MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

MERE THREADS OF THE LIFE WE ONCE LIVED

Mere threads of the life we once lived when our feelings

were flying carpets, and more unravelling all the time

where the frayed river meets the sea like the bloodline

of a mindstream that kicked the buckets from underneath

its waterclock after the house had burned down,

the fire was out. Now I ride grey horses with manes of smoke.

On nights like this. Quiet, after midnight, a gesture of snow

frosting the streets outside and my rage

at the atrocities of the pandemonious world,

weary of coming to exonerative conclusions about humans,

hoarse with shrieking murder at God and the stars

for this grotesquerie of death even the gaping silence

that shadows the wonder of being alive can’t answer,

knowing how many times it’s tried before, and failed.

On a night like this when my heart is exhausted

as an asteroid that doesn’t care if it makes

an impact or not in a splash of instantaneous diamonds,

meteoric insights generated out of the catastrophic heat

like pure fire in the heart of its apocalyptic translucency,

I just want to sit by the river and watch it take its time

as I drown my mind in the flowing like a sword

I blunted on the rock of the world and now lay in pieces

like the moon shedding its petals and feathers of light

on the waves of the waters of life, in peace, in tribute

like the falling of the snow, and remember

when I used to reach out to touch your eyelids in your sleep

so gently I could feel what you were dreaming through my fingertips.

I want to put these heavy bells of sorrow down

like a windfall of the fruits of the earth that have

sweetened over time like the labour of a human

that tried like the light and the rain

to add an element of heart to the mix

before the work were taken out of his hands

and returned to the root as he must be soon

with a little more love, a little more beauty,

a little more compassion in the visionary tastes

of next year’s apple bloom as you were to me once.

Awake or asleep, what a seance of stillborn dreams

this passion for life can seem sometimes,

and how strange the vows of the fireflies

we once exchanged, pledging ourselves

to each other’s stars as if they’d forever

remain faithful to the wildflowers of the earth.

Dream-figures in passage who don’t always

wake up with us when we do and so much

torn like a purple passage out of the book of life

like loosestrife from the wetlands, all you can do

is share your memories with your solitude

like the smell of snow in her hair, night on her lips,

autumn burning in her green eyes and the council

of five fires at the sacred meeting place between her hips

where the rivers of her legs met like green boughs

that made the nightbirds ache with longing.

Long gone, years ago, so far away by now

it’s annalled in the archives of the fossils and stars,

all the mystic details conserved like data

in the bottom of a blackhole, the open gates

that once banged in the wind like applause,

unhinged like lapwings and grown over with vetch,

and the black pearls of the prophetic skulls

we consulted like new moons every spring,

thatched over with green moss like a funeral carpet.

Disembodied vapours of what we were, our breath

gone from the windows we used to draw in

trying to get the light right on our tears

when the sun came out after a lightning storm

and watergilded the rain that dripped from the leaves

like sacred syllables at dusk in a skin of gold,

and gently restored the direction of prayer

to the deranged fields, standing the goblets

of the poppies upright on their altars again,

combing the hairknots out of the dishevelled grass,

coaxing the turkey-vultures to spread their wings

to dry like totems at the tops of broken pines

as if they weren’t the undertakers of road kill

for the moment, but war bonnets of eagles in disguise.

PATRICK WHITE

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

THE SUN PUTS MY EYES OUT LIKE A STAR IN TOO MUCH LIGHT

The sun puts my eyes out like a star in too much light.

I wait for the night to return my seeing to a vision

of things unseen, the unnarrated themes of life and love

that move like migrant birds and sounding whales

behind the symbolic lifemasks of the moon, none of them mine.

Mystery within a mystery, my voice is not a camera

at a seance. I listen to what hasn’t been revealed.

I turn even the homeliest asteroid over like a jeweller

with a pygmy telescope for a third eye

holding a diamond in the rough up to the light

to see what’s been concealed like a secret of life

hidden within the ore of its savage shining.

I invariably rebuff the heavy bombardment eras

of the brutalities of love, though I had to suffer them

like noxious atmospheres in the wake of a cosmic pummelling

to arise so wisely here, the broken pine of my arboreal insight

into the nature of rootless trees. What doesn’t kill you

can wound you so badly that even death

looks like a redundancy in the maimed mirror

of your reflection. Be clear about this. After

every extinction passes like the cloned silhouette

of the full moon, it’s the labour of a lifetime

to publish your poems like apple bloom on the branch

of the lightning bolt that cleaved you to the root

like a French executioner with an imported sword.

It’s not strength to retool the innocence of an open heart

into a lethal weapon, even if it’s a righteous kill.

It’s one thing to heal. It’s another not to be destroyed

by your scars like a shy painting in an arrogant frame.

Green bough. Dead branch. Same song. As I’ve said

before. The nightbird sings on the tongue of a serpent

as readily as water and wavelengths on witching wands

and tuning forks, the sound of sorrow in a human voice

where the rivers divide inseparably for life

like the strong rope of a spinal cord into the weaker threads

of a string theory of profoundly significant departures.

So be it. I trembled. I cried like an abandoned housewell

whose lightbulb just went out like the filament

of a genome that tried to keep its afterlife from freezing

when the world was destroyed by ice

in the terrible clarity of the eyes that blew it out

like a mutant candle that tried to add its odd gene

to the constellations of razor wire that imprisoned it

like the dangerous exile of its own dna. In this game

of musical chairs, I always try to take the low place

like a sea on the moon so all my lost atmospheres

and high tides returned to me, kinder, deeper,

more experientially seasoned loveletters than those that left.

Hatred isn’t creative. Judgement accuses itself.

History is written by the victors in dust on a shelf.

When we all lie down on the pyres of our deathbeds

may each of my lovers have enjoyed a better

dream of life than I did, more stars, more flowers,

fewer chains, less red shift in reality than in

their memories of the way things could have been

with the strangers we became over the long lightyears

looking back in arcane wonder at how love changes

to keeps its balance against a backdrop of creative chaos.

I observe the protocols of a poet approaching

the allure of an unknown bird at the gates of my voice

like a lyric I’ve only ever heard before at a lonely distance

from its source within me. The wind blown seeds

are more prodigal with insights into the mystery of life

than the genetically modified, and every exile

tends a secret garden that travels with them

like a vagrant motherland planting a starmap

of hyperbolic comets in the open fields beyond

the prize-winning asters of lesser zodiacs.

Petty monuments to transcend our mortality

won’t arouse the quiescent jealousy of time.

Truth doesn’t renew its virginity in an acid-bath.

Beauty isn’t marked by the singularity

of a star-nosed mole piercing a black hole.

The clock shows up with a second at a duelling sword dance.

Evolution advances surrealistically like a fast lane

for atavistic snails and the celebrity messengers

try to steal the spotlight from the message

they were created like flying fish with fins

on their heels to convey as a warning of pre-eminent change.

Circus animals in an abattoir of balancing acts.

Emotional jugglers and fire-eaters, sword-swallowers

easing the silver scimitar of the moon down the throats

of shallow lakes drowning in their own spit.

Freaky sages and anointed snake-oil salesmen

gulling the vanity of those seeking to be enlightened

like exceptions to a species going extinct

since some disappointed scribe divined

by the sunspots on his shining, every bloodline,

but the holy book of his own phylum, was a bad idea.

Not to be mean, vicious, feeble, ungenerous

to even those who tried but failed to love you in life

like crutches that didn’t break into blossom under your armpits

or the right idea with the wrong blueprints

for ladders and wings to get you out of the snakepit

that keeps swallowing your cosmic eggs

like albino whole notes, the stone cartouches of eyes

that never got to see how big the sky is because

you didn’t break out of your shell in time to see the stars

or even hear a whisper of the oceanic awareness

within you like the white noise of your afterbirth

still traumatized by your universal intrusion into this life.

One night laid out on your deathbed in a tidal pool

of febrile sheets, staring into a homeless abyss

like the return address of an anonymous enquiry

reviewing what you said and felt, or didn’t say,

because you calculated the effect in numbers,

not the words in your heart, like a silent movie

with more of a gift for pictures than conversation,

you’re going to see yourself unadorned as porn

in a snuff flick of all your myriad love affairs with life,

and the bloom off the rose, whether you were

a petal or a thorn, it’s going to be too late

to rewrite the black farce of the leading protagonist

as the rising star of the person you should have been

instead of the one you are in the sewer of fame.

The intensity of the clarity won’t leave you

a patina of mind to hide behind or insulate the view.

Naked, alone, out in the relentless open, for

your eyes only with eternity your sole witness

and you about to notarize it with your flesh,

even if it be the noblest folly of a leftover child,

a dragon-slaying firefly, an iota subscript of self-respect,

the taste of crazy wisdom you can’t rinse out of your heart

like the bloodstain of a rose, honour those

you have loved painfully like a morning frost

or in joy, though lost now, when you shared the dusk

with a moonrise as lovely as any muse

you’ve ever known, come down to the river

to drink from her reflection in your eyes, or just

for the hell of it because you prefer it that way,

let your heart remain as large and lavish

as any gesture of stars the universe ever squandered

on your impetuous love of life that embraced it all,

blessing and curse alike as the old moon opens its arms

both crescents wide to the dark abundance of the new.

PATRICK WHITE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

POETRY USED TO LIVE IN A FORBIDDEN STATE OF COURAGEOUS GRACE

Poetry used to live in a forbidden state of courageous grace

but now it’s palpably culpable of cowardice.

Paper-mache lifemasks with all the characteristics

of a gaping sin of omission. As F.R. Scott said of E.J. Pratt

in his poem about the building of the CPR

where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?

The ten thousand that died lining and tamping track.

Now the real subject matter of most works of art

is not what was put in, but what was left out,

where’s the heart, the soul, the imagination,

where’s the grief and the longing that slowly matured

into the black flames of the charred roses

that immolated themselves in their own fires

for the love of someone they couldn’t live without

like the other wing of the song of a bird

maimed by the oversight like a tree in chains.

The applause of trained seals isn’t praise

and celebrity isn’t fame. Everyone’s good

at divining the well, but who takes the time

to dig one any deeper than their own shallow grave?

Maybe there’s a sleeper out there who’s fighting

for his life in a dream, enduring excruciating transformations

as experience shapeshifts his voice into poems

we’ll get to overhear one day after he’s dead

like the sound of distant water in a mindstream

or the ashes of an unknown soldier

that couldn’t be contained by a broken urn

or buried under a monument to anonymous violence.

A hero or a heroine who didn’t play to the crowd

like an acrobat of words faking it as a wizard

in a literary scene of very unsacred clowns.

Tiger-striped arsonists that couldn’t burn

their way through a matchbook. Where are

the thieves of fire, the Promethean criminals,

the fore-ordained demons of nihilistic doom,

the mad who used to sacrifice their shadows

on the altars of the mountains of the moon

and came down into the valleys in tears

with a message like an avalanche of the underwhelmed?

Are there no more Druids? Is the bloom off the mistletoe

of myriad moons that have lost their atmosphere

to the bright vacancy of the vacuum on the reflected side of things

and forgotten the dark abundance of the occult originality

of the true face that’s turned away like a perennial eclipse

of the black sheep of a severely depleted family

that doesn’t want to talk about such things in public?

No more shamans risking death in the cradles of the treetops

at the hands of the visions that cut them to the bone

to see if they’ve marrowed suffering into lunar gold

they scatter on the waters like feathers and bread?

Even the deer miss their hunting magic more than they realized.

Now the flies stalk lions in zoos that know better

than to fight back. And poetry reads like a tourist trap

for expired prophets glad-handing their coveted awards.

Bleed a bit, damn it. Weep like a mountain. Write a poem

like an amputee in a straitjacket with the pen in your mouth.

Pour the ocean into a seabed, not a teacup

that tastes vaguely of life, and down a deep draft

of your own blood in a single gulp from the vessel of your skull,

then wipe it from your lips like the petals of a rose

that knows how the heart feels when it’s sealed

like a blood bank and the hungry ghosts of ideas and ideals

have been summoned to it like a seance of vampires in lieu

of the living metaphors that animate the lives of real things.

I’m not saying that the morning is without singers,

or that one should only listen to the night birds

or that the old stumps aren’t sprouting tender green branches

out of their Medusa-headed roots. There’s fire

in every generation if you get close enough to it

sufficient to singe your eyebrows on or at least

walk toward on a cold night in a cruel landscape

to spread a few stories around to scare the children

into listening to their imagination unbound

from the usual lullabies that keep their parents lyrically young

in a state of arrested development. Where are

the dangerously dissociated ones who yell Merd!

at the choirs of cant and stab an established

pigeon of a poet through the hand like an osprey

then walk off the stage into oblivion as if

a mediocre morality play were beneath his felonious dignity?

Where are the black-robed, outlaw, poet priests,

the sybils, oracles, witches and warlocks,

the vatic rebels hiding out in caves to amplify their voice

like the anarchic mountain they’re trying to bring down

on everybody’s heads like a meteoric shower

of portentous space junk in a degenerating orbit

that cremated their body parts separately as if each

had nothing in common with its fellow asteroids

except they couldn’t keep their cornerstones together long enough

to establish a small planet they could live on in anarchic accord.

I can remember when poems were written in blood,

not bleach and fabric softeners. Not anti-bacterial detergents

that shoot at their own troops over the heads of the enemy.

And how the poetic toads that hibernated for seven years

in the dry creek beds suddenly woke up one day to a flash flood

and started singing sexually naked in the downpouring rain,

not these isolated ripples and trickles of acidic dewdrops

that burn the tongues of the flowers with trademarks and name brands.

Where the savage mystic who wanders in out of the desert

reeking of stars and the wisdom of a snakepit

that could make a whole village stop work, and listen

to the unexpurgated desert wind that spoke through him?

Where are those who ennobled the miseries of life

by living their way through them like diamonds in a black lung?

Now it’s the association of the sensibilities into elitist cliques

of enculturated memes with homogeneous life themes

that never leave home to save their children, as Rilke rightly observes,

from having to do it for them. Domesticated lapdogs

never very far from the begging bowls that feed them

like the awards and grants of an institutionalized paternalism

that lets them know when the silver-tongued should be heard

at the table, each in their proper place, and when

Skinnerian censorship, like repressive tolerance, is golden.

Poetry’s as old and as dead an art as prostitution.

It’s been dying since the first shaman

imitated the song of a bird with its feathers on fire

or the first stripper teased her nakedness with boas.

Or the first wounded wolf let out a warcry

that chilled the moon with its unwaning sincerity.

And the ultimate angle? To be the thing itself

until it breathes you in and out like a way of life

the petty won’t risk aspiring to for fear of falling

and being found out like a candling parachute

tangled in its own life lines like a labyrinth of axons

that have lost their nerve for heights. Twenty-five million

children dying of starvation every year on the planet

and you’re lying in the lap of the luxury of literature

writing about the rustic quaintness of making home-made jam,

the same way they turned totem-poles into telephone booths

and minor domestic tragedies into recyclable myths of origin.

Let the stars burn deeper into you. Befriend the darkness

like the largest room in your house. Salt your tears

with oceans where your sorrows can learn

to swim like fish without ever swimming out of your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is it, this onceness,

of the dirge and the lyric you’re never going to hear

the same way twice, this mystic specificity

that encompasses us wholly in the mystery

of what we’re doing here, what we’re saying

and thinking and feeling and shrieking and seeing here

in the presence of each other bearing witness everywhere

as if even the void we flash out of like the morning dew

and return to with the dust of the sunset all over us

were also in some inconceivable way, though

we can’t put our lips to its eyelids, sentient

and playfully absurd, but never frivolously recognized.

Don’t live like the dress rehearsal of a play you didn’t write.

In the pursuit of an earthly excellence that expresses

our human consternation of who we are and are not,

neither this, nor that, say deeply what you mean

so that we can all draw water from it like the sun.

So there’s lightning in the clouds of your depression

and the fireflies take over where the starmaps leave off.

Be a great high priestess of the sacred syllable

and when you enter your venerated groves

like the night wind among the crowns of the trees

be at least as engaging and beautiful as they are

and as at home among warriors as you are homeless among saints.

Awake and alert in the unsayable silence. Wait.

And the metaphors will come like bridges that burn

and go up in flames like an orchid and bridges

that collapse under their own weight into the river

they were trying to cross to the colder, lonelier shore

where purity’s just a long, slow annihilation

of everything you still insist upon cherishing.

Let go. Fall. Revive. Return. Go up the mountain.

Find the mother lode. Bring it back down into the valley

like a strong river brings its knowledge of gold within.

Behind every explorer is a child who likes to discover

and share things. So what’s worth finding that you can’t?

You just have to look into one eye to see the history

of everything that can be seen. And when you open your mouth

prompted by a rush of stars, you sing

for thousands of dead poets who used to occupy

these green boughs and leafless branches, you sing

as if you were the last surviving member of the choir,

and the silence, the enraptured silence, were listening.

PATRICK WHITE

SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

SOMETIMES THE SEA RETURNS ME TO MY DREAMS

Sometimes the sea returns me to my dreams

like a drowned man washed up by a wave

like a cinder from under its eyelid on an island

I return to like a message in a bottle from the future

that says don’t risk yourself to save me, it’s hardly worth it

compared to who you wanted to be way back then

when you laboured to amount to more than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been bobbing like this Orphic moon

of a prophetic skull across this dark night sea

for lightyears now singing to myself in the abyss,

the self-abnegating minstrel of my melodious emptiness,

listening for any sign of life in these sidereal realms

that dumbfound the starmaps when I ask

to what point, what for, into a coma of silence

that echoes from mirror to mirror like a spent satellite

that wandered out of orbit like a slack guitar string

that didn’t want to stay in tune with the music

of the usual shepherd moons. But I ask, anyway,

thinking the answers might be quantumly entangled

with the questions somehow it’s impossible to fathom

except as just another poetic lucubration in the void

of what life has made of me for the last sixty-four years.

Maybe it’s all one long beginning that flows on forever.

I hope, of course, though hope isn’t the most reliable horse

winged or not, to bet on, whatever I’ve done

might be to the betterment of God knows what,

but something, whether I’m the last to know or never

and it’s better that way, or, at the very least,

if humanity’s lost the taste for itself and more

robotic sensibilities want to forget who we are

and cauterize their hearts to the civilized savagery

of atrocity, waste, and devastation we’ve wreaked

upon millions and millions of lives throughout history,

poetry was the most graceful and absurd sorcery

of the word I could be apprenticed to like the muse

of a dream grammar that taught me to sing metamorphically.

What a curse humans have afflicted upon themselves

and the robots will be worse, much worse than now.

O may it not be so, but too many languish in the alibi

of inevitability and even astronomical catastrophe

seems to have lost the power to change our minds

like proto-mammals back in the age of the dinosaurs.

And it isn’t if we didn’t see it coming from a long way off.

If you let your oceanic awareness of the multiverse

linger in the shadows of your big, blue, cosmic eyes

there’s still something, isn’t there, perennially true and beautiful

about watching a mother wash her daughter’s hands

in a fountain in a park like the wings of a small bird

when you recall all that had to occur from God particles

to black holes for that momentary act to happen,

all the collaboratively creative annihilations that had

to take place in an unending succession of cosmic events

big, small, incomprehensively, or randomly significant

like fireflies and stars, trace meaning of metaphors

leaving half-lives and contrails of where they’ve been

in the field of view of a few who see them for everyone

like the moon and the sky in a drop of dew, or jewels

in the net of Indra whereby you mark one and they’re

all marked indelibly like a starmap on the waters of life.

Maybe there’s a code-breaker somewhere one day

who’s going to make crystals precipitate out of thin air

synchronistically like a kind of intelligence

that overlooked our starmud as way too sloppy

to be the hard-edged medium their translucency

prefers to work in, but to me it’s this lumpy clump of clay

on a potter’s wheel that can just as soon turn into

a game of creative Russian roulette, this amorphous

nebularity of the vague way each of us is giving birth to stars

within ourselves all the time even if we don’t realize

we’re androgynously pregnant with the inconceivable

like clepshydras breaking water like ripples of rain

in the eyes of a mirror that undulates like the wavelength

of a serpent of mercury, life echoing itself

in the elaborate proliferation of mandalic diffraction patterns,

the evanescence of this endless dream of change within,

without beginning or end, birth, death, cessation or continuance,

beyond ignorance and wisdom, achievement, failure,

the filth we derive our myths of origin from,

or the false dawns of a mythically inflated paradise

that turns its back on the dark energy of the new moon

that inspired it counter-intuitively to conceive of itself

in the first place, this is the dangerous garden I live in

where just to touch a face the mind can feel in astonishment

through the labyrinth of my fingertips and staggered eyes

is a wonder of chaos that it should have been shaped so

out of nothing, I can read it like the face of the moon in Braille

like an ocean where the stars dwell deep within,

light upon light, without any notion of ever having gone

metaphorically blind. However you try to square the circle

of your place among the auroras of air you wear

like the aura of a lifemask that concealed your inner vision

of yourself as adamant as a glacial dolmen

about the size of a thumb stuck in three and a half pounds

of brainmud like a plum pie, o what a good boy am I,

there’s always as much up ahead as you left behind

and take it from me, I’ve tried, just to be true to myself,

however you do, you’re never going to disappoint the mind.

PATRICK WHITE

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

SITTING ON A WOODEN BENCH IN STEWART PARK

Sitting on a wooden bench in Stewart Park

directly behind the jumping statue of Big Ben

frozen in bronze and time beside the black marble slab

that looks like a mini Vietnam wall of corporate sponsors,

staring into the sun at the white water rushing

over the rocks under Little Rainbow Bridge,

under the greening willows, galaxies of stars

winking in and out of existence like fireflies,

whirlpools of radiance spreading out across

the reflection of dark leafless tree trunks

shredded by the blue of the sky then pieced

back together again in the wavelength of a snake

charmed by the muscular undulation of the surface

of the pond rippled like a membranous universe

in some earthbound mode of hyperspace, as if

someone took the Pleiades on a clear winter night

and sowed them like first magnitude wildflowers, chicory

and asters, perhaps, in the troughs and furrows

of the sinusoidal waters moving like supple mountain ranges

toward shore where a clash of wild irises

raised their tender green swords up to the sun,

created and annihilated millions of times an instant

in the blink of an eye, white hot and young again,

and for a moment, as fast as an insight

into the nature of a vast intelligence inspired

by the scintillance of its own light playing

upon the waters of life as if nothing, not the skulls

of the underwater stones striated and webbed

by the waves of the golden webs and nets

dreamcatchers and runes inscribed on the rocks

like a language that never speaks in the same tongue twice

in a world of white shadows in unfathomed depths,

things took off the patina of their deathmasks,

and what was solid and inanimate, even Big Ben

anchored to the earth in the afterlife

of his arcing transit through the air forever,

couldn’t help but be alive and real

in every visionary act of seeing that animated

the whole of my being through the eyes

I saw shining out of everything like aeons of stars

opening loveletters like wildflowers and metaphors

addressed to what’s nameless and illuminating

about the substance of sentience that beguiles everyone

in a world of forms shapeshifting transmorphically

as the mindstream turns and the light burns

for the dazzling face of the stranger behind the veils

of the willows rooted in the spring run off of the Tay River

like a flashflood of life threading the eye of paradise

like the creative rush of the fledgling awareness

of the cosmic unfolding of chaos under the wingspan

of Little Rainbow Bridge reconciling the disparities

of light, love, life, in these recombinant unions

of starmud and mind and the heart that smiles within

to feel what’s liberated thereby like the light upon light

of a million epiphanous suns from one side the mind

reflected like the memory of a face you saw in a mirror

in the depths of a dream where you’re bright and whole

and creatively free to wake up on the other

shoreless river of life to realize there’s only

this small, red bridge of blood you’re standing on

watching the flow of things, without waiting

for anyone to show up who isn’t already arrayed before you.

PATRICK WHITE  

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

MAD YOU MUST BE AND DELIGHT IN IT

Mad you must be and delight in it

like mating killdeer in the spring,

lyrical love-making in the epiphanous air

and one flys into the bumper and dies.

Tears flowing down your cheeks

as you drive on into the incomprehensible

horror and silence of the act. And later,

your girlfriend will elaborate the fact

into a beautiful piece of art. Radiance

thrusts a shard of glass through your heart

out of the blue and there you are

with a baffled pain in your eyes

crying on the easel in paint. Poor man.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Revel in the absurd. Logic, the shakey stool

of a man trying to hang himself.

Quicksand cornerstones sinking into a miasma

of conditioned chaos. What does it prove

that would have made a difference to the outcome?

Nothing to stand on anymore. Even less

to lie down for. Nature a postcard.

A recurring calendar. And one of those months,

a close-up of a killdeer in intimate detail.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Uproot your hidden harmonies. Give up

your golden chains. Throw the swill

out of your fountains like wine

from the night before. Ignore your dreams

as the phantasmagoria of sacred clowns.

Everything passes in a riot of stars

before you’re aware of it. Where are they now?

The aerial ballet of the killdeer. Roadkill.

Random encounters with the irrational.

The clarity cruel. The darkness immense.

Mad you must be and delight in it.

Stare at the wall until something appears.

An orphan of mirrors. An estranged elopement

trying to get away with it all. Throw

the moon down from the tower first

and after it your skull. The hearse awaits

and the horses are plumed with black feathers.

Space is warped. Time’s corrupt. And the light

isn’t on some kind of goodwill tour.

Over the newly ploughed field,

where are the killdeer that were there

a moment ago, a year, forever, a figment of time?

So beautiful in the way they impressed each other.

First warm day of the spring. Even the silence

overjoyed with the liberation of water

of earth, of sky, as the stitches came out of the wound

and winter, the scar of a worn out topic.

One of those moments it was intense bliss

to be alive on earth, unasked for,

and delightfully irrelevant the reason.

Mad you must be and delight in it

to embrace the crazy wisdom of the incomprehensible

as a spontaneous medium you’re not involved in

except as the one who suffers what you see,

the terror and the lucidity, the rapture, the monotony

and the worst you could imagine it could be,

the abyss, the car, the killdeer, the unreality

of there being no amends for the tragedy

to fall back upon, not even the pity of the poetry

or the beauty of the painting. And the tears?

What of the tears? What are we to make of them?

Water off the wings of the killdeers? Time

just another water clock that heals nothing

it wounds by accident? Annihilations

of the spirit encountering anti-matter?

You can entertain yourself as delusionally sane

by explaining the stars to the stars,

or you can spend hours trying to decipher the scars

like glyphs on the stone calendars that knew

timing revealed the content in the blink of an eye

and in the cherry-sized heart of a bird

smashed against the sun and the sky

flashing off a chrome bumper at 80k,

who knows, a moment before impact,

if it felt it had desecrated the absurdity of the event

by dying inchoately innocent of its own bewilderment.

PATRICK WHITE