around a fire

whispering to them about legends of smoke and mirrors,

and every breath I take is a vision of life

as I imagined it a moment ago, about to to expire

like a candle that’s come to the end of its tallow in the dawn

and all that’s left is this little black priestly heretic of a wick

kneeling like a forest fire in the ashes of its own starmud

having been struck by a lightning bolt of serpent fire

so it could see, like a star whose history runs ahead of it,

who it was dancing with in the dark like a firefly

to the picture-music of shadows on the far side of the moon.

As a poet, what an estranged community of misfit angels I belong to

and runaway demons who aren’t willing to take

anyone’s word for hell, without jumping from paradise first,

each in their own little cave skull in this desert of stars,

living on locusts and honey among decapitated prophets,

scapegoats driven out into the wilderness

through no fault of their own, wounded imaginations

they wear like medicine bags and bells around their necks

to let everyone know they’re coming like the black sabbath

of an evil eye warning people away from them like bad bread

as if that were the only way a pariah could respond compassionately

to the dark night of the soul that had descended upon it like a taboo

only the most obedient could break like a koan with impunity.

Poetry’s a dangerous business once you’ve finished unravelling

the conditioned chaos of the screening myth that conceals

rats behind the arras to find your own way out of the labyrinth

like the thread of a strong rope that once dangled you

like the horns of a lunar anchor over the dead seas of the moon

swaying like the metamorphic caterpillar of a butterfly

on the wind with a bird’s eye view of a vernal abyss

that might look like a kiss at a distance, but, in fact,

eats its joy on the fly like a broken promise of bliss.

Outlaws write better than sheriffs because sheriffs

have no idea of what it’s like to live your life

as if you were getting away with it like a theft of fire.

I sit down on the ground twice a day with my fellow miscreants

though we live lightyears away from one another in a thieves’ world

where we recognize each other by the constellations

that have been tattooed by barbed wire and rubber tires on our chest

and break into gales of laughter at our deepest felt alibis

like crows on the autumn boughs of enlightened haiku

breaking into blossom long after we’ve shed our eyelids

like the masks of black roses with blood on their thorns.

Not in the habit of asking for approval the path

of a heretic through life is lonelier and holier than a saint’s

living up to an example that’s easier to follow than lead,

no one’s footsteps but your own painted on the dance floor.

So, yes, it takes a rebel to see where they’re going

by their own light like a firefly off road into the dark

like someone unique among stars, exploring the face they had

before they were born like a myth of origins in Braille

they could read like a dream grammar of the Burgess Shale

with runic fingertips in an avalanche of Rocky Mountain gravestones,

the long bearded breakers of ancient oceans that long ago

washed up on these coasts of consciousness like empty lifeboats

to give the lighthouses of the imagination a purpose in life

warning seafarers to watch out for falling rocks

like Mayan calendars and the heraldry of cometary messengers

with news of astronomical catastrophes like pink mornings

on the horizons of the false dawns of evolutionary Armageddons.

Fifty years tilting at scarecrows in this unholy jihad

to uphold the honour of a blessing I was called upon to forgo

to be worthy of like a wandering warrior laying his sacred arms down

mutilated to be of no use to anyone after him

in tribute to the sacred pools of dying salmon

that swam upstream against the flow of the waterclock

like a constant beginner keeping something inestimably alive

by refusing to go along with time’s incapacity to reverse itself.

Haven’t you noticed yet out in the dark woods

how eventually even the permafrost goes soft on itself

and the most fragile of wildflowers with blue and white petals

as shy and cool as moonlight on your flesh bloom

like tiny love lyrics to life even in the cataclysmic doom

of the November duff reliving itself all over again

like the reincarnation of a poet who dropped out of death

in the early spring when the red-winged blackbirds returned?

If you listen with an imaginative heart and soul to the lachrymae rerum,

the tears deep down in things long enough to wonder why

the world’s always crying over a house it burnt to the ground,

eventually you’ll stop drying the eyes of mirages

and apprentice yourself to the long, lonely discipline

of an enlightenment path of the rain weeping behind its veils

like housewells and watersheds to ease the private hells

of other people’s root fires burning them like cedars at the stake.

You learn to kiss their burns like the head of a snake,

or dice for good luck, as you look deeply into their eyes

like a nightbird that refuses to turn into stone out of a lack of love

by denying the dragon within the use of your wings.

Show me an angel thatched with feathers that wasn’t

shingled first in scales, the lowest of the earthbound

that isn’t the quicksand foundation stone of the highest paradise

where Gabriel reveals himself as pure light

emanating from the dark eclipses of the cloaked ones

like the eyes of fluid diamonds pouring out of the wounded ore.

Sometimes you’ve got to pry the stone out of the sword

to see through the eyes of a prophetic skull

how the blind jewels of the underworld can rise up

like the Pleiades in the crowns of the black walnut trees

that have shed their leaves like posthumous love poems to the earth

by going down Orphically into a shady world of gibbering voices

and singing your heart out like a hermit thrush in a birch grove

to draw the poison out of the snakebite on their winged heels,

remembering, like the mother of muses, even among those

you cherish the most, looking back is the sacred path

in the afterlife of a holy ghost and no one returns

to the surface of their oceanic awareness like a bubble in the multiverse

of a warm-blooded mammal coming up for air, without feeling

deliriously light-headed and mysteriously empty handed

like a thief that left the new moon in the open window,

like the black pearl of an outdated calendar

illuminating gnostic annihilations of the soul

when Spica, Saturn and the moon are in spiritual syzygy

like three muses at the spring equinox of midnight and noon.

Everywhere the light getting us through the night of the mind

in a union of opposites greater than the sum

of all our hearts put together like tributaries

of the same dendritic mindstream that binds us like water to each other.

O sister I can hear you sighing like a candle in a skull

leaning on the crossbones of your arms on your windowsill

from here, wishing on a star of broken promises, and little brother,

my unfaithful alpha-male comrade, how many times

have I plucked the thorn of the moon out of the paw of Leo

like porcupine quills out of the nose of a dog that refused to learn?

Indefensibly human, homeless trolls living under the bridge

with creatures we couldn’t help becoming eventually

in transit like shepherd moons imprinted by an uninhabitable planet

from one extreme to the other as the cerulean blue of the sky gods

red-shifts into the chthonic demons that drink

libations of blood from our skulls like the crones of Kali

renewing their virginity in the birth waters of lilaceous lotus girls.

I know the wyrd of night owls practising at night in their towers

to make the carrion of dead snakes leaf again into wings

like powerful dragons sleeping in the hollows of dead trees

waking up from a dream of latent magic splitting the wishbones

of lesser songbirds like divining rods struck by lightning

over an unfathomable watershed of oceanic awareness

labouring to give birth to Venus like a pearl in a cosmic seashell.

We’re all reading the same writing on the wall,

Graffiti Botticellis all, trying to tell it like it is

to the best of our imaginations without pandering

to realistic lies that have to call on the facts to back them up

when any true delusion would have stood its ground alone,

third eye to third eye with the standard model of the universe in the way

and cataracts of rose petals would have fallen from the sky

like scales off the unarmoured visions of the blind

who can see through their veils whether you know who you are or not.

Whether you’ve triumphed over your own snakepit,

staring the Medusa down without turning into your own headstone

or realize you can sometimes milk human kindness

out of the opposite fang and breast of the moon like anti-venom

when you stop holding your shield up like a mirror to nature

you neither intend to come home carrying, nor be laid out upon

despite what mother said by way of farewell to her first born.

Do you not see the poets, how they wander into every valley

and their right hands of power do not obey their mouths

except those who remember much what there is to be grateful to

like a star you greet every night on the same long, dark road you’re on.

Ten thousand pilgrims. Eleven thousand shrines.

Not counting the temples tangled in the vines of their own lifelines

like low flying swallows in the bird nets of dream catching spider webs.

Not really so much a community as a migrant tribe of hunter-gatherers

following the herds of white buffalo stars across the sky

in a loose confederation of ghost dancers handing

the same inexhaustible peace pipe around like a talking stick

imbued with the power of thousands of songbirds

emerging out of the dark silence of the urgent morning trees.

I still tend to trust the picture-music of scratched guitars

as if their lyrics bespoke a common broken heart

to the bling and polish of more immaculately lacquered

tones of voice without any dawns or sunsets to speak of.

And I know how inconceivably far it is from one heart to the next

but I swear I would have lost my way long before this

if I hadn’t taken the wind home after a blissed-out firewalk

among the summer stars without leaving a path in my wake

anyone could snail down like the silver track of a tear on a cheek

or break like the trail of their own creative freedom

like a comet in the wilderness slagging the impurities

out of its diamond insights upon first impact with the earthbound.

Spaced out, scattered like disparate stars in an expanding universe,

introverted black dwarfs, explosive supernovas

with mercurial sensibilities and touchy detonators

that would rather blast than bless their way

through the world mountain standing in their path

like a moonrock in the old shoe of the heart

that kicked it down the road like the winged heel

they’d bruised by walking on it as far as they could

like oceanic eagles and sidereal swans out of their usual element

before flying off in all directions like arrows from the bows

of waterbirds reflected in their own snakey images.

Spiritually undulating on the waters of life like membranes in hyperspace

we twist ourselves into party balloons to welcome the prodigal

back to his homelessness like a surprise beyond

the dark doorway of a shipwrecked ark that turned the prayerwheel

of birth and death over to the pilot of a storm

to weather the sea like a prophylactic starmap

for overturned moonboats scuttled on holy mountain tops

without a commandment to show for all their trouble

or swept like dead starfish onto the shores of galactic islands

spewed out of the calderas of volcanic black holes.

The lanterns burn late in the mystic scriptoria

water-gilding the alphas and omegas of our myths of origin

in gold leaf so thin it would sublimate into a smudge of dust

like a dragonfly wing between your thumb and forefinger

if you even so much as blinked hard to see

what was written there in light and blood and tears and fire

like watercolours of the rain on caustic windowpanes

trying to heal broken-hearted stained glass

with long leaden scars of unredeemed base metal

that nevertheless keep the big picture together

long after the last philosopher’s stone has lost

the lustre of its vision of life like a Midas touch.

PATRICK WHITE

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY'S WISDOM

WHEN THE UNSAYABLE SUPPLANTS YESTERDAY’S WISDOM

When the unsayable supplants yesterday’s wisdom

it makes it look obvious and trivial in retrospect

and you marvel at the spiritual gestures of goodwill

that swept you off your feet for light-years

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

because you could only see into the matter

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

And you didn’t know then that when

you blew the candle out you held

pathetically up to the abyss that you did more,

by blowing it out, to illuminate the universe,

than you did when you fed it your heart

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

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

Off the path is the way of the path.

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

Midways of gurus with their touring freak shows.

Sacred matchbooks of budding sulphur

throwing humans into the Bonfire of the Vanities,

chasing the bank-rolled Renaissance out of Florence.

Terminal literalism, infectious symbolitis

sweeping down the coast like hemorrhagic fever

from the merchant fleets of Genoa. The wild grape vines

of intuitive insight converted into the razor wire

of paranoid orthodoxies. The heretics bear witness

to the madness in the judgement of their abusers,

and scald the clouds with their blood for it.

The spiritual highways cluttered with exiles,

refugee saints, and scapegoats, where is there

a wilderness left where the tourists don’t go

to gawk at the hermits like wildlife? Back

to the birch groves and the cawing of the crows

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

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

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

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

by walking through it like the path of least resistance,

unmapped as the wind. What is it all, when

even the seven-tiered tower of the Scotch thistle

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

in the sense of being indefinable, not missing,

as if anything were there in the first place

it was crucial not to lose? Spare your tears.

Life hasn’t got anything to repent or reform.

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

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

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

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

about them as you wish. Mourn the ruination

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

or trust your own mind to mentor you in the ways

of not reifying it into a thing among things,

the source and matrix of your most cherished illusions,

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

There is no pattern, path, paradigm, psychodynamic

or unified field theory that the mind won’t

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

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

a morphology of knowledge forms

that sing in its boughs like sparrows

in the black walnuts of the morning

and then consult it like the grammar of a dream

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

like a screening myth with a built-in library.

The magician gulled in the doorway of his own magic,

having lost the key to the spell he cast

when this desert of stars was merely

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

The folly of sages, the wisdom of fools,

what’s the point of enlightening your own freedom

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

that’s under your nose this very moment?

You can hunt your own shadows down like heretics

fleeing the hounds of heaven, you can denounce

an eclipse for being a sunspot on your illumination

and polish the mirror for the rest of your life

and still not wash your face off with a paint rag

like a clown in a green room waxing tragic

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

Look into the eyes of the roadkill for yourself

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

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

No spiritual snake-eyes. No hidden meaning

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

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

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

you sense has been going on a lot longer

than the last few thought moments when you showed up

to be misunderstood by your own imagination.

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

of taking it yourself, whether things are sublimely rough

and death is dying into you, or life is trivializing

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

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

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

PATRICK WHITE

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

AND IN THAT MOMENT THE STARS COME DOWN TO EARTH

And in that moment the stars come down to earth

and light up the lanterns of your cells

you’ll finally see that constellation of your self

so many of us have been born under

shining like eyes in your blood, your bones,

your tongue, your skin glowing with starmaps

like the holy books of the fireflies. You’ll

light up this whole night sea of sentience

with a vernal firestorm of essential insights

like the full moon conducting a seance

among the corals, a fertility rite of enlightenment

in which you repeatedly give birth to the universe

moment by moment, cosmic eggs in a halo of comets.

To love the earth in all its mutable variations

is to love the music of your own revelation

playing like a genius in a beauty pageant

with the spontaneous brilliance of billions

of miraculously catastrophic forms of life

with an appetite for adding flames to the fire

like leaves and petals and wings to a wildflower

until the elaborated order of things is a loveletter

chaos wrote in its own beautifully cursive hand.

Above everyone’s manger there’s a star

that becomes incarnate in humans

who go looking for themselves like three wise men,

or the trifecta of three wise women in their craft,

Alnitam, Alnilam, and Mintaka in the belt of Orion,

and Sirius updating the calendars of the Dogon

lower down in the southeast such that even those

lost in the deepest black holes a prophetic dreamer’s

ever been cast into, can’t help adding their light

to the darkness by following their own star

back to themselves, to find the light they’ve been given

to go by, was like the mind, like the lantern in their hand,

like the lostness they ever despaired of finding their way out of,

the illumination of their true destination all along.

The mountain was climbing the guide back up

the stairwells of its own elemental genome to the stars

like a child that can’t wait to slide down the bannisters again

or a sparrow hawk riding its own gleeful thermals

like the first star to appear in the sky like the eye

in the moodring of the peacock blue-green of the sunset.

Every time a species is effaced from the smile of the earth,

our own bodies are desecrated by the act

and in every one of our cells, lockets of the galaxies,

where the firmament places its highest hopes

close to our hearts, a star goes extinct, a candle goes out

that’s been burning for millions of years,

and the windows pull down the blinds like eyes in mourning.

The world is more collaboratively communal

than it is solitarily universal. First rule of thumb

in creating life out of its own cauldron, organize,

like starlings rising out of a birch grove.

First law of the heart in cherishing and sustaining it,

is to respect yourself enough to look after it

as if it were the changeling daughter of the new moon

placed in your care by the dark matrix of a passing eclipse

that let’s you in on the family secret the stars

have known all along, that every conception

of your heart and mind is blood of your blood,

flesh of your flesh, bone of your bone. And in your genes

the sacred syllables, relics and runes of your own fossil.

Add your life like lyrics to the cacophonous symphony

of the jungle music you hear going all around you

day and night, the ancient exhilaration of life

sword dancing with the stars to the dangerous riffs

of a predatory lead guitar hunting solo in the shadows

of a game of snakes and ladders that can see like dice in the dark.

Hone your instincts like the blade of the crescent moon

on the stone of your heart in a biochemical state of grace,

and don’t neglect to let your spirit break

like the new dawn of a lobster out of your body armour

or a dragonfly escaping into one sky after another

through the window casement the first night of its moulting.

Compassion is the visionary collagen of life

and imagination is its agent. Its metaphors

graft the trees and the sponges into lungs.

Can you hear the generations of nightbirds

in every single vowel of your voice? Do you know

they don’t sing just for themselves, but in the lament

and longing of their songs, you can hear the faint traces

of the lumbering bells of the dinosaurs bellowing

like the eidolons of carboniferous foghorns in the mist

off the coasts of consciousness? Sometimes

when I hear the bush wolves howling in the hills

I catch a note or two of a pack of killer whales

going deep to recover the black voice box of tetrapods

who preferred dancing in water to walking on land.

Compassion is the recognition of your identity in everything.

You wound the earth, an arrowhead sings in your rib cage.

Can you hear the demure laughter of the willows

walking like geishas along the shores of your mindstream

undoing the ribbons of the stars and waterlilies

to let them fall free from their hair to pale in the moonrise,

the memory of old lovers mingling in the living light

like the ghosts of the waterbirds returning to their shoals and inlets

like the bridge of a song, a waterclock of stars

between one stanza and the next life keeps coming back to

like the refrain of a melody line of the sea

it just couldn’t get out of its head like the reflection

of trillions of stars writing irradiant treble clefs

of the original sheet music in constellations high over head

like a five string quintet for the hymeneal cosmologists

while archaeologists achieve illumination

in the golden ratios of the life and death spirals

of the fossilized bass clefs of the equally alluring

mystery of the vocally earthbound children of the starmud

singing their hearts out like a choir off key as if

they grew by losing their balance against

a background of cosmic harmony so sweetly

that if rain could speak of what it’s like to fall upon

the fruits and flowers of the earth, it would sound very much

like the laughter and weeping of the ungrammatical stars?

PATRICK WHITE

I STILL BELIEVE IN THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I STILL BELIEVE THE PURSUIT OF AN EARTHLY EXCELLENCE

I still believe the pursuit of an earthly excellence,

not in name alone, but in the act of elucidating

even so much as a firefly’s insight into the darkness

to add your experience and confusion to the abyss

like a myth of origins in progress, is a noble calling,

a privilege accorded by the moon to wear the hide

and head of a wolf when the spirit howls in longing

to lift the agony of humans up to the stars as if

there were no greater sacrifice we had to give than this

that makes us peers of those fires, eye to eye, mirror to mirror

as above so below, the jewel of compassion in the slag

of our suffering, the beauty of the rose in the midst of its thorns

weeping holy blood on the skulls of her prophetic children.

A poet among people, a voice, a hermit thrush or an owl,

a red-winged blackbird on a dead branch or a crow

on the cabled bridge of the green blackberry,

or an indigo grackle, the eclipse of the mourning dove,

regardless of who or who isn’t listening to the wind

rasp over this desert of stars in an hourglass

like the wavelength of a serpent of fire as a sign of intelligence:

Say what is uniquely human about you so that

others might recognize themselves in the music.

Mourn as you must as if it were your funeral

you were going to as one day it will be,

your ashes in the locket around a loved one’s neck,

and break trail along the way as you explore

the wilderness of your loss so that others might follow,

assured by the dolmen of your presence in their solitude

the dangers of the journey are humanly surmountable.

A poet among people, that’s what you can say to yourself

on your deathbed and mean it in gratitude with a smile

at whatever shape of chaos you’re worshipping at the time,

you had a summons to suffer, praise, rejoice, mean and go mad

on behalf of other people, you, a self portrait of them.

Your love of them voluntarily going into exile,

or driven into it by the very ignorance you’re dying to overcome,

to know their homelessness as if it were a threshold your own,

to sow the available dimensions of the future

with metaphoric weeds and wildflowers in the starfields

so we don’t forget what all the fuss about enlightenment

means to a species rooted like a waterlily in its starmud

as if that were the dark genius behind all that shining,

the apex, the acumen, the anthos, not the denouement

of our flowering, and no future habitable that isn’t freely human

to express its awe and wonder at being imaginatively alive

like a purpureal crocus under an eyelid of opalescent snow.

Poetry is the discipline of a crazy person

who walks wisely among people half-fearful

of how fiercely vulnerable you must become to love them

as if there’d never be anything in it for you,

the most indefensibly human of them all

o so much more substantial than your dream figures

once you wake up, stubbing your heart on the rock of the world,

a razor blade to the artery of the rose that bleeds

just a profusely as you do when death cuts obliquely

into the stem and presents it like the ear of a bull

to the moon in a sacred brothel around the corner

opposite the Iseum where they make the partial whole again.

Incited by life to be demonically playful in the darkness,

angelically withdrawn like the stars and shadows at noon,

cherish the inconceivable nights that are not rewards

for anything you could have done or earned, as love

and inspiration aren’t, and marvel the more

at the strangeness of the miracle that things are this way.

Exhausted mid stride between the noon and dusk of your life,

don’t underestimate the mysticism of action

in the mundane labours of the day responding like bees

to the floral opportunities of tending the larkspur

like a voice coach pinging a tuning fork on their stamens.

Work at nothing that isn’t a form of worship

that demands your passion. Not to be fascinated by your life

is a child labour sweat factory of human enslavement.

The petty won’t brave their own happiness

nor that of anyone else, but the generous will

who understand that happiness is a grace of the heart

that happens to you from the inside out like a fortune cookie

not a law of causality misery is endlessly trying to repeal

beyond a reasonable doubt of ever coming true.

But seldom a joy without a bruise for a poet

whose bell of sorrows depends like most humans

as much upon the rain as the light to ripen

into the warm sugars of life like wild apples at sunset.

The eyes that look the deepest are usually the saddest

like housewells anyone’s free to draw from

but god, what poignancy of light smiles favourably

upon the faces of the tragically fulfilled

who lived out their singular prophecies

to purge everyone’s terror with empathy for their fate.

Arete, excellence. Aristos of merit. Beauty of soul, mind, body, heart,

the quality of your awareness, the largesse of your experience,

the natural humility of the bow you return to the mystery

of a tree in bloom, and the wisdom of an old stump,

not in the way of perfection, but the brilliance and courage

of your failure to attain the unattainable, enlightenment

the ultimate defeat for the benefit of all because it’s never complete

even when the Buddha goes straight to hell like an arrow.

Not void bound, bless the intuitive disobedience of the poet

who burns in the flames of her most sacred heresy,

savagely curse with compassion the erosive injustice

of the greedy legislating impoverished standards of living,

raise your voice when you see murder being done

so your silence isn’t complicit and the power of your rage

mollified by the slag of association that blunts

the edge of your sword when the only mercy is a quick kill

with a sharp blade and you go to it like your own execution.

I don’t care if you’re a junkie sleeping on a car seat

on the back porch of a crack house in the summer,

wondering in a moment to yourself if the stars ever weep for us,

or an associate professor of English at the University of Victoria,

cherishing a pair of thin leather gloves some raving beauty

left in your office and though she never returned

to reclaim them and you as for years you hoped and hoped

still rot like black banana skins on your windowsill,

a divorced housewife doing investigative forensics

on what happened to her life at the kitchen table,

share whatever starfields you’ve sown with tares or wheat

as if there were always enough bread to break with everyone.

Take the gold coin you call a career from under your tongue

like a false moonrise and washing your corpse

in your own grave, take the edges off your sphericity,

average the crucials out like a pebble or a planet

in the great tides of life you’re immersed in

like a human panning their own starmud for a little more light

to be shed in the depths of their oceanic awareness

than there was before you showed up like one bright fish

and lit your cells up like votive candles dedicated to the dark

and started seeing things by the light of your own life,

not the Rosetta stone of three dead languages

that never spoke from the heart about the ruses

of being human that get us through the darkest nights of ourselves,

so when someone takes a greasy volume of poems

down from the shelf, the cover worn off, the glue

of the perfect binding crumbling like dreams

in the corners of their eyes as they wake up,

and they’re shuffling loose pages as if they were

paginating a deck of cards, or trying to keep

the leaves of an autumn tree together, though you’re dead,

though your tongue is a leaf on the wind

and your eyes are clouds, your breath gone proto-nebular,

and it’s three in the morning, and the solitude is withering,

and insanity is grinning in their face as if to say

you always knew this is what it would come to,

and they reach for you like a home-brew of magic syllables,

yarrow sticks and tea leaves, liver spots and fossils

in a bonebox at the bottom of your skull cup,

write in such a way they don’t just read what you’ve said

but sit down on the ground with a friend they can share things with

and break your book open like a loaf of bread

spiritually cooling on an open windowsill as fragrant

as white sweet clover growing along the roadsides of paradise,

but as substantially nurturing to life as compassion for the flesh.

PATRICK WHITE