SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

SOMETHING CONTINENTAL WITHIN ME RISING

Something continental within me rising.

Atlantis, surfacing. Pangaea coming back together,

synarthritically, after diversifying its sentient life forms,

from the preludes of the Burgess Shale

to the double-beamed diplodeci of Patagonia.

I can feel the shoulders of an ancient ocean

heaving up beneath me like a Leviathan of life

with the power to smash headlong through

the hull of the lifeboat of my psyche, or tip me

like a seal off this last ice floe I’m clinging to in the Arctic

with four polar bears, Henry Hudson, and a terrified tern.

Sublimely underwhelmed, everything I once transcended

crossing a burning bridge of stars in a long firewalk

now subtended like the underside of a leaf or a starmap

as if my vision of life, and this thread of blood,

this small mindstream at night I am in it, is being

woven and unravelled by the moon I’m giving birth to

in a fire womb of an underwater fumarole

umbilically connected to the magmatic core of the earth,

hydrogen sulphide mythically inflating the scale of life.

I’m heading into a bloodstorm with a ragged poem

like a flag of surrender for a sail on a life raft I lashed together

from the available driftwood that washed up on my shores

like the contorted corpses of those who had drowned in agony,

trying, as I have, for light years, to get to the other side before I die

in this tidal pool of shore-hugging ego that esteems itself

the third eye of the great nightsea beyond it

and when it’s full of stars, the parabolic mirror

of a reflecting telescope in orbit around itself like a deer fly.

The earth is turning into quicksand under my feet.

O, earth, gape! A touch Marlovian, perhaps,

and a sound magician might make a demi-god,

but demi-gods don’t always make the most sound magicians.

My skyscrapers are loosing their footing

like needles skipping grooves across an old fashioned record

of the celestial spheres, striated by retreating glaciers

trying to revive the last word of their literary careers,

like fireflies with enfibulators come to jump start their art

too late, too late, to go south with the other birds.

The mourning dove flees, but the crow winters with its heart

like a continent of coal deep freezing into diamonds

when a dark muse seizes it by the throat like an eclipse

and it cries out in the starless night of the uncomprehending abyss

across the ice-glazed eyelids of the blood-stained snows,

I am the ocean in the eye of a black rose.

I am the prophetic passion of fire in the skull of a dragon.

I am the dark lantern the arks of the stars

send out before themselves as if their myths of origin

were all ahead of them like a time capsule of eyes

to be opened sometime in the future when the light

makes land fall like the Norse at L’anse aux Meadows

before the fishermen anglicized Medusa from the French

in Jelly Fish Cove at the northern tip of Newfoundland.

I am the spectral blazing of the silver heart of the moon.

I am the compassionate ice palace of an Inuit embassy,

an igloo in tears, giving sanctuary to the snow blind ghosts

that can wander the tundra for years like exiled dolmens

following the spectral fires of the auroral borealis

without any sign of a seance rising like smoke

from more accommodating fires on the shamanic horizon

of a mystic trickster that ate the eyes of the snow fox

so it could see in the dark the traps that had been laid for it.

Long before I became the funereal usher

greeting the new comers at the one-way exits of the dead,

I was the gateless gate at the entrance of the living

to the longest white nights of their lives in a northern paradise

where nothing was forbidden and the great oracular snake

that Blake said in his prophetic books would arise in Canada

found it too cold to survive and perished

like a wavelength of dark energy red shifted toward the light

in a six month long nightmare no fire could revive it from

like the hallucinogenic smelling salts of the volcano

it coiled around for visionary warmth at Delphi.

But I can tell by the tattoos on the skin it shed

what it would have said if it had been more adaptable

and let more serpent fire go to its head in this cold climate

like chimney sparks among the stars

shining above its last chakra circumpolarly like Draco

growing wings like a wivern of wild grape vines

wrapped around the axis mundi of the wounded earth.

I can heal. I can soothe. I can seduce you to my love.

I can move like a scar over the surface of the earth.

I can run like a wild northern river roiling in the moonlight

I can linger like a ripple in the oilslick of the Alberta tar sands,

or a perma frost speed bump on an asphalt highway in the spring.

I can be the dark angel in your way who drives

a spear of light through your heart so you can

never really tell if you’re just another Barbie

toying with nirvana, or a real voodoo doll in the night

with a deeper insight into the dark arts of cursing and blessing

than either of the shallower mirrors and scenic vistas

of your blood and tears could have managed

on the same event horizon where they stand on the threshold

of a black hole they dare not enter on their own.

I am the alpha. I am the omega of shapeshifters

I am a dynamic equilibrium of fire and water

at peace with themselves without compromising

the other’s nature for rising up or flowing down.

When my feet are in the stars, my head is on the ground.

I am the balancing act of a sacred clown

chequered like a chessboard calendar

of the days and nights of my life

I’ve danced with the full,

I’ve danced with the new moons

as if my ends always came before my beginnings.

Extinction the prelude of inception,

not the false dawn of its epilogue.

Clarity doesn’t engender an opposite.

It isn’t reality. It isn’t a lack of deception.

It just means enlightenment and delusion

have both ceased to exist

as you make your exit, laughing,

with a real tear painted on your cheek that hasn’t dried yet.

PATRICK WHITE

PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

PARANOIA KILLS LIKE A FANATIC WHAT IT SUSPECTS WITHOUT CONVICTION

Paranoia kills like a fanatic what it suspects without conviction

isn’t true about what it believes about thinking. It’s getting

mad out here, the moon’s gone rabid and the tides are awry.

Given my age and the quality of my rage tempered

like the sword I fell upon in the waters of life

more evolutionary than the revolution that dropped out

to go back to Daddy’s law school like one of the fashionistas

of idealism who’d rather be wealthy and wonderful than real,

I scry the future behind me in Dr. John Dee’s black mirror,

menace in the air, darkness growing like black mold

in the walls of the house of life, the garotte tightening

around the necks of those who stick out like deathbed confessions

that there are still things worth dying for that make you feel

you’ve wasted your life, given how little has changed.

The bees are estranged from the flowers by neonicotinoids

that go out of their way like pesticides to kill anything

anyone loves anymore, if that’s still credibly possible.

I stare personally into the blank, oblivion of the door

that’s opening up ahead like the threshold of a return address

and I think to myself, every groundhog’s got two holes

to escape by and I can see an eyeless night at the end

of the tunnel of death littered with the corpses of star-nosed moles

that died like molecules for nothing when the light

went looking for their eyes like a convenient disguise

for seeing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing,

the old stars in front of the aimless firing squads of the fireflies,

terrorists in sleeper cells of waterboarded nightmares

with mini-black holes in their hearts you can enter

like a bullet through the brain and leave by an exit-wound

through the mouth of God as the spin doctors infringe

on her copyright, factualizing the fictions, and fictionalizing

the facts like a twenty-four hour news cycle

that teaches you there’s nothing personal in the way

you can’t help but hate your fellow man as if

the only thing that bonded us to one another anymore

on this chromosomatic coil of flypaper were the buzzing

of our anger and disgust at getting stuck without an alibi

for who we are as we plea deal for brain resistant headstones

we can hide under for the duration like cut worms in our roots.

I want to trust. I want to love. I want to seek. I want

to listen to what others speak as if we shared the same silence.

I don’t want to read any more statistics about

the collateral damage of our pandemic neglect.

Twenty-five million children, give a few of them

faces and fingertips in your mind, blood your abstractions

and see your own kids in your mind with the same

quizzical look of disappointed surprise in their

blue, black, green, brown, trusting eyes when they realize

they’ve lived just long enough to be killed by the lies

the elect of the world tell like bedtime stories to landmines

and political screening myths proclaiming they were victimized

by the lack of happy endings for bad seeds who don’t believe

in the same genetically modified creeds of wheat

it’s become a violation of an industrial patent on our cells

to break with each other meiotically once and awhile

as if we really meant bread and medicine when we said

hunger and disease, tired of our guilt spoiling the health

of our featherless chickens born ready for processing

as if the hogs had found a way of shortening the food chain

like a rosary of pearls thrown like loaves and fishes into the trough.

I want to look out over the valley of life as I’m leaving it

like dusk over the shoulder of a mountain I climbed

to get closer to the stars without going blind like people

who look into the face of God and think they recognize themselves.

It may be retrograde on my part to want to celebrate

in an age of desecration, but there’s a beatific demon

of crazy wisdom within me that says do, dance, sing,

whether you have a reason to or not, embrace the absurdity

of dancing with the cloud shadows on the darkening hilltops

against the gathering storm of a clockwork apocalypse

on the nightshift of a graveyard where the stars go to die

because they can’t live on the mean skies that make them feel

like mere satellites of the visionary fingerpaintings

we smear on our narrowing eyes like the aperture of a Cyclops.

Even if you have to sing like a soft metal alloy in a language

twisted by the mutated sensibilities of the times as

the cherry bloom cankers its perfection at Chernobyl and Fukushima

as the first sign of the fallout of a drastic spring.

Sing about anything as if there were a muse of chaos

lodged in your heart like a cardinal in an evergreen

that took over your house like a riot of homeless guests.

Dirge, dorn, whimper like a deermouse that believes

it’s got Lime disease, put your hands over your ears

like a hood over the head of a red-tailed hawk

and shriek at the sky like fingernails clawing a blackboard

if you must, but find a way to go insane

that lets you sing in the asylum to yourself

sitting by the window in the artificial light of a false dawn

with an irrefutable smile on your face you don’t need to wipe off

like a mirror that’s getting ready to take your place in the universe.

Right here and even now where it’s imminently conceivable

things will get worse and worse and worse and worse

and the dead will legislate for the living myths of origin

only the stillborn of the imagination will subscribe to,

and the dispossessed alienated by a deathmask

that slowly effaces them like a farcical masquerade

of the lives they pretend to be living for the sake of appearances

will cultivate exotic norms of madness that will conform

to the unconscionable scions of chaos living like

the mountainous echo of a moral code that couldn’t restrain them

deep within where apocalypse originates not as fire or ice

but the afterbirth of a forbidden silence that never shows its face.

Even in the midst of this, Loki, a sacred clown,

a downcast harlequin with long fingers sitting disconsolately

on a beach ball as the circus packs up to move on,

a trickster crow, a dark farce of your dynastic selves

in a long hall of mirrors warped by the gravitational lies

you have to vow to the dark every night to ground the shapeshifter

you’ve become in your absence in the starmud

of your next astronomical catastrophe to keep

from taking your extinction personally, whatever,

whomever, whyever you have to do, make it the labour

of a capricious preference, if nothing else, to sing like a universe

to the genius of your solitude as if you were setting

a loveletter to your muse on fire to show her how

serious you are about passionately annihilating your inspiration

in the thousands of eyes she has shed like tears over the lightyears

to silver the mirrors that flow like the radiant rivers of the waters of life

from your improbable heart over the precipitous thresholds

of a homeless art that’s been on this mysterious road long enough

not to close the gate after it like an exit with nothing to look forward to.

PATRICK WHITE

WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

WAIT. WAIT. WAIT FOR IT TO COME

Wait. Wait. Wait for it to come,

the mad folly of my creative destruction.

Bleak the flowers in this ruinous garden

and my psyche speaking in tongues

like gates someone left open banging in the wind.

Bring on the storm. Uproot the lightning.

I will not run. I’ll stand here steadfast

as an amputated stump in this open field

with a ghostly feeling I can grow my arms back

like a faith healer sitting like Stonehenge

in solstitial silence at the last broken window

snarling at the fixed stars that keep drifting

in and out of the asylum like a seance of fireflies

that’s turned into an angry mob

looking for stars to martyr for not taking

their fanatical starmaps as literally as they do.

I’m an heretical astrologer tied to the axis mundi

of my own imagination. I read my doom,

cowled in candlelight like the skull of the full moon

scrying the entrails of a wounded bull

garlanded in laurels like a loveletter to the gods.

My end without exit. My beginning without a door.

My backbone bent like a rafter from shouldering

this dance floor that’s crippled me for life.

Should I paint my skin blue? Should I get a tattoo?

Should I carve a more fashionable deathmask

out of my heartwood and learn to lie like a man

acquainted with the truth? Should I go into battle naked

like a beserker sporting his own vulnerability

in the face of an enemy outraged by the insult?

I’m beating on a pinata of killer bees.

I’m cauterizing my nerves with the synaptic

welder’s arcs of the stars until I’m numb as an alloy

of water and blood at the point of a sword

that’s about to cut my throat like a ouija board

that’s run out of answers and alibis for everything.

I’m jester to the divine sense of humour

of a moody goddess trying to decide if she’s a crone

or a nymph. Too late for autumn. Too early for spring.

She falls through the cracks of time

like an old age pensioner. She is the muse

that takes the new moon from under my tongue

and throws it like a penny into a wishing well.

Good luck. I’m done. I’ve worn my bones out

like dice in a gambling den long enough.

Seven come eleven or snake-eyes,

it’s all come around like Russian roulette to me.

I’m dissipating my intensity in the supernal immensities

that don’t give a damn whether I exist or not.

The hurricane’s out of the aviary. The singing-master’s

dropped out of the choir of crows of the black mass

in the ashes of the infidels cherishing the leftover relics

in the sacred shrines of their fire pits, surrounded

by the boundary stones of their spiritual opulence.

I’m tired of mistaking a faithless face in a broken mirror

as an ultimate insight into life. There’s nothing orthodox

about a labyrinth of cul de sacs. Nothing infernal

about a scapegoat driven out into the wilderness

by the sins of the tribe to graze on burning bushes.

I’ve read the gnostic allegory of my life

to loose-lipped interpreters in burning libraries

all over this country from one coast to the next

without being hexed like a nightbird

by their symbolic superstitions. And I’ve listened

for vital signs of life in neglected cemeteries

where no one’s making love on the graves

to tempt the silence out of hiding its genius

like a birthmark under the headstone

of a prophetic paperweight with no voice of its own

to speak of were the wind not a shepherd of leaves

looking for greener pastures for its lost sheep.

I’ve done it right. Nothing less than everything

all the time. I’ve kept it all together like a night sky

that goes on forever like a crow with an eye

to the shining. I fletched my eyebeams like arrows

with the feathers of ospreys to bring down the stars

like messenger pigeons of the light with rumours of home.

I’ve broken the seal of my blood, like a scab on the moon,

or the immaculate sunspot of my word, to liberate

the mystic singularities at the bottom of a black hole

that promised them a better life on the other side

and hung a lantern in the tunnel of an oncoming thought train

that knew it could, knew it could, knew it could,

but didn’t. What more could you ask, what

moiety of my life hasn’t been devoted to the absurdity

of conducting sky burials in an orbiting observatory?

I’ve sung for my supper, sex, money, fame and meaning.

I’ve raised my voice like an axe on behalf

of people on the receiving end of the stick

and I’ve brought my winged heels down hard

on the skulls of slack snakes on railway tracks

when it became clear as an X-ray to me

they weren’t fledgling dragons and the babies

were as toxic as the adults. Retreads on black asphalt,

most of their books, shedding their skins

as if they were laying rubber on well published roads

lined with critical road kill. Everybody underestimating

the monstrosity of a mythically inflated ego

with the mass of a black dwarf that’s imploded

on itself like the withered daylily of a weather balloon.

Imagine the rapture of frogs in the rain

blissed out on the highbeams that will crush them

like chocolates with strawberry hearts.

And everybody grieves like a sieve

for the mystic mishaps of the lesser vehicle

But poetry isn’t a joy ride for petty thieves,

and there are dangerous hitch-hikers, thumbs up

on the backwoods highways at night out in the starfields

poaching the horns of unicorns to sell on a black market

that doesn’t believe one miracle’s ever enough.

I may have been eclipsed by my own enlightenment,

but I can still shine. I radiate. I emanate. Every meteor’s

got its radiant. And there are always stars in a poet’s eyes

he hasn’t got around to naming yet like diamonds in the rough.

My life might ring as hollow as an empty silo,

and yet I’m fulfilled. I’m ripe as the red end

of the spectrum, a windfall in the Hesperides,

all flavours of the lifesavers in the sunset.

My fear hasn’t aged. My grief. My love. My imagination.

Strange recollections from dissonant hours,

I regret having mismanaged the retroactive exorcism,

of my childhood, but things get better the less they matter.

Even a shipwreck on the moon has oceanic powers

over the way the waters of life ride out the storm.

I take liberties with chaos and risk more than I have to lose,

bracing for the fall with an incommunicable form of the blues

that reconciles me to the unattainable by revealing

what’s most human about me isn’t a still life with apple piety,

not what I excelled at, but the bruise I achieved when I fell.

PATRICK WHITE

YOU'RE JUST MESSED UP LIKE NEW MOONLIGHT

YOU’RE JUST MESSED UP LIKE NEW MOONLIGHT

You’re just messed up like new moonlight

scattering its plumage on the waters like the wing

of a black swan, sweet one. Dry your eyes.

I know there’s a house well of sadness in every one

of your tears, but this is not an eclipse, not the headwaters

of the mascara that runs down your cheeks

like rivers of night. Less is not less. More is not more.

And the light’s not being cruel or trying to make a fool of you.

Love can be a constant in an Elizabethan sonnet,

but in my lean experience of separation and union

the heart’s never been true to time. It doesn’t reject,

it doesn’t defect, it pines for change like an evergreen

when the red-winged blackbirds return in the spring.

Love’s disciplined as water when it’s ice, conformable

as the eyes of the dead to any shape that contains it

like a fixed star that’s always on the graveyard shift

in somebody’s heart or other, a kind of permafrost

that thaws out in the spring like a long laneway of starmud,

or your tears as they are now, released, supple, free,

a turmoil of puddles like inkwells among a thousand lakes

that still wouldn’t be enough, I know, to fill

the eyeless, skyless, emptiness in your heart with words

like the abandoned nest of the abyss in a vacant aerodrome

that’s never going to fly again, songs in the dawn, echoes

in the dusk, and you in your boa of black feathers

billowing like smoke from a rubber tire you set afire

like your heart at a protest when things got real mean and rough.

I can’t say if you’re lover’s ever coming back.

My mystic guess is usually not, but possibly, but don’t

hold your nose like an amateur pearl diver plunging

into those depths when the moon is in the corals

and it’s a shipwreck with its hull ripped out on the reef

you mistook for an enchanted island where you

were the Circe of love, as you were, and it was,

though forever turned out to be epiphanously brief.

No good turning your tears into bathyspheres

when the seas are bottomless and your loveboats don’t float.

Every time you open your eyes another star’s encouraged to shine.

It’s clear you feel like you’re the one who’s blind,

but it’s not true, you know, if you turn the night around

and let the light look into you like the moon

through your bedroom window when there was

more rapture in dreaming awake than there was

in wasting it on sleeping, you’ll see the hidden radiance I see

deep within you brighten the light by deepening the darkness.

Forgive what you can. Forget the rest. Cherish what you must.

It’s not always an evil sign when things go dark. Even

the Queen of Cups must leak out of her heart like the moon

sometime. Mend it with gold. Or leave it open like a wound

you don’t want to get over because the pain has grown

so beautiful, and your longing so pure and poetic

it feels as if a dark angel pierced you through the heart

with a spear of fire that burns like dry ice. Finalities

and farewells numinous with supranormal significance

that can haunt you like an open gate no one’s ever

closed behind them even after stepping through it

lightyears ago. And later in life, you’ll see, you’ll

be amazed by the triviality of the mystic details

the eccentric heart remembers, little things

you never gave a thought to at the time, fireflies

that end up dwarfing the supernovas of self-annihilating emotion

that vaporized the oceans in your eyes and scattered your ashes

across the firmament like the Road of Ghosts poured

from the urn of a cement truck paving over the past

to make you forget that any path you take in life

is cobbled with the skulls of those who died to build it

like coolies on the C.P.R., or children making Nike runners.

You’re bipedal enough to know that one step forward

is one step back so where on this long, dark, waning

and waxing journey through life is there anywhere

for anyone to go except right here as we are now

dogpaddling in space as if we were firewalking on stars?

Between the first and last crescents of the parenthetical moon,

like the bay of your open arms, the systole, diastole of your heart,

the ebbing and neaping of tides, quantumly entangled photons

ten thousand times the speed of light, flaunting

the constants of life like chains we throw off

like a revolution we fought to keep things

as they always were, radically the same, clinging

like liberation and unity to the contradictory sum of our parts.

When these deserts of stars that scorch the heart grow hot enough

they go swimming in their own mirages like lovers

in each other’s eyes, trying to beat the heat

by sweating it out as if each were weather to the other,

a promise of rain, a spring in Jericho, the oasis

of Amun-Re in Egypt. Yes, your lover’s father was a god

and his mother a Pythian priestess with the grace of a snake,

and you feel you’re burning like Persepolis in the flames

of a drunken rage trying to upstage Asia Hellenistically,

but little Isis, you’re sleepwalking in the land of the lotus-eaters

as if you were following the starmap of a dream you drew

imagining what it would be like to be in love

like a secret garden in paradise you never grew tired of

waiting for him to step out of the moonlight

and embrace you under the blossoming persimmon trees

as if he were of the same heart as you and you weren’t a girl

with grass stains on your knees and your hair in hideous braids

you wanted to cut short like a reprieve from your mother’s sense

of gallow’s humour and what looked good on you

like a chain weighing anchor like the corpse of a caduceus

that couldn’t find a way to heal itself before it was too late.

It’s an injurious business losing your innocence like a lie

you told yourself as a young girl, and did everything you could

to make come true. Don’t flagellate yourself

for something that was missing in you or think

your life, his life, all life is meaningless because

even his absence isn’t big enough to contain

the emptiness that abounds in you like a darkness

you cherish like a hidden jewel in an underworld

where the Queen of Death is more ravishing

than apple bloom in the spring of life before

the prelude of love turns bitter and green for awhile

as counter intuitively, the golden windfalls of the sun

at dusk in autumn, and this can happen synchronistically

without a local habitation or a name at any time

regardless of your age or the despair of your era,

just fall in your lap like the sweetness of life

ripening the light retroactively on a survivable planet.

PATRICK WHITE

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

ONLY THE LONELIEST OF GHOSTS GONE MAD

Only the loneliest of ghosts gone mad

don’t fret their abstractions with facts.

The wind is pure and seedless and the moon

without weeds. Like old windows,

they weep tears of glass for what they’ve seen

like glaciers in an ice age slowly thawing out.

My voice is the tragic black box of many

panicked conversations trying to act professionally

just before things went deeply south. Orphic descents

into the underworld of the dead and the songs

I sang from the heartwood of my lyre, still resonate

like the shadows that flitted through the sacred groves,

the occult feathers of a coven of crows

that taught me posthumous dream grammars

have no verbs because everything’s already been achieved.

Strange, strange, and inexplicably human, how

the imagination is as easily seized upon

at this time of night by the dead and gone

as by the living, mysteriously animate and near.

I don’t deny there are demonic spirits

that can freeze my eyes with fear, lords

of the abyss that know how to clear a stage real fast

as all my dream figures sublimate like dry ice

into more habitable atmospheres, but I stay centred

at the nave of this prayerwheel of birth and death

and let whatever wants to emanate through me

fan out from there like the spokes of a sea star.

Together we make a zodiac of anathemas and benedictions.

The dead can bestow blessings and lift your spirits

like a curse if the timing’s right and you don’t

waste your trust on quoting chapter and verse.

Ghosts are the last inspiration of the air

the living breathe out as if they were returning

the waters of life to the river they drank from.

The moon passes on, but its reflection makes

an indelible impression upon the mind like a woman

grieving in a cemetery late at night for a baby

she held in her arms like the death of the dawn

and even the black dog of the autumn wind

is at a loss to know how to keen as deeply as that.

Voices out of nowhere, commanding no, don’t go in there

and others, gentle as fireflies that summon me

to follow bracken covered trails through the woods

to a plaque in the ground with a toppled Mason jar

of dried chicory and cornflowers that can still move me to tears

a hundred and fifty years after they died at twelve

of some garish pioneer fever with the name of their favourite colour.

I don’t shut the windows. I don’t close the doors.

I don’t smudge the air with sage or cedar boughs

to drive them out of the attic like bats. I let the dead

come and go as they please. I let their sorrows touch me

and my spirit bleed with empathy for the windfall

of wounded bells that haunt the grass like an eerie carillon

of death knells for the music of the past they once bloomed for

like new moons in a calendar of waning skulls. My house

is their house. They cling to me like an hospitable threshold

for homeless atmospheres very few among the living

know how to breathe in and out anymore without resorting

to a seance or an exorcism conducted like a bus stop for runaways

and vagrants common wisdom says it isn’t wise to trust.

Why shouldn’t the unsheltered dead take their place

at the round table in me like the shadow of a sundial

in a garden abandoned by time where dry-mouthed fountains of salt

still long for a taste of the rain in the tears of their dark watersheds

deep underground like wells that have yet to be divined?

The memory of the waters of life is the muse of the wine

they bring to the table like an echo of blood that’s gone on

ripening in them like uncultivated grapevines in the wild.

One drop on your tongue and you’re drunk

in the doorways of life for the rest of time like a dream

you can’t die in like an imperilled heart without

being grateful there’s as much to celebrate at the end

as there is a new start, that living and dying are the same event.

And as often as the dead have come to me in joy

though that might surprise the uninitiated who still divide

the hellbound from the heaven-sent, the fire from the light it sheds,

so the living have approached me like a perennial lament

for everything that’s missing in their lives like a bright vacancy

out of touch with the dark abundance that thrives

in their uprooted shadows like midnight at noon.

What sea do the Styx, Lethe, and Phlegathon flow into

that isn’t the same for the four mindstreams of awareness

that poured out of Eden, or the gardens and underground rivers

among the fountains of Salsabil in Jana or the waters of Babylon

Zion sat down and wept by? Or the dead leaves

of the burning maples I watch floating by on the Tay

like experienced fires inspired by the starmaps of autumn?

PATRICK WHITE

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

LOOKING AT THE RAIN. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THE RAIN

Looking at the rain. Are you looking at the rain,

alone in an upstairs window of a small town

deserted except for the salt trucks sowing the road,

watching it freeze in the tarpits and stretch marks

of asphalt smeared by storefront colours

that try too hard like circuses and brothels?

And the people dreaming behind the makeshift veils

they can see out of into the dark, but no one ever in,

should the lights be on, and they’re not. Are you

embracing yourself like a stranger in your solitude

by acclamation, no one to challenge who you must be?

And the sky glowing as if there were a fire

in the distance, you cannot see beyond

the looming rooftops, subliminally infernal,

marginally dispersed auras of infra-red

that fell off the flat earth of a pre-mixed palette?

I imagine you keeping your pain to yourself

like the secret name of a god you disclose to no one

for fear of them having power over you.

I imagine you trying to embody the whole mystery

of life within yourself like the improbable avatar

of all that’s invisible within you like a ladder of thresholds

the light has yet to cross. Not a god or goddess

but a mystically specific human being who doubts

the divinity of her own uniqueness. Once for everything

means no two alike, but the air is saturate

with comparative metaphors in the absence of stars.

I imagine you remembering sporadic lovers

you were hurt by, children who abandoned you,

parents who tried but could never really understand.

Doors you slammed in anger as if you were

turning your back on yourself like a red sportscar

that kept breaking down by the side of the road.

And how you decided to go the rest of the way

like an indeterminate leaf on your own mindstream

once you decided you weren’t a map to anywhere

that wasn’t as evanescent as you were at cartography.

Three hours from dawn and you’re still a seance of one.

You summon lonely trains like mourners

hired for a funeral. Who’s dying? Whose

deathmask are you paying homage to

by obeying the protocols of artificial respect?

I can intuit the sundial and the sanctuary

of the walled garden your heart keeps trying

to bloom in like a poppy in winter but you neglect it

like a small fire that’s pleading with you to tend it

instead of letting it bleed out like a hare in the snow.

I want to console you. I want to undo the daisy chain

of razor wire you’ve wrapped yourself up in

like a gift to someone you think deserves it

as a mockery of everything you once cherished

but if I were to slowly emerge out of the void

into the room like an enchanted island you could be

the Circe of, you’d change like a chameleon on the spot.

You wouldn’t be yourself in the confines of your loneliness.

You’d keep chanting the prophylactic mantra

of a Greek chorus in a satyr play as if

you’d just seen a hungry ghost rise up,

a deux ex machina through the creaking floorboards:

I am not. I am not. I am not. When, of course, you are.

So let me ease your fear by appearing

like a star you can’t identify by its shining alone

through a clearing in the clouds at your window.

Let me empower you like a firefly

of the first magnitude, a mandalic insight

that inspires you, because you’re weary and bored

of your colouring books, into making up

an original constellation of your own

that doesn’t show up on anybody else’s starmaps

but vastly improves your disaffection

with the the outlook of the ashes of the zodiac

you keep in the urn of a see-through telescope

like so many burning bridges you’ve crossed

like an albatross with an arrow in its heart

arcing across the sky, martyred by a curse

on the long, cold, barren beach of your windowsill.

Be Circe awhile and throw your pearls like a full moon

before swine that used to be men you couldn’t turn to

for nautical advice when they were shipwrecked

on the same shore you walk in isolation now.

Believe in the power of your own madness

to work wondrous transformations at either end

of your modes of seeing that are the lore

of blind poets, and the legends of your shining

more creatively intriguing than the war stories of Helen.

If all is lost, you don’t need to compete

with winning anymore. Paris throws the apple away

and says to the three goddesses, you choose

among yourselves. This is not a creation myth.

PATRICK WHITE