DON'T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

DON’T THINK I OWED IT TO MYSELF, BUT I HAVE ENDURED

Don’t think I owed it to myself, but I have endured.

Scarred and broken and as full of escarpments

some bad mason laid in like a Cubist stairwell

in the Canadian Shield. Experience the sum

of all my failures, it’s a strange book to quote from.

I tell people not to listen to anything but their own hearts,

but they take that as a sign of creative sincerity

and continue to listen out of the corners of their lives,

defying my unmastery by paying stricter attention.

You’d think someone who had lived sixty four years the hard way

like a wild mountain goat on a high, noble path

the rest of the herd doesn’t take much anymore

as they did when the more siderealized shepherds

used to drive them to the Zen pastures of the moon,

would have his act down pat by now.

Still got a few gamma ray bursts of demonic energy

left in me yet, a black revolver of comets left in the clip

to take a few more pot shots on a drive by at the sun just for fun

as it’s going down like a mailbox at the side of the road

with a waning rooster painted on it like a fire hydrant.

You can spend your whole life as preparation

for a moment that never comes. Some people

don’t want to catch up to their star.

They just want to follow it as far as they can go.

They want to explore the offroad mysteries along the way.

Some ghosts radiate like well known constellations

and others roses in the dark that are just as happy to emanate.

Not in the habit of judging the ashes of others

by their constellations or their urns,

I’ve had more of a precessional inclination

to scatter them like seagulls on the wind

just to watch them hover motionless over a precipice,

each fixed in space like a mobile of sheet music

or the paradigmatic silence of a symphony

living the moment like a riff in the heart of time.

Wherever I’ve gone I’ve tried to leave signs

of where I’d been as delusory clues for those

sleeping walking in their delusional lostness,

roomy, lunar waterpalaces of the mind to move into

with more infinitely spacious windows

than there are condemned houses

in the slums of the usual zodiac of clockwork origins.

Not infrequently I can see time in a better light

than it deserves, and I like people that have been

sand blasted in the tide like a piece of broken glass

that washed up on the beach without losing its translucency.

An alumnus of the underground schools

for the occult science of new moons,

every moment of my life since

I’ve been the master apprentice of my own dark beginnings.

The serpent fire at the base of my spine woke up

like a fire alarm in the hallway of a burning house

shrieking for life at the window, and my vertebrae,

playing by ear, the silver-tongued flute,

and the picture-music within me, the snake-charmer,

swaying like a river reed going with the flow

to keep me on the same wavelength as lightning

looking for a place to strike, intrigued and alive.

It’s the arrogance of consciousness to think

it’s anymore than an eddy in the mindstream

that’s got intimate connections with the greater sea of awareness

it’s heading toward like a maple leaf with a flightplan

that’s got nothing to do with how things fall out.

The world turns and things are relegated

to stolen milk cartons like old albums weaned

from the nippled turn tables of a breast implant.

The past is a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces

keep changing shape like the fossils of a man

who isn’t comfortable in his death bed.

Over the course of time this vale of tears

slowly evaporates spiritually into the heat

like heart-shaped morning glory leaves

steaming into the dawn

like ghosts that had to get back to their graves,

arising off the lake like a mass exorcism,

or the third eye of the sun that shines at midnight

from the bottom up on the roots of the earth

as if it were trying to teach blind, star-nosed moles

to see the stars burning in the day

from the bottom of a dry housewell

that echoes like a firefly in the spider mount

of a hollow telescope listening to the cosmic hiss

of a message it’s waiting to receive

that’s already been delivered

like a star that’s strong and true,

but apocalyptically behind the times

as if one person’s past were another person’s present

and past and future and present

were all living co-terminously in the moment

like the triune identity of time looking three ways,

and probably more if you were take its lifemask off,

simultaneously, so when the wind blows

through my musical skull in this celestial desert of stars

because I listen attentively to the lyrics

like a nightbird waiting for an answer

to its amorous inquiry, I know I’m not

singing out of my ears just to overhear myself talk.

My world’s been complete since the Big Bang

and everything after, the prophetic echo

of a future memory of cosmic events

that happened without me billions of light years ago.

PATRICK WHITE

LIGHTYEARS AWAY FROM YOUR GREEN, GREEN EYES

LIGHTYEARS AWAY FROM YOUR GREEN GREEN EYES

Lightyears away from your green, green eyes

in this labyrinth of black holes and cul de sacs

where the entrances to love are as inescapable

as the exits, and still, legends of the inconceivable,

unlost, unfound as I am, how could I have imagined

time and distance would not diminish the intensity

of your power to make the dark bloom within me

like a rumour of flowers on a previously

uninhabitable planet that keeps jumping orbitals

to release this ghost of a photon like an enlightened memory

of the interlude we were to one another once,

when all you had to do was glance at me

with that ferocity of intent to live life immensely

and I could hear my dragons singing in your flames

like heretics in the bliss of a revelation they never denied.

The myths of origin we attribute to the light

may lie over the course of time to protect the truth

like a passport that identifies the thresholds we crossed

like burning bridges to get to the other side of nowhere

real fast as we swore allegiance to our homelessness,

but the constellations we translated each other into

were the conflagrations of real dragons born

of the fictions of fireflies. Root-fires in our starmud.

The truce we both made with the warriors

of our solitude that ate our hearts like wild strawberries

if we ever did lose it for awhile like a holy war

that left Jerusalem undefended. I always loved

the metal in your spirit like an alloy of water and light

and the darkness of the ore they were embodied in

as I stood there beside you like the urn of a lighthouse

looking at the stars at the beginning of the Bronze Age

over the expansive starfields of the wine-dark night sea

as if all journeys had been woven on the loom of the moon

into the aniconic wavelengths of the flying carpet

we were riding on like serpentine picture music

over the precipitous event horizons of albino worlds to come

where blazing is the blindness and if you want

to see each other in the dark as we did you have to

blow the candles out like the masts of white canes

on a liferaft without a star to guide them.

You overwhelmed me like the eclipse of a hurricane rose

as I fell on your thorns, the crescents of your lunar moods,

and the antidotes in their fangs repeatedly like a junkie

on the white nights of a Saturnalian paradise

that shone like the sun at midnight on the winter solstice.

Even the shadow of your absence was a lost eyelash

brighter than this road of ghosts on a summer night

thriving with life I’ve wandered down alone ever since

the phoenix was fledged like the flightfeathers of the sumac

in the fall and it was time to abandon the nests

we laid upon each other’s heads like laurels and crowns going down

like Corona Borealis shedding its flames like the leaves

of the abandoned birch groves it’s still a delight to remember

once burned like a green dragon in the saline taste of your tears.

The black arts people practice upon each other’s hearts

in a shallow time shore-hugging their passions

like the eyes greater tides left in their wake might long

for love to sweep them away in the undertow of their dreams,

but at the deep end of the pool you knew how to hunger

like fire for the waters of life you wanted to dance upon

like the graves of your enemies where the skull and crossbones

marks the spot where you buried them at sea with hasty honours

from the flashing sabres of your laughter as they went overboard

like the moon in the way they fell for you on their own swords.

Imp of my spirit, water-sylph, rogue star and demon,

there aren’t enough tree rings in my heartwood

or skulls on the abacus of my calendars and rosaries

to count the times I stopped for eras along the way

and wondered what rivers you walked beside on your own

as if your tears were solely reserved for the stars

like broken mirrors and intergalactic chandeliers

that fell like a glass blown ice storm thawing into rain.

It’s not my place anymore to say much to you,

but I saturate the space around you with millions of eyes

that run like sacred syllables along my tongue

like a blade of stargrass on the cutting edge of love

that’s mastered the silence like a foreign language

only the two of us could ever understand. And I know well

the darkness within you that is deeper than the watersheds

of night, but even for a moment of insight

if I could shine for you one more time like a star

through the distant veils of your treeline, even

as it descends like Vega into the Orphic darkness

of its renewal, black Isis, Queen of Heaven,

who keeps the sailors from drowning who wear

the prophylactic of your sidereal tattoo

on the left palm of their hand like a lonely constellation

of one, what could I possibly say at this remove

to indelibly impress you with the staying power

of the furious tenderness of love except to thank you

for not blunting the sword on the stone you drew it from?

PATRICK WHITE

MORE OFTEN NOW AS I GROW OLDER

MORE OFTEN NOW AS I GROW OLDER

More often now as I grow older, not a hot flash

or photo-op of time, I see as if my eyes

were waterclocks not chromatically aberrated telescopes

with astigmatic tears for corneas. A woman

walks down the street straightening her hair

with her hand behind her in the sunshine,

and she’s beautiful without any awareness of it,

and I see her image in ten thousand generations of women

all doing the same thing at one time or another

by housewells, in mirrors, in the eyes of lovers,

as if it were a kind of symbolic signage

you practise when you dance with your hands.

And the meaning is expressively true and perennial

in the extraordinary simplicity of the moment

when eternity unveils how indelibly intimate it is

with the most off-handed features of human transience.

We pass without passing away like water,

or wildflowers who bloom in the light of the spring

we bear in the eyes we bring to them

like a book of preludes to the eras and hours

as new to leaves on the dead branches of autumn

as the apple-bloom is on the green bough.

Some nights, I swear, I breathe out

and my whole being evaporates like stars,

radiant ghosts glow on the cold night air,

exiles in diaspora lingering in silence for awhile

without trying to grasp anything on the threshold

of their homelessness. Every time I die like this

I am more and more convinced death isn’t

the absence of life but its twin. Opaque abundance

quantumly entangled in its own translucent vacancy.

The darker it gets, the more I’m shadowed

by the light like a star peering through the foliage

of the black walnut trees as if it had just come across

a world it hadn’t detected before, and couldn’t help

be amazed at the fullness of our skulls in the black holes

of the graves we embody like stem cells

of our ancestral emptiness. Even the light of a star

mastered by the vastness of the space within us,

forever in the presence of what we can’t be guided to.

O how lonely the taste of death is in our mouths,

but I ask you, not as a sentimentalist who lacks

the clarity to be honest about their rootless emotions

as if the lucidity of a starmap had planted gardens

at the end of a journey that bloomed along the way,

is life not born of the same solitude it enters everywhere

as if the whole of death were achieved in the very first breath

we ever took, all of life, all of death, behind us from the start?

The many return to the one, and the one returns the favour

like a good heart that hasn’t been wounded

like a sea on the moon by giving it all back like rain

to the myriad rivers of eyes it drank its own reflection from

like the flowers of the stars that strew petals of light

in their own wake as if their shining illuminated the dark

in hindsight and the future memory of our endless becoming

were already a prophecy behind us long before we got here.

PATRICK WHITE

AND WHEN WE WAKE

AND WHEN WE WAKE

And when we wake we live the lives

we exiled from our dreams. We enter

the wilderness in the hourglass we drive

our scapegoats into like a dumping ground

for the waste disposal of our infectious sins.

Cleansed of our inner incense and soot

in the unlucky month of May. Poor bears,

poor squirrels, poor scapegoats, poor brides,

o hypocrites, munifikun, purged

by a ritual bath in the saline waters

of our own eyes, I ask you with bitterness and irony

without malice, is our innocence not contagious?

Time demonizes whatever we separate

from ourselves, set aside, cast out, anathematize,

consign to the lost animal shelter, or imprison

in the spirit as if the spirit were some kind of warden

that didn’t have to wear socks over his boots

when he made the night rounds so as

not to wake the cons recasting their nightmares

in bronze like rodeo clowns on rocking horses

before the Trojan gates. Especially in love

we make gifts of the unknown to each other.

Could be a curse, could be a blessing, whoever

knows?---you take it in, you’re betrayed;

you don’t, the fragrant indifference of your piety

fouls the nostrils of God, as she turns away from you

like sundials and wildflowers away from the sun.

The scapegoat learns to live with himself

like the dark familiar of a Renaissance demon

tragically condemned to practice the occult art

of an infernal kind of compassion in the world

that transcends the absolutes of anyone’s condition,

despite the self they have to keep on shedding

like snakes and dragonflies or last spring’s

tree ring in your heartwood to keep on growing,

the death masks of the screening myths

you see in the mirrors your eyes gather into

like sacred pools of tears unveiled like the rain

every time you pass by, estranged from yourself

as if everything crucially vital about this momentary life,

all the terrors and wonders of this mystery

we’ve been dreaming like a waterclock, afterlife

after afterlife, had been reduced, o how could we

have impoverished ourselves so?-- to getting on

with yesterday like the hidden agendas

of busy, busy undertakers washing the starmud

off our corpses for cremation like felled trees

so we can die like fireflies instead of real dragons

with ashes on our breath like a urn full of stars.

O how feeble we’ve become that we have to lean

on all these wise men like crutches we won’t

cast away to do our time standing up on our own

burning ladders of serpent fire climbing our spine

like scarlet runners, to lead us to our mangers,

like public beds in the shelters for the homeless

or the barred cribs of our privatized jail cells.

No winners, no losers, no villains, no heroes,

in truth, it’s hard to tell the victims from

the executioners, given they both wear

a hood over their eyes, and the one isn’t

a new moon and the other an eclipse, both bonded

by the isolation of life on death row

as the curtain parts on the last act of the play

we’re putting on as someone turns down the lights

on the swan song of the full moon in a tar pit

to console the tragically purged witnesses

something infernally compassionate was served by our death.

Call it fate, justice, karma, see it as a morality play

or the absurd theatre of life with no emergency exits

for the actors or the audience, because

as Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked

as if knowing would make any difference to anything,

ah, Faustus, why this is hell (can you hear the weary sadness

of the compassion in his voice?) nor we out of it.

And look at us now trying to genetically modify the doctor

in order to cure the disease we’ve afflicted upon ourselves

as if we mythically deflated what’s truly beatific about us

into the candling shadows of pharmaceutical elves

with gargantuan inferiority complexes in the collective unconscious

of a time---was there ever a time?---when the angels

mated with the daughters of men? Silly question,

when it’s as clear as the windows of an orphanage

on Heartbreak Hill, we’re the illegitimate children

of now, not designated heirs among the children of then.

Is there ever going to come a day when we’re

disappointed by the disappointments we are to ourselves

we live every moment of our lives, barring

a few fools who think the way to enlightenment

is just a matter of prying your eyelids open with a crowbar,

like an ox-eyed daisy before its time to bloom,

shucking the shell for the sacred syllable

of the black pearl on its tongue like a fee

for the ferryman with his hands on the wheel

of a deathboat lowered into the waters of life

as if our only hope of rescue were oblivion.

Nada. Nada. Nada. In a sunamic Shangrila of dopamines?

Even if you find yourself shaking like a persecution complex

from withdrawal in the bitter dawn

of your tragically flawed impotence

as you watch the spy satellites transit zenith

in everyone’s telescopic eyes, and there’s a circus

in town but no one’s laughing at the pie-bald clowns

like interventionists in disguise, why labour

like an Oxycontin to yoke your gazelles of light

to that apocalyptic deathcart you drag around with you

like an implausible loss of heart in what

you’re doing to yourself bleating like a judas-goat

on a food chain for a morsel from the mouth

of a tiger of wrath you’re hunting like a perfume in heat?

If you’re living in expectation of never

being understood by anyone, maybe you’re

a star ahead of us and the light’s just a little late

in getting to the rest of us, or you’re sorely

underestimating the innate intelligence of your solitude

to make a fool of you by insisting everybody

mistake you real seriously for the mystic missing link

that’s come to help us all like a starting pistol

in a firing squad a legend ahead of your time

to fill in the blanks with our last names first

and you with your flashflood of a vocabulary,

surfing your own thought waves and then announcing

as if you were confessing something wonderful,

a new blues riff to the lamentable nightbirds

you patronize with compassion for their lack of range:

I know you all like secret passwords you only

use once, then throw away. Though, of course, you don’t.

But that’s ok. The nightmares only lie to people

that nothing can change, and that were

the strangest thing about them. Their stem cells

were never irreparably deranged by their metaphoric selves

when even the inner potential of hell has evolved

into a funeral bell that never rings true until it tolls for you.

PATRICK WHITE

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

ANYTHING GOES AT THREE IN THE MORNING

Anything goes at three in the morning.

I’m dogpaddling in the salvage of the day

after the sun went down like a shipwreck

with all hands on board. A train whistle

mourns its lonely mile and I’ve known

since I was twenty six, the night is not a reward.

And the heart not a starfish you can easily drown

to keep from shining as if it had

a sense of direction all of its own

even if its just a momentary flashback

of a life you’d forgotten on your way down.

The darkness bruises my solitude.

I bleed like deadly nightshade

and talk to myself and the stars, the lamp posts,

the glassy-eyed windows with smut in their eyes

like the rose of life with a wounded mouth.

Trying to express the silence through the afterlife

of my voice, as if I were the ghost in the machine

of a transfixed medium you could get your bearings by

like a candle at a seance that suddenly goes out.

Or maybe I’m just the smoke of an old demon

who feels more like an exorcism sent into exile

like a scapegoat for things I might have done

if they hadn’t been done to me first by the sanctimonious

to purify a long winter of soot, incense, and snakeoil

like an oilslick contaminated by hypocritical rainbows.

But I mustn’t grow bitter. It’s moonrise

and the windows across the street, dirty

as these I’m looking through, seem sublimely elevated

to be used like a lake or a drop of water

when it isn’t raining, to reflect so much beauty

with a moondog for the iris of a third eye

that’s always urging the mindstream

to take a look for itself to liberate its seeing

from a purple passage in a bad dream that doesn’t end well.

The raccoons and feral cats are giving the dogs

something to bark about as they entangle their hind legs

like Houdini in a labyrinth of chains

to keep from running the deer to death at night.

Strange place, this earth. This starmud

that’s an alloy of blood and passion and mind

trying to second-guess where its presence comes from

as if everything had to be derived from something else

to lay a claim to the mystic specificity of its cosmic origins

and to understand that originality’s most unique feature

is that it shares its characteristics with everything else

so the more a human embodies what he perceives,

in his confusion, his horror, his bliss and sorrow,

that forms don’t appear and disappear for him to believe in,

that their passage isn’t a work of time, but the way

life shapeshifts from one dream figure into the next

without leaving the hands of anyone’s who’s ever

grabbed it by the throat and hasn’t let go

like a snapping turtle that’s just got hold of the moon,

its beak full of the flightfeathers of a waterlily

rising off the lakes of the windowpanes as unconcerned

as Cygnus flying over the tarpaper pigeon coups of the rooftops.

PATRICK WHITE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

DRIFTING TONIGHT, A POEM IN THE CORNER OF MY EYE

Drifting tonight, a poem in the corner of my eye,

maybe a crumb of sleep from last night’s dream,

the willows have grown up a lot since I last came here

but the stars they fix like flowers in their hair

even the lake can’t rinse out, haven’t changed much.

I seek out this precarious granite ledge

shaped like half an anvil or a stone age bicycle seat

with its thatch of moss and yellow grass

and this little patch of dirt, struggling

to cling to the rock, I’ve come to trust empathically

as if many others sat here before me

and watched the moon belly dancing on the undulant waves.

Abandoned heron’s nests in the boneyard

of marble trees, broken statuary in the moonlight

wading through the wild rice with their skirts

above their white, white knees. I come here

to listen to my solitude like a Tarot deck of constellations,

missing a couple of cards when it was stolen from the Sufis.

A nocturne of fate I’m being very cool about

I sing in dark harmony with the nightbirds

counterpointing the silence with sudden rills of longing

my heart resonates with like the hidden wavelength of sorrow

that it’s almost autumn, getting too late for anyone to come,

except for one firefly shining behind her veils

like a diamond in eclipse, a tattoo on the eyelids

of a black velvet painting of bullfighting rose.

And something deeper, more dangerous, like pike

moving just under the surface like nuclear submarines

under the Arctic ice-caps of circumpolar cataracts,

while night creatures are out hunting each other’s flesh

all around me as if the loss of life and the joy it took

in being a field mouse with a mouthful of seeds

were merely collateral damage in the owl’s eyes

of remarkably no significance at all. Life smells

of carrion in the nest, though we all light incense

to deny it. And try to feel as convincingly as we can

life heals its own absence like a wound in water,

like a mouse squealing in midflight above

the waterlily starmaps that hide the snapping turtles.

Generations have sat here before me

with their heads on the flying buttresses of their knees

to relieve the stress of the dome of their prophetic skulls

on the walls of a cathedral wilderness

pioneered into the empty one-roomed

wooden churches around here where the flies cluster

like spiritual footnotes with no real faith in what they say.

And the pioneers have all been ploughed under

and then exhumed and placed in a less savage cemetery

than the earth without black iron fences and gates

trying to imitate the tree line of a militant event horizon

around the graveside of the black hole we all fall into

when we attribute a meaning to death it doesn’t give to itself.

And life and love follow suit, knowing there’s nothing to risk,

nothing to shed, nothing to reveal, nothing to explain or understand

that isn’t whispered in your own voice into your own ear

so nature could imitate art by deepening the mystery

of the human spirit walking like the stars on its own waters

as if it weren’t a miracle the whole sky

with all its legends of shining doesn’t go out in our tears

and love turn into a black farce of suggestive preconceptions

dancing for our heads, as if we’ll be eating

honey and locusts, dressed in the hides of wild jackasses,

or in this lunar wilderness of shadows and wraiths

wolfskins on despondent shamans with

two heads on their shoulders like snake-eyes

trying to howl like smouldering volcanoes at the moon

with one heart, one mind, igneously alloyed

to the heartache and longing that can suddenly

startle and blossom out of the darkness

like the blue fire of the Pleiades flaring through

the crowns of the trees as if love were a conversation

between two, like a star and the eye it’s shining in,

it only takes one to sing.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

EVEN WHEN THE ROAD IS MISSING

Even when the road is missing

like the absence of God, or a woman I love,

I praise that emptiness for the freedom it accords me

to create a way of my own like a river of stars

and for the universe it’s left me

like a travelling companion I couldn’t improve upon.

The gate shut, the door closed, the window locked,

I slip a key to a poem under the welcome mat

and say my house is your house anytime you call

and then go get drunk with the moon down by the lake.

And after awhile we’re laughing at ourselves,

rolling in the leaves like the groundswell

of two happy vagrants with homeless hearts

making off with our lives for free as if

we’d just pulled off some cosmic B and E.

without leaving any sign of culpability behind,

except for the joy of our felicitous crime.

And when my moonboat’s in port for repairs

like bedsheets in a backyard fleet of laundry on the line,

I don’t mind being land locked for awhile.

I just take a walk along the shore of the lake

and gather moonlit feathers

from the scales of the waves

that have evolved from raptors into swans,

and binding them together

like Daedalus did for Icarus,

take a joy ride into the sun at midnight

not really caring too much about whether

I’m at zenith or nadir as long

as I’m transiting something akin to a threshold.

The sun can hold Venus on a short leash,

and me on the chain of my spine

like a barnyard dog barking at wolves

trying to tempt it deeper into the night

but the last crescent of the moon

will cut right through them both

like the umbilical cords of a new life

where we can both roam free

like rogue planets from star to star.

Empty-handed and full-hearted I come by day

to a low place looking for fire

from the daylilies with a bucket and an urn,

because I’m so tired of what I’ve had to do

to stay alive for the past fifty years as a serf of poetry

to keep it a calling, instead of a career,

and suffer the consequences of not attending to it

as a business that makes a profit off the stars,

but by night I’m a starling of creosote in a chimney

singing my heart out as if I wanted to eat it

because it has all the virtues of a noble enemy

and there’s no poetry or protein in the junkfood of fame,

though I think that might be a trifle ingenuous.

Impoverished Druid, you lean on a crutch for a tree,

as a flying buttress to your sacred folly,

and running out of time to avoid

a head-on collision with eternity

all your devotions the ghosts of yesterday,

you kick the stool from out under your feet

and garotte yourself from the bough of an oak,

like the berry of a single moon of mistletoe

and the last crescent of a golden sickle just out of reach

of the harvest season of the King of the Waxing Year.

Poor heart, what a battered shoe

of a vital organ you’ve become, a bone box

for the sacred skeletons of hummingbirds and elephants,

a Burgess Shale for the creative fossils and footprints

we both had to evolve through to come to this

inconceivable moment without a time scale

to measure how far it is from then to now

like the last leap of faith of the waterclock of life

into the abyss without a bucket for a safety net

or any deep assurance of even having a bottom anymore

to fall out of the ongoing over the edge of a precipice

as if even the rivers of Eden sometimes

had to seek release from it all and fall

even without a parachute to candle

like an exclamation mark all the way down,

a descent into hell creatively much to be preferred

than stagnating in paradise with nothing but apples to eat.

But still you know you won’t do it, given

the number of times now I’ve come running

with a chair and a rope to let you down

out of the window of a burning building

not knowing whether we were committing suicide

or I was running to your rescue as I always have.

Your daring has always said feathers and falling

has always taken wing like Pegasus before,

and what a wild strange radiant white water ride it’s been

across the high unbounded starfields of the shining

with Vega and Deneb goading us on

ever further like spurs of Spanish silver

just you and me, my blood brother, together

in the vastness of a mutual solitude.

My God, when I think of the flights we’ve taken.

When I think of the things we’ve seen,

and the orchards of sorrow that found more bliss

in the fruit than they did in the blossom.

And what did we ever write about all those stars

that didn’t declare how impossibly illiterate we are

compared to the lyrics of light and time and wonder

they’ve been singing all these lightyears

since I first opened my eyes to why I’m conceivably here,

though here can be anywhere by now like a bird

that loses its bearing under the stars everytime

it tries to get a fix on where it’s going like a photon

jumping orbitals like tree rings in a flash of insight.

When you’re light, when you’re foolhardily alive

you don’t need to pay heed to where you’re going

because there isn’t a single stage, place, or phase

that isn’t the destination of what you’re shining up at.

And I never thought the day would ever come

when sadness would sweeten into wisdom enough

to take pity on the mirrors like the eyes under our lifemasks

when we went down to the river to drink

our own reflections like faces from the lifeboat of our hands,

like a rain of mercy far out at sea far from the sight of land,

when we first began to understand how clarity like unity

can be broken down into little pieces of sand

that reflect the whole universe as readily

in their mystic particularity

as the stars and the sun and the moon do

when they lay their swords and feathers

and flying carpets like wavelengths of light

down in tribute to our third eye weeping its way to the sea.

And you were surprised, admit it, weren’t you,

to find so many white horses like you running ashore,

mustangs from the waves, to check out the new guy’s wings.

And me standing there like an avalanche of winged heels

wondering why I didn’t make as big a splash

and if all we walked away with was a detailed starmap

who could say the journey really wasn’t worth it?

Let the shore-huggers do what they want with it

to find their way around in the dark like fireflies.

Leave it to them. We were ever explorers

from the beginningless beginning to the endless end,

and we’ll rise up again on a gust of stars

caught up like a dust-devil at the crossroads of earth

and ascend on a thermal of the sun, the stairwell

of a star-studded chromosome that could

take a coil of flypaper and turn it into a poem.

PATRICK WHITE