OLD SORROW, I'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

OLD SORROW, I’VE FORGOTTEN YOUR NAME

Old sorrow, I’ve forgotten your name,

you’ve been with me so long, pouring

the iron in my blood into the heavy bell of a heart

that’s climbed back up this sad tree of my spine

so many times out of the afterlives of my windfall,

these sad planets collapsing in on themselves

under the decaying weight and water of their own tears

from the inside out, and gone to seed

like a small fleet of lifeboats in this floating world,

trying to make it up out of these watersheds

to run the vertical deltas of this autumn orchard

whose roots I keep falling upon like a radical place to begin

climbing back up toward the stars again,

until one night I’ll raise my sail

like the moonrise of a blossom on the Milky Way

and be gone like a ghost ship in the fog of a nautical legend.

Old sorrow, I know you like the smoke of a thousand fires

I’ve danced around alone like the only child

of a midnight sun that abandoned me on the threshold

of a black hole I orbit like the rain in a broken mirror.

Who did you bury that we weep for, what

did you aspire to that you were too earthbound to reach,

what love of yours was so betrayed when it had

its eyes pecked out by the song birds

you never sing anymore when the bees

are in the locust trees, and the ants are opening

the peonies like loveletters from the Pleiades,

except there’s a wound in your voice the lyrics

are bleeding out of like a thorn in the eye of a hurricane rose?

Old sorrow, are you the tears deep down in things,

the lachrymae rerum that fill the wishing wells

with oceans of disappointment like the run-off

of our hopes and dreams descending the world mountain

after we’d talked to God like bathyspheres

trying to get to the bottom of our tears

like glass bubbles in our crystal skulls,

our third eyes frozen like the lenses of a telescope

fixed on a star above a shipwreck in Arctic ice,

looking for a northwest passage out of ourselves

toward a mythic Cathay beyond our continental shelves?

And what did God have to say that you kept to yourself

when you came back down from your tete a tete,

and returned your commandments like a library book

that was way overdue in Alexandria?

Old sorrow, I can sense in you how many seasons

have scarred you like a calendar of crescent moons

as you hang like the pine cone of one dolorous note

of the silence you sustain like a blues guitar

ripening in the corner of the room where the spiders

are writing music you’ll never play like the wind

in the hair of the willows down by the Tay River

when the black walnuts are floating by

like the scorched planets of sunless solar systems.

Old sorrow, I know you like a heavy boot cloyed in the starmud

of all these roads we’ve walked together to get

nowhere in particular but wherever we are now

in this graveyard of shadows

that talk to the stars who have none

about how to wash our names and faces off

like deathmasks that are tired of trying to light up the darkness

like a candle at a black mass at high noon

with an eclipse high overhead the flowers won’t look at

for fear of burning their eyes. Compendious companion,

you bend my boughs toward the earth

with the low hanging fruit of a giving nature

seasoning your inconsolable wisdom with compassion.

Immoveable buddha, are you the ancient echo

of the birth pang of life, the groan of sentience

being torn up by the roots out of the indwelling forms

of things you used to take shelter in like lenses and mirrors

you could blow into bubbles of the mind

like the multiverse through a keyhole into the abyss of hyperspace?

Old sorrow, were you rounded like a shepherd moon

in the undertow of time, your teeth blunted

like the molars of the asteroids eating stoney wheat

growing wild in the starfields of the neolithic grasslands?

Sometimes I can feel you possessing my heart and body and mind

like the corpse of an ancient ancestor, my spirit

like a prophetic skull on the dark side of the moon

lamenting the loss of its atmosphere like one of its eyes.

Other nights, I look upon you like the ruins

of a palace of water that once greened this desert of stars

like a Persian gardener that ruled an empire of flowers.

Venerable exile, do you despair of ever

finding your way home again through your lion gate

or have you encamped like so many other nations

to weep like Zion beside the rivers of Babylon?

Is your diamond corona occluded by the protocols of coal

that sully your face like the memory of darker days ahead?

I shall call you, friend, given how long

we’ve known each other like shadows of the valley spirit

blinded by the sundials of the unageing mountains of the moon.

I shall open my heart like a fire to you

and we can share the silence together for hours at a time

on long winter nights when the wind is howling outside

and there’s no need to speak of things

that neither of us understand about why

the fountains with the deepest watersheds

are always sadder than the last of the flowers

in a late autumn rain, or the willows along the Tay.

Slowest of rivers, you can sit saturnine and soporific,

red shifting into the longer wavelengths

of the oldest of your dreams, if you still dream yet,

and I’ll work on a poem in the shipyards of the mindstream

that will displace its weight in tears, and hopefully,

though you probably know better, keep us both afloat

like a paper boat shooting the rapids of a waterclock

that’s been running a little late like the two of us for light years.

PATRICK WHITE 

THERE'S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

THERE’S A WOMAN IN THE DOORWAY

There’s a woman in the doorway

flaking like a rose of red paint

with eyes that have been weeping

the shadows of dead saints, a full eclipse

of mascara, sloppy sorrows, and a mickey

she quotes like a Bible, chapter and verse,

though the Bible’s mickey-mouse

compared to how bad it can get

as I notice there’s a pink Glock in her purse,

the arthropod of an uncalibrated shrimp

that isn’t going to let her lover off the hook.

I’m engraving poems on the frosty windows

with a crow’s claw as they whisper to me

like the moon among the corals when I dream,

strange omens of incipience I always mistake

for a sign I’m about to cry though it’s seldom

revealed why. The earth is a sad, sad place

sometimes as you’re ushered to your seat

by a starmap of waterlilies that can see in the dark,

a bouquet of wildflowers in a funereal movie-house

at the first screening of a cosmic prequel

featuring your life as you’ve never seen it before.

Reruns in the multiverse, I’m standing

on a million streetcorners all at once

trying to hawk my theory of fiscal surrealism

to a bloodbank trying to hang on to the Iron Age.

I turn the page like an eyelid to exorcise

the ghost of the jinn in the lamp, and the cupboards

are as bare as the vow of a celibate wishing well

the watercolour lovers have lost interest in

now that the stars have evaporated from it

like the spirit of yesterday’s perfume in a purse.

Where is the lost atmosphere of the moon going

like the shrinking ferns and bonsai trees of my breath

as if it were revising nirvanic haiku until all that was left

were parings of nothing, lunar phases

and fingernails of glass that could scratch

your eyes out like nature red in tooth and claw

as you rake wavelengths in the sand

like a Zen garden in Kyoto waiting

for enlightenment to germinate the rocks,

hard-scrabble farmers with almanacs of crystal skulls.

I’ve ploughed the moon monkishly long enough

with a silver tongue to know when

to sow, tend, reap, the skeletal crops

of the dragon’s teeth that police the secret

of a green thumb trying to hitch-hike out of here

on a long, dark, estranged, radiant byway

lacquered in black ice like the gleaming mirrors

of a snake uncoiling like the full eclipse of an oilslick

waiting for me to slip up like an apostate

of my mystical ineptness long after

the last sacred clown sat down on the ground

and had a good laugh on the house

at the expense of the unamused abyss,

remarking how absurdly child-like all this is.

Medusa, armed to the teeth, tries to tell me

she’s tired of crossing swords with her own fangs

over a point of honour someone has to die for

like a crescent of the moon she’s going to pull

out of the mouth of her lyrical liar with pliers,

every one of her vocal cords tarred and feathered

like the black swan of a stone guitar

reverberating in the Martian canyons of her heart.

Ars longa. Vita brevis. Hatred and angry grief

so much easier to master than the impossible art

of keeping your evanescent fireflies of insight

undisciplined enough to ride the lightning

like a pale horse with the wingspan of the universe

without tampering with someone else’s specious curse

or plotting a course by the stars on your Spanish spurs.

Not on the dance-card of her spite and ego,

I listen compassionately to what

the white noise outside is trying to teach me

like the universal hiss of the afterbirth of road kill

about the ontological misfortunes of being born

to long for nightbirds and hear the rattling of crabs

lugging their armaments to the front lines of love

like lunar castanets, or the horns of a bull

narrowing the gap between parentheses

like the clashing dooms of Scylla and Charybdis,

a whirlpool and a rock, gravity and mass,

the crone phase of the moon having it out

with the vernal equinox at a calendrical toredo.

I see the first crescent and I want to put it up

to my head and pull the trigger to put an end

to the incommensurable agonies of fractious decimals

repeating themselves like mantric alibis

until nothing’s left of the original cartel

except the amputated torso of the fire hydrant

that tried to put the blaze out like a voice coach

who didn’t know all the words to the hysterics

of an anonymously amorous narco ballad

mythically inflating the legend of a famous love affair

out of the redoubtable details of a few bad superstitions.

Pity the fool who begrudges even the grubbiest delusions

of the quixotic heart tilting at the stars

like the precessional axis of the wobbling earth

come round again to the eternal recurrence

of the stratagems of spring in a Great Platonic Year.

Love is as much of a companion to death

as murder is to sacrifice or genetics to loaded dice.

House wine or love potion number nine,

pink guns with clips of rose-petaled lipstick,

everyone’s upholding the incriminating honour

of their uncontested heart defended by their folly

to the death as if the mystery were about to be

lost upon them for good as they rend each other asunder

shooting out the stars like a fashionable crime of passion.

As for me and my tent, the dancing girls

with coral lips and wishbone hips have come and gone

like serpentine wavelengths red shifting into

the shadows they left behind like signs of intelligence

alloyed with carnal desire like a nocturnal mirage

of the moon laying its broken sword down on the water

like a vow we didn’t let come between us

as if we didn’t belong to ourselves

which made the theft of fire we stole from each other

a greater blessing than the hurtful consolations

of obedience to the thorns at the expense of the rose.

What can you say about the nature of crazy wisdom

when the heart is bemused enough to cherish someone

barefoot beyond the bounds of common sensical shoes that pinch?

Some people would rather be loved than right.

Others more righteous than touched. Majnun

had his Laila. Love limps beside others like a crutch.

And though he sipped from many goblets

encrusted with star sapphires from the Pleiades,

none of them tasted like the night until he drank

from the reflection of the beloved from his own hands

and knew a darkness brighter than enlightenment

and the music of rain in the eyes of a desert

more beautiful than water imagery on the moon.

The mad man knows a secret even the deepest stars

can’t understand without losing their way to the well.

PATRICK WHITE

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