ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

ANOTHER LIGHTNING STRIKE DIVERTED FROM THE OAK A MOMENT

Another lightning strike diverted from the oak

a moment so I can uproot my nerves,

steel them to the sensitivities of the light

on a rampage, electrical snakestongues of fire,

welding sparks jumping the gap between

one neuronic synapse stripped of vitamin B

and the next, the entrance and exit of a collapsed bridge.

I want to go out the way I came in, a poet.

All my prophetic skulls laid out like stones in a river,

an inundated cemetery of moons hoping

to catch the next providential tide of spring run-off,

I’m still trying to get to the other side of why

I’m alive, by jumping like the moonrise of a pinball

from one extinction event to another, keeping in mind

the meteor that gave its amino acids

to the elaboration of life on the planet in the first place

will also be the one that takes it eventually.

A blow to the solar plexus of the earth

that knocks the atmosphere out of it.

But my mistletoe isn’t fried quite yet

though I’ve had to pawn my golden sickle

just to survive the deforestation of my sacred places,

I’ve got the eyes of the Gulf of Mexico

though given the oilslicks and astronomical catastrophes

that always come as a suprise, I’m undergoing

a sea change of self somewhere in the Cambrian era.

I’ve integrated a sense of compassion into my cells

like the mitochondria of my mother. I empathise

to the point there’s nothing human under the stars,

from cartels to Cepheid variables that I don’t take personally.

Some people collect souvenir spoons. With me,

it’s scalpels. Especially the ones still buried in my wounds

like crescent moons waxing and waning

like the phases of my eyelids, the bright vacancy

of a full glass of emptiness, the skull cup of the dark abundance

of the ghosts in the shadows that refuse to be conditioned

by the medium of anyone’s seeing but my own

as if they were all familiars of mine from a long time ago

I met at a seance they summoned me to as if

I were the one who had died in this dream of life

and the living and the dead stood eye to eye

like binocular vision in the observatory of the same head.

Water, time, suffering, and the wind blunts the sharp edges

I flintknapped like obsidian from the eclipse of a new moon

that slowly pressed into my flesh like a black rose

in the pages of a book I seldom open anymore

like a bone-box with my fossils in it that an avalanche

on the sea bed wears like tattoos on the inside

to remember me by. There are wines and inks

as indelible and dark as the night, pumping

through the heart forever, long after

the last tear in the rain has flowed away

like a watercolour of a fallen leaf under the bridge

of the mindstream you’re walking on like a great blue heron.

Don’t let the brutal sorrows make you defect

like a plague rat the many joys of the moonboat

that used to unload its cargo of roses in Genoa.

As soon as you fall like a cynic on the bitter thorns of life

it’s oxymoronically inevitable you’re going to become

quantumly entangled with someone who strews

rose petals in your path with such disarming tenderness

you’re seated like a fool on the impoverished throne

of your own defeated predictability. Bad, prophet, bad.

Tomorrow mutates to adapt to the available dimensions

of a future that has no conception of you even

existing yet here in the past where the real business

of living is done and now, though you cut it infinitely fine

like God particles that turn out to be your own mind,

never comes because time is what you are and what

you shall be, embodied in the throb of your own humanity.

Live up to it like the cause and effect of the only

regressive alibi that has stood up for you so long

it’s becoming a paradigm of stars and fireflies,

a new myth of origin among the constellations

that count on your imagination to sustain them.

Fire in the eyes of a snowman. Shine, shine, shine

like diamonds in the coal, wine in the bitter grapevine

that doesn’t know where all this ends like a road

gravelled with the skulls of hospitable planets

across the firmament so some drunk can stumble his way

home alone, all his darkness and light singing

in harmony with the stars and daylilies

of the flames in his heart he’s standing in for

like an unrecalcitrant martyr to the heresy of the art

of staying drunk on the moonlight, the orthodox

who decree they know what’s right burn in effigy

like a scarecrow because there’s no body to dig up

when you drink life down to the lees of the crows

looking for hidden jewels in the ashes at the bottom of the cup

as if the urns of dragons are the seed beds of the stars.

PATRICK WHITE  

TRAIN WHISTLE

TRAIN WHISTLE

Train whistle then the rush of surf from its wheels on the track

as if it were hauling an ocean somewhere.

Grafitti from North Carolina on tour, one long art gallery

spray bombed by underground American artists

on its boxcars and tankers. When I stopped at the crossbars,

driving cab, I always wished I could publish

a poem like that, one line coupled to another

as if our metaphors were holding hands at a barn dance.

Then on to pick up the next fare as if you were cruising

the red light district for a working girl who called

without a return address, mind-reading doorways in distress

as if you were ambiguously oracular about where you were going.

More sedentary now, the crackheads trust me less

about where I dropped them off and picked them up

than they used to when they knew I had taken

an unspoken street vow of silence like a vehicular priest

who confessed everybody for their indefensible humanity,

on his way to somewhere else that was seldom paradise

with its feet on the ground like a corporate pharmaceutical

wallowing in its own starmud as if someone

had just thrown the shepherd moons of its pearls

before real swine, sometimes, who blackened the reputation

of the death mask they wore as if Zorro were a dealer

fencing with the delusions of Don Quixote tilting at windmills

he mistook for prayer wheels. You don’t know whether

to be mad or sad, or just as bad as the fools that milk

the wrong fang of the snake they’re buying the antidote from.

There’s more loneliness in moving than there is in sitting still.

This road of ghosts is dotted with tasteless pit stops

like a starmap with nuclear, attention-getting

big city magnitudes of light on all night outblazing the stars

like a ferryman on a graveyard shift who’s trying

to stay awake in the wheelhouse by the pilot light he’s been given to go by.

Coffee and cigarettes please, in the snowblind glare

of a lap top that’s got a long, hard drive ahead of it

I play like a keyboard on its knees that’s got

no idea of how to get there from here before it invariably does

through a labyrinth of cul de sacs and train crossings

that don’t attract as many Sufis as they used to

when I was dancing my way deeper into my homelessness

for shelter against the white noise life was humming to me

as I watched the deaf grooving like water snakes to flute-music.

Now I take long, dark walks along the Tay River

where I’m least likely to meet anyone coming my way

as I watch the stars flicker in the river like lures

on the fishing hook of the moon trying to catch the big one

like the legend on a starmap it never fails to throw back

into the sea of tranquillity its awareness jumped from

like a northern pike that arises from the bottom up

like a covert insight into the nature of life eyeing

what’s inspired it to strike like the imagination of a madman

caught a moment in his own highbeams like the ghost

of a white-tailed buck leaping out of the headlights

like enlightenment with no intention of adding itself

to the pageant of roadkill along the back roads

of the shadows of lost sheep in the shepherdless valleys of death.

See how I wrote that like a train passing through town

in the dead of the night like a found poem

I’ve spliced together like the neurons of railroad lines

from all over North America like delinquents with winged heels

rising like waterbirds from a million weak threads

of a river system bound into the strong rope of a spinal cord

you can climb up to heaven on like a fuse or the lifelines

rooted in the palm of your hand like a crosswalk beginning to flower

with zodiacal traffic signs because the mindstream flows

horizontally onward like an egalitarian that will come to harmony progressively

like water seeking its own equilibrium from the same sea of awareness,

each at the level of the thresholds they’ve crossed

like a sword dance with a waterclock that’s always on time

as if it were running on sundials with alarmist hour hands.

Bad dream grammar, perhaps. But I bet there’s

a poet-cabdriver in North Carolina with the same

mad picture music in his heart who understands perfectly

the denaturing of creative humanity from his art

isn’t a short cut to that right side of the tracks no one’s ever

been reincarnated on like the side of a bone box

that didn’t express itself demonically like an exorcism

blessing the empty hearses of dead air in the freight cars

with nothing written on them as if some nihilistic orthodoxy

had freshly painted over the hunting magic

of artistic Neanderthals scarred indelibly

by shamanistic spit paintings of genius with blood

like red ochre and night like soot in the mouths

of their lanterns waiting for the lights to change

from the false dawns of fake songbirds in the sun

to the mystic moonrise in the occult guild halls

of howling bush wolves contemporaneously

packing in the dark like the solos of nightbirds

echoing across the lake like the longing

of an unanswerable response to the sublimity of why

we must live, love, desire and die as we do, written on the fly

like the linear A of inchoate thought trains of subversive water and fire,

hissing like spray bombs of scalded metal whenever we come to a full stop.

PATRICK WHITE

DON'T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

DON’T BE A STRANGER, COME IN, COME IN

Don’t be a stranger, come in, come in.

My house is your house. Out of the wind

for awhile, a hovel of broken mirrors

that help keep the cold out, or a palace of tears

synarthritically fused together like a glacier

of chandeliers by a candle in an igloo

slowly glazing its way to the calving sea

like the Nazi demolition of Warsaw.

When you’re dog-paddling in a shark bowl

of circling sundials, or you’re coming up from the depths,

remembering you’re a mammal, through

an airhole in an ice floe hoping your second innocence

doesn’t get clubbed to death as your first one did,

it’s only natural that the world dispossesses you

of your heart momentarily and you cringe.

This is where I’ve lived most of my life

like a poor boy that didn’t make good

in his mother’s eyes and now it’s too late, too late

to even hope I ever would. Not every sword

you fall upon like the truth guts you

quite the same, and some you don’t want to remove

for fear of what might come out that would

hurt you worse like a great black hole

in the center of the universe that’s bleeding out.

This is a shrine, asylum, shelter, lair, sanctum,

third eye of a hurricane looking back at you

like a snowblind computer screen which isn’t

quite what you expected of the enlightened,

and I don’t understand it either but here

transparency doesn’t mean you have to go to school

to learn to be a window. No sea change anyone

has to undergo like a mirage that’s just discovered

real water is the source of its eyes and the light

is an absentee father most of the time until someone

gets in its way and gives it a reason to shine.

No harm will befall you that I haven’t died for first.

But I won’t stand on the sum of all my failures

and call myself authoritatively experienced.

You’ve got to blow like a nightwind

on the apricot blossoms yourself to see

if that much beauty is as scattered as they say it is,

and we’re just a shadow of chaos lingering in the air

like the fragrance of an old song that came out of nowhere,

or creative annihilation is how we waterclock forward

into fruition like the ripeness is all windfall

into the big plunge into the abyss like Icarus

coming undone like candle-wax feathered in fire

like one too many parabolic flightbys of the sun.

No path to illumination but you can see

your way in the dark by the glow of fireflies

I keep like old insights that shine like night lights

through the eyes of my prophetic skulls

like metaphoric answers to questions that burn the soul

like a lantern held up to the stars overhead

to decipher the occult life lessons of your own starmud.

I started out afraid to write this poem but now

I see you standing in the doorway of this

my alternative, shapeshifting universe

playing transmorphically like a child on the moon

with lunar phases of its knowledge forms,

the crazy wisdom of my solitude waxes empathically

like a dream grammar coming into full harvest,

and for my sake as much as yours, I’m afraid to stop.

PATRICK WHITE  

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

DARKNESS, LET ME ENTER

Darkness, let me enter. Oblivion, open your arms.

Sweet liberty, lengthen my chain by light years.

Venus in the Pleiades, let me feel your charms.

I want to ride the light, o yes I do, as far as I can

toward some flowering of the mystery

I can add myself to and bloom as the stars do.

My most intimate familiar, solitude, eras of it,

yet it’s never known my name. My best feature

once you get pass the indignation and the anger,

compassion. And though love seems to me

the sum of many hearts, trying to express itself

as one, when have I not been a doorway to the dead?

When have I ever preferred my happiness

even as my last rainbow bridge went up in flames

and there was no where else to cross before the falls,

to that of the ironic beatitudes of the forbidden and the blessed?

Make me a star again one day with a few habitable planets,

each with at least one moon that can make me crazy as this one.

Promise? Promise me it will be so and mean it.

I will continue. I will keep on. I will endure like a mountain

that never capitulated volcanically to my own rage.

I’ll walk the road standing up. I’ll traverse it on my knees.

I’ll be the nightbird. The green bough. The apple bloom.

I’ve learned. I’ll listen. And when I’m overwhelmed by words,

I’ll give you my voice and let you speak for yourself.

Whoever, whatever, you are not or you are,

though I hear you’re too ineffable to get to know,

should the day ever come you want to disclose yourself

like a hidden secret that wants to be known,

I’ll understand that, I’ll be the night in your mirror

that shows you four hundred billion stars in the eyes

of as many life forms and more in the multiverse

than you can see without being astonished by the beauty

of all the secrets you’ve kept to yourself for light years.

Even if I’m just talking to myself like a waterclock

pouring my mindstream from one ear into another,

whether you’re there or not, or just the matriculated anima

of a pineal gland projected onto a holographic space time continuum,

and my spirit be no more than my own breath

condensing on the diminishing window of this cold sky

where I write the name of someone I’ve never met

with a frost-bit finger, longing for encounters I won’t regret,

let me flow into your awareness like a wavelength

into a river of light or let me burn in the immutable darkness

a firefly of thought, a thread of lightning, a distant star,

a thinning fragrance of a wildflower you might have known

a long time ago that reminds you of someone

so many changes away from anyone you’d recognize today.

I’m not looking for someone to whine to.

I’ve been omnidirectional since I turned forty-five

so I don’t need anyone to tell me where I’m going.

I’m not looking for a soft shoulder of the road to cry on.

After so many nights of laying my head

on this hard rock pillow of a world

that’s refeathering itself in scales and razorblades

I’m not dissing the occult wisdom of my consolation dreams.

The way it seems is the way it appears. Let it.

I grew up on the streets, drastically. I know how

to break a mirror in case of a catastrophe.

Just let me pretend for awhile out here in the woods

where I always feel as a human it’s the first day

of a kid in the schoolyard until I make friends with an owl

or the occasional, curious bush wolf wondering

what I’m doing so far off my natural turf, and why,

just like a dog from the city abandoned on a farm

I feel so disowned sometimes I should learn

to snarl back at the moon when it bares its fangs at me

instead of baying its praises to the rest of the asylum.

Just let me suppose for awhile that a poet

isn’t the orphan of the absurd, that there’s

a bloodline of meaning that still seeps into everything

like the dye of a black rose in the night that steeps the heart

in all frequencies and colours of the clear light of the void

that tastes like the mystic poetry of the waters of life

on the tongue of a stranger who’s just wandered in from the desert,

his lips dusty with the stars he’s been drinking

from an hourglass rimed with sand and salt.

I don’t want to receive everything only to find out

I prayed for nothing, so I won’t, but if you’re

the shapeshifting creatrix of subtle intelligence

I intuit you might be sometimes when I’m alone

with the stars like a childhood that hasn’t forgotten me,

and there’s a sudden breeze out of nowhere

that grazes the back of my neck like a sabre of the moon

so close I could swear we were lovers in another life,

light a candle for me somewhere in the universe,

and you be the light by which the light is known.

Show me your smile like moonrise on the lake.

Let me see your eyes in the rain, so inter-reflected

they can’t help shining out of everything as if

no one could keep you a secret for long, except you,

and for the moment, at least, I’m not accepting this.

Don’t care if I’m painting a lifemask to put on an abyss

of molecular indifference. You should see the tears

I’ve smeared under my eyes to save face

with the sacred clowns I’ve been from time to time.

You keep your distance and I’ll play hard to get as well.

You take one step toward me, and I’ll go the rest of the way.

Devotion’s always been a weakness of mine. One sign

and I’ll light up like an esoteric zodiac that just went electric.

I’ll meet you on a bridge at midnight, and I won’t forget

when fire comes down to the water’s edge, fire

has to use the bridge as well. Just tell me that you care,

if not for me, for all these humans that die like roadkill

stunned by the highbeams of oncoming circumstance

as if nothing in life, however rightly or wrongly,

however young or old the blood on the hands of the clock

that kills them as if they were as devoid of characteristics as you

could console them for the loss of what they dared to hold close.

That’s the gamma ray burst of the protest that has kept us apart

since my innocence first started bleeding in childhood

for the impersonality that mutilates 3.5 billion years of evolution,

the sum of all our infirmities and strengths, as if there were

nothing to cherish or venerate in us, like a homeless drunk

beaten to death on a fire-escape in a back alley just for the fun of it.

That’s the thorn in my heart. I watched my mother

half beaten to death three times by my father before I was seven

and it wasn’t you, it was me, that picked up the ax

to put a stop to it. Who could aspire to heaven

when that’s going on in the snakepit at your feet?

How do you return to your toy truck after

the cop cars and the ambulance has left with your mother

and the absence is so terrifying even the nightmares

don’t dare echo an answer that isn’t an atrocity of guile

that lies to a child about the good that will come out of it.

I’m sixty-four now and ever since my eyes were pryed open

like the petals of a flower that wasn’t ready to bloom yet,

everywhere I look, the indignity and ferocity

of intrusive happenstance inflicting itself upon life

with a few intermittent truces to lick our wounds

like razorblades in candied apples. Yes, I stand my ground.

Knock me down. I’ll get up again. And I’ll carry my pain

in my heart, in my voice, in my art, my blood, my arms,

in the urn of everything I’ve ever cherished

like a silver eagle, a placard, a birthmark back into the tear gas

of the last crusade that never had a chance, if I must,

until the human divinity that broke the seal of our suffering,

small as our light may be now, leaves an indelible impression

upon space and time, or you, if you’re there,

like the labyrinth of a fingerprint you can’t ignore.

And I’m not asking for an emergency exit,

just take the gate off the entrance and let everyone in

on the secret of why everything seems so brutally true

in the bright vacancy, dark abundance of your absence,

and I’ll dance with you in a garden on the moon

until the lemons turn blue as the wild grapes in late October

when you shall be my folly. And I shall be your fool.

PATRICK WHITE

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

IN THE LEFT FRONT PARIETAL LOBE OF MY CRUCIFIXION WINDOW

In the left front parietal lobe of my crucifixion window,

beatifically blue sky letting the slow motion clouds pass as if

they were too white and puffy to be solemn about things,

chilly sunshine casting a neatly cut geometry

of occult hieroglyphs on red brick heritage walls.

Sunday. Free. Blesses its own bells like the left-handed virtue

of a secular day to celebrate a shopping mall.

No mail. No bills. No threatening phone calls.

No answering machine that talks robotically

in the tone of a guillotine in the Reign of Terror.

Good day to write if you’re summoned by other voices

beyond the range of the usual crows who talk

about the dawn of another encore more like roosters than moonbirds

whose feathers turned from white to black

for going as they were told, but never coming back.

Words aren’t a medium for fortune-telling your afterlife.

They’re vital organs of the trees who have no other way

of singing about what they feel from the bottom

of their heartwood up. All lightning and root fires

flashing on the waters of life rippling like tree rings

when a fish jumps like the mind at a low flying insight.

Twenty first century siege mind, brain meat,

soft walnut in a scorched black skull.

I’m dragon-spotting forest fires from a long way off.

I’ve got a computer for a watchtower and a moat

and if I can see any folly in your madness

that passes for the grailquest of a loyal clown

I’ll lower the drawbridge of my lap top

and show you where to stable your horse.

It’s freedom itself to drift like the sport chute

of a dandelion with a flightpath of smoke

away from the thermals of the canyon walls

of an abyss that’s as open and closed as

a tight-lipped door with no expectations of

greeting my alienation like a threshold that means well

and even the silence doesn’t care if you’re listening or not

to every thought that crosses the moon

like a Canada goose that empties the urns of the dead

at midnight, the echo of an ancient pathos in its voice

even on its return journey to pick up

another payload of solitude like a hearse.

There’s no doubt daylight’s kinder to love

than most nights are because there’s less magic

in its prosaic approach to metaphors that only

glow in the dark like the shadows of strangers

in the niches of sacred doorways slightly left ajar

like a black star saving its last ray of enlightenment

before it goes out nirvanically to see better

in the eclipse of the mirror that nothing can be recognized

for what it is until it’s looking through your eyes

as if you didn’t have an identity of your own

but you were still willing to share your absence with them

like a well-thumbed starmap and a telescope

that occasionally weeps to wash the accumulation of stardust

off its lens for clarity’s sake on a seeing-eye night.

Down by the broken phalanxes of the cattails,

their pale ochre almost a shade of moonlight

on the broken lances of an old war gone long in the tooth

like the shell holes of biopic cannoneers sighting their guns

on the British fleet in the harbour of Toulon

and a sea of lunar tranquillity nothing disturbs for long

except the odd wolf nosing around for muskrat,

the willows waltzing with the wind like ladies in waiting

in the most vernal of their ballroom gowns

under the chandeliers of the stars to the music

of a river in passing like a mindstream retreating through time.

Funny what comes to you when you’re dreaming awake

on a late Sunday afternoon in a small town

that’s going on around you like circuitous ants

in the pheromonic labyrinths of the water-logged grass

greening their prospects of pillaging the larvae

of dragonflies that spend most of their lives as nymphs,

hand-picked by the sparrows like krill from the grills

of parked cars beached like baleen whales on hot asphalt.

PATRICK WHITE  

I'VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I'VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’VE BEEN A STRONG ROPE AND I’VE BEEN A MILLION WEAK THREADS

I’ve been a strong rope and I’ve been

a million weak threads. I’m waiting

for something green and vital to take root

in my starmud, but I’m oozing eclipses

like the La Brea Tarpit and there’s

the white swan of the moon in the window

across the street swimming through asphalt

and liquid bitumen like a chimney sweep.

Underpainting in. I’m labouring. It will

do for the night. No point trying to put

horseshoes on the muse when she’s digging

her spurs into your side as if you were her ride

for the night. Let’s go anywhere. I want

to step out of the light for awhile and forget

that I exist to witness myself struggling to live,

always wrestling with the next angel in the way,

looking for something illuminating in every defeat

just so I don’t waste that much pain on nothing

like a sugar maple being garotted by its own tree rings.

The silence of the town is peopled by ghosts

that feel like dead air when they gust against your skin

to let you know they’re still there as they’ve always been.

Clear night, but the darkness hums to its own madness

like a hermit thrush, and love numbs the heart

to protect it from worst to come. I was struck

in the throat looking for an antidote to myself.

Even when they’re defining things words are

perpetually expressive of the writing between the lines

of a vicarious human nature that doesn’t know how

to stand up to itself without hurting its own feelings.

Every step I take I’m bridging an abyss like a waterclock.

I pour the waters of life back and toward me

into the emptiness as a sign of uncontaminated respect

for the mindstream I drank them from. I’ve long

been a mirage of starmaps trying to fix by parallax

where the radiant of the light, in terms of tracing back

all these meteors and fireflies of insight to the source

they originate from is, if it isn’t non-existence itself.

The traffic lights must feel as useful as I do this time of night.

Red, yellow, green, they should try mixing

their palette up a bit and start adding a few more

complementary greys to the nature of their outlook

upon life. Hard to distance yourself aerially with the blues

when you’re always in the foreground of your own face

up close and intimate as primary colours

in their second innocence. Green, yellow, red,

like an apple ripening thousands of nights and days

without ever falling from the bough. No windfalls

of low hanging fruit there. The sun ignores the dusk

that has come upon it as if the sky were full of crows

pecking at the eyes of a fox on the run until it’s dead.

Night and blood. Blind before the rose. Is it

prophetic? A big life in a little death or the other

way around? Am I drinking from my skull, down

to the embryonic lees of a stillborn afterlife among

the enlightened who sometimes water the wine down

with vinegar just to rinse the taste of a miscarriage

out of their hearts, or do these mirages of black matter

sing and dance in their own desert starfields

as if there were a watershed the moon could drown in

like a nightsea of awareness in the heart

of a drunk poet reflecting on the hard beauty

of a forsaken life devoted to the unattainable truth

of knowing whether it was worth it or not, somewhere nearby.

PATRICK WHITE

BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD SO LONG

BEEN DOWN THIS ROAD SO LONG

Been down this road so long

don’t even know what I’m looking for anymore,

if anything other than the way it is.

Set out to find something, be someone

and found I was the journey itself.

Passage, my destination. Always

just in time to say farewell to my arrival.

The still point of a black hole

in the gravitational eye of my awareness,

change and change again the most

stable foundation stone of my continuum,

it’s like the wind talking to the night stream

in whispers of moonlight that take

possession of my mind and voice for a moment

as if something prodigious moved

on a far hillside and you couldn’t help be all ears.

Life of the Mind. Function or Source.

Light or lantern, or inseparable bodymind

reflected on its own waters, or

the optical illusion of a dream grammar,

a cosmic tweaking of God-particles

in the third eye of a hurricane of stars

like a mirage in a sandstorm the washerwomen

in your eyes rinse out in tears after

beating your brains against the moonrocks

wonder keeps bringing back from your heart,

convinced there are hidden jewels of insight

in the ore. Even the way you’re weary of thinking

is perpetually new as a patina of light,

constellations of fireflies holding their lamps above

the ancient loveletters of the waterlilies

renewing their virginity as they’re writing

to the stars. Who knows what it means?

Don’t trouble yourself. Make one up of your own

like a bored artist trying to paint picture-music

on the shield wall of plywood boards

around a construction site with siege equipment.

You set out on a grailquest to discover

the meaning of life, and it’s a bad hangover

when you drink from your own skull,

and the next night, you’re drunk, dancing

around a fire with the life of meaning and briefly

you know for certain that mind is inexhaustibly more

than a ghost dance of the flesh longing

like a marriage bed to be crucially urgent

with desire again as a distraction from the pain

of remembering people and things as unattainable

as their memories unavailably lost forever

in the abysmal solitude of an indefensible human

listening with her heart to the irrevocable echoes of time.

Songs for the nightbirds. Sad music of the mind

putting shadows like treble-clefs and semi-quavers

to the riffs of a widowed guitar proud of its scars

as if that were proof what it sings of sorrow

can be believed like words that silence the heart.

PATRICK WHITE