I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I COULD LOOK AT IT WITH SWEETER EYES

I could look at it with sweeter eyes.

The way boys and cowards romanticize war.

I could emphasize the honeysuckle and fireflies.

I could say that’s not a noose in my hand, it’s an ankh.

I could run an extortion racket of jukebox mirrors

and have them placed in all the best cafes

so when you put a quarter moon in

they reflect anything you ask them to.

You’ve got a beautiful face. Man

are you smart. Yes, you’re the son of Zeus

and I’m the oracle of Amun at Siwa.

And every occasion I can with integrity

I try to praise the larkspur.

I’m exhilarated by the waterlilies

that have almost come to mean

as much to me as the stars on a summer night.

I rejoice in extraordinarily ordinary events

between people, I don’t expect to experience again

the way he walks beside her like a green crutch

coming into bloom and leafing like a loveletter

trying to be a strong tree she can lean on,

and so much is so crucial to a blessed few

or a father walking down the street,

listening to his daughter as if she were the Buddha

or middle C and he had to keep his eighty-eights straight.

Born a cellular optimist or too stupid to be a cynic,

though there are days I live like a dog,

and I know that denying this suggestive reality

is to summon its affirmation as if

something in the context of life heard you

and though you’re never certain, out to prove you wrong.

And likewise endorsing it, invites its denial.

This is the middle extreme and it should be lived

immensely with intensity like a Sufi gyroscope

in dynamic equilibrium with your wingspan

whether you’re homing to a sacred grove for the night

and your heart is a bell of shadows

or you’re one of the good sugars of life

fulfilled by the dawn where all the birds

sound like one harmony, but if you listen a little harder,

they’re all out of tune with each other,

this one a bass run and that an arpeggio

on a water flute that can hold a note like a drop of dew

on the tongue of a blade of stargrass when it wants to.

When the long wavelengths of its tears

aren’t breaking ashore like a menagerie of glass horses.

My mystic guestimate is. In the dark beyond

the blazing memes that have yet to light a candle to the stars,

love silvers the harvest of the heart in moonlight

and comes by day with a golden scythe to thresh it,

and an understanding that puts its trust in the future of life

like a windfall of apples swarmed by wasps like a train

that had jumped its tracks, or dozens of whales

were beached overnight and crushed their lungs

under their own weight, though that wasn’t as buoyant

as the previous metaphor, nevertheless it’s not

an injudicious verisimilitude for what I’m getting at.

If your passion for anything is ferocious enough

sooner or later you’re going to meet a nemetic dragon

though I’m sure that’s just a dream cloak

for projecting my anxieties onto a blaze

of cold-blooded reptiles with inflammable wings,

and you’re going to look deeply into the fangs of its eyes

as if you had to go through this ordeal

to suffer for what you love to prove you’re real.

Today I lived like one long mouthless scream.

I could have kicked stars in someone’s face.

Too much of a black farce to be the credible dream

of the air corridor I’m trying to sustain

like a black hole to the other side of the hourglass

that’s timing all this like a heartbeat of picture-music.

Now I’m writing poetry beside an aquarium

at two in the morning with three goldfish

hovering in their sleep beside me like hummingbirds

gone back to the sea as we all do eventually.

And it feels good to see the likeness in disparate things

and bring them together like the moon on the mindstream,

maple fire dancing to the rhythm of northern water,

and though it’s impossible to assess the worth

of what I’m doing as a poet in the twenty-first century

I can feel the compassion of a crazy wisdom

in every feather of light that falls to earth like Icarus.

PATRICK WHITE

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

JUPITER GONE FROM THE WINDOW

Jupiter gone from the window. Homage

to the ambiguously forgotten moments of light

that shine down upon the earth awhile

whether anyone’s watching this time of night

or not, intimate fireflies of the terrible largesse

of the diminished gods that once dwarfed our childhoods

in the shadows of the shepherd moons they cast

like an abacus of wandering stars. Thaumaturgic

strangers at the gates of our youthful wonder

as we cried ourselves to sleep at night because

we were born too early to walk on another planet

surrealistically pictured in the collectible spacescapes

of the bubble gum cards we swapped like Jupiter for Mars.

Nothing more hurtful than the unrequited love affairs

that ached with longing at the city limits of our starfields.

Postcards from the edge of nowhere left unsigned.

The first betrayal of astonishment on the thresholds of time.

A curse of distances that left us spell bound

by an abyss of inconceivable mysteries illuminating

the ancient texts of our estranged starmud homesick

to return to the original fire wombs of our shining

instead of being marooned here burning our ships

on the beach of a circumnavigable island

as if we could do nothing but under-reach ourselves.

Lightyears ago before I discovered thought was faster

in the gaping interstellar spaces of my own mind than light

and sight was a kind of love that touched the heart of things

and brought them infinitely nearer than a mirror or a lens.

That what I really longed for from the intangible brilliance

of their emphatic absence in my life was to

humanize the unknown with the evanescent metaphors

that bridged the gaps between our departures and arrivals

like analeptic waterclocks thawing the tear ducts

of cold eternities eager to learn as much as they could

from the brevity of our unbearable passage through

the recurrent perishing of our lives and unborn deaths.

No lack of midnight specials flashing in the dark,

I grew up looking down the long Buntline barrels

of alta-azimuth refractors with small spotting scopes

aiming at things impossible to hit. No collateral damage

from ricochets, except for the occasional planet or star

through the heart, and the childhood fever

of the wounded wonder of it all lodged there forever.

Despite what the Cyclopean optimists insist

with their big third eyes orbiting like automated proxies

for their spiritual lives in a brutally cold, space

you have to look into the dark if you want to see the stars.

I looked up at them out of the immensity of my solitude

and they looked deeply back out of their abyss into me

and once our eyes met and mingled like wary animals

in the woods at night, out of the corner of a window,

fireflies hair-braided into the willows, in the cuffs of a dream,

in the nebular chandeliers of a lover’s eyes moist

with the Pleiades, none of us have been the same ever since

like mini nirvanic flashbacks from the eternal sixties.

Light upon light, the way of gods and humans in the world,

and well beyond, o so much deeper into the dark

where seeing leaves our eyes behind, and it’s not

the insights that are revealed along the roadsides

of the starmaps we’ve memorized like wildflowers

that our divining aspires to, not the lamps

of the nightwatchmen with master keys to secure

the doors of perception our childhoods walked through,

light through the black holes and pupils of our eyes

and telescopes out into the open of our expanding minds

and their multi-tasking worlds, a seance of friendly faces

at the end of a tunnel of light, but to be enlightened

by the shining of the secrets that leave you in the dark,

burning in the window on the grave yard shift

long after Jupiter has set in the west over the Lanark hills.

PATRICK WHITE

EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

EVEN THE TINIEST WILDFLOWER IN THE WOOD

Even the tiniest wildflower in the wood

tangled in the shadows of the grass,

smaller than an insect, a lonely diminutive yellow,

five sounding flukes of pygmy whales for petals,

is a starmap to the whole universe

shining back at itself, the invisible made manifest,

by swimming against the current of the light.

It’s just as much the obstructions in life

that show you the way, the lost key, chance, hope,

the door you’re only allowed to live on one side of,

the tree root of the willow in the garden

you’re chopping at like the tentacle of an octopus

with a double-bladed axe that reminds you of the moon

as it is the lanterns of the random fireflies

that light your way through the woods

like a chaos of lamp posts and guiding angels.

Maybe you could stand the tentacles straight up

like the towers of the hollyhocks and larkspur

and let them blend in with the rest of the garden?

But that’s a little too wily and wise for me to propose.

And the way you frustrate yourself like whitewater

in a torrent of apple-bloom from the spring run-off

is as long a mile of the journey as the last three lightyears

of flowing freely around the angel in your way

with a gravitational third eye that bends you its way

like Jacob’s hip and Vulcan’s limp, and you’re

mythically inflated enough to begin to suspect

you’re a symbolically crippled sacrificial king or queen

of the Waxing Year. Even the Boy Scouts have forgotten

how to tie themselves into labyrinthine knots

the way you do when you’re not weaving snakepits

into flying carpets like M-theories out of

the stringy wavelengths of guitar-shaped black holes.

Poetic dismemberments are more a way of the one

returning to the many like a river plunging off a precipice

into millions of gleaming eyes, each a window

in a palace of water with a star for a candle inside,

than body parts planted like the ashes of your sister

in a rose garden that blooms for that purpose alone,

though their visions seem heavy and sad

as the bells of abysmal solitudes that have passed

like an era of individuals into the transmorphic anonymity

of a Meta-Conservation of Data Principle

that archives every iris and pixel of your digital fingerprints,

if you were born a poet, you’ll always be that stranger

sitting beside you in the shadows around a fire

telling ghost stories with narrative themes of cedar smoke.

Dynastic Dionysiac plenipotentiaries of the wild grape vines.

Maenads. Muses. Valkyries bobbing for prophetic skulls

in the Aegean like apples off the coast of Lesbos.

Everybody sings along with Sappho after upstaging

their Orphic voice coach. It’s the natural order of things.

Full moons of the mistletoe and dusty blue planets

with wine-dark seas. Barring the F chords on your

lyres and turtle-shells, capos like starlings on the staves

of the hydrolines strung out like a power grid

of bird nets and dreamcatchers in the palm of your hand.

You want to glimpse the quick of it, don’t drive yourself crazy

trying to understand. Just dance to the rush of the river

over the rocks like castanets. Love disastrously, with no regrets.

PATRICK WHITE

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I SHED SKINS LIKE ECLIPSES

I shed skins like eclipses and black latex gloves

peeled back from the new moons of unravelling snakes

that have outgrown their starmaps. Fire-sage

of a surgical dragon wound around circumpolar north,

there’s freezing in my fangs, little arrows of toxin,

and the milk of human kindness in my anti-venom.

I’m a wavelength unto myself, not a path

for anyone to follow. There are aimless rivers for that.

Poets skilled at setting paper funeral boats afire

as if they were burying their dead like real Vikings.

When you’ve left everything behind, you get used

to not leading anywhere. A cul de sac is as useless

as a labyrinth when you’re lost like the wind. Yarrow sticks

in all directions. Dishevelled stalks of dry summer grass

broken like the sarissas of a phalanx on a hillside.

You take the lowest of the low and join it

to the highest of the high and you have the makings

of a dragon that never overinflates or underestimates

the mythic potential of the quantum entanglements of life.

Scales and feathers. Winged horns ascending

over the birch groves of the lake like a dangerous moonrise

as I try not to cut my eyes on the talons and the sabres,

the Damascene crescents of clarity I’ve been running

across my tongue like the folded edges of ancient blood vows

to risk nothing less than everything all the time

making peace in a holy war of dead metaphors

buried too deep in the collective unconscious

to ever rise again with the same perceptive innocence

of their first alchemical revolution. The bloom

is off the rose. Beauty bares its thorns. Monks of gold

mine their own base metals for lesser transformations.

They unhinge their jaws to swallow their cosmic glains.

To them its all eggshells in a manger at Easter,

the two crows of Egypt, the triune identity

of three faces in one of St. Hillary, the Catholic Druid.

I sleep in my coils like a pagan hill fort

at the center of a mandalic crop circle

with occult starmaps tattooed under my eyelids.

I’m writing a grammar of symmetrical unlikenesses

to give my dissimilarities a chance to express themselves

without peristaltically swallowing thousands of contradictions

like the moon in a single gulp to bring the rain down

on the serpent fire of the lightning that engendered it.

Once you’ve passed through the monoliths

of dualistic reasoning like stone labia

at the Medusan entrance to the cave, you don’t suffer

the metamorphic uncertainties of what you were born to be,

quite as much. You’re free as a forest fire

to immolate yourself like a heretic at your own sky burial

on a pyre of crutches you threw away like the Tunguska meteor

radiating out in all directions like compass needles

from the unmarked grave of an auto de fe that made an impact

without gouging the eyes out of the truth like an unbearable fact.

PATRICK WHITE

WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

WANT TO WRITE OR BE WRITTEN

Want to write or be written. Whatever comes first.

Want to slide down a Martian sand dune

like a hockey puck of dry ice etching clawmarks

into a copper plate as if I were trying to cling

to something I couldn’t get a grip on like a snowman

thawing. A mirror melting. I want to plough

the desert in an hourglass into a Zen garden

where the stones flourish like weeds. I want to

swim in the wavelengths of my own mirages

in a month of heat, but there’s a small, nasty voice

like a deerfly buzzing the wheelhouse in my head

that bites like a cattle prod of conditioned guilt

because I’d rather write a poem than fill out

the deadpan forms of the world. All those deathmasks

plastered over our faces like papier mache over the years

just to prove we’ve got some kind of nonrefundable identity.

Do this, do this, do this, and then, this. As if

business had become the sign of a healthy spiritual life.

Curse the opportunistic careerism of our pettiness.

I’d rather hide like a tiger in the stripes and shadows

that are cast upon him by the busy, busy villagers

tying a judas-goat to the stake of an hour hand,

forgetting that time’s a waterclock, not a traffic cop,

to draw it out like fire from a moonrock.

Tears of blood flaring like the stamens of a matchbook

brief as a poppy blooming like a solar prominence.

No auroras in its wake. No scarves of light

lingering on the air like the fragrance of a mystic insight

into the humbling depths of our own ugliness and ignorance.

Que sais je. The clearest of all corneas. The Kepler

of all third eyes in orbit around some guru of a shepherd moon.

Life’s a mystery, not a question. Don’t expect me

to answer that. You can autofill your own blank.

Or try to second-guess your way out of the abyss

you wander in as if emptiness were a labyrinth

you had to follow your daily bread through

like the crumbs of the dreams you left behind as clues

to where your freedom went when you closed the windows

on what was once as wonderfully useless as a sunset about you.

Whatever it costs. Whether they cut me down

and make my skin into wallets to cover the expense

of hanging me from a heritage lamp post like a flowerpot

nesting in midair from the bough of a one-armed tree,

hemorrhaging violet petunias, I will still

heretically insist on how crucial it is just to drift

down your own mindstream as if your only purpose in life

were not to have one that moored you like a lifeboat

to a long walk off a short pier. You can sing to the stars

or you can call for help. You can water plants

like green lanterns in the window waiting for love

to hand out starmaps to your stem cells as if

you only direction in life were some kind of photosynthesis.

It’s a dangerous calling to live creatively free.

There are always hounds barking in the distance,

coydogs yelping after the magic rabbit in the hat,

deerflies trying to land like kamikazes

on the flightdecks of your carriers in Pearl Harbour

whether they’re out to sea or not, low-flying topedoes

released like snakes from the claws of sea-eagles

trying to train them to bite other people. Good luck

in the snakepit. I’m out of it like an emergency exit.

I’m not into mindwatching from a crow’s nest

for any sign of trouble on the horizon. I’m not into

crawling across my thresholds like the rungs

of a burning ladder for the upwardly mobile.

I’d rather fall toward paradise than cling to it

like mordant ivy on a church. And truth to tell,

I’d rather search than find. Build my house

on the waters of life than a gravestone that covets

my relics like a bone-box in a Gothic cave.

Water’s always on the move like a true pilgrim

following its own thought waves like tree rings

in the heartwood of a cross of terebinth

many springs have hung the fruits of life upon.

Peace be upon the pilot lights of the prophets

who taught the spirit how to make it through

another night without freezing to death in the firepits

of cold zodiacs feathered in shrouds of ash cloth.

Rites of passage trying to thrive like fish in the desert

around the great artificial barrier reefs of the moon

that ossify like dental plack and barnacles

on the decks of our spiritual shipwrecks

in the dead seas of life we’re walking on

like root fires of our own radiance in the housewells of light.

Whether you make an ashtray or a body cast

out of your starmud, no matter, the dragons of life

burn no less hot in their urns than they do

in the furnaces and kilns of the stars whatever

prayer wheel they’re being turned upon

like the inconceivable embodied like the sun,

the moon, and Venus, in the false idols of visionary insights

that shadow the ineffable with the simulacra

of the painterly senses that know of their own accord,

like unsuccessful saints, who better?---there is no metaphor

for the light upon light, the mind upon its own waters,

until your seeing isn’t discoloured by the eyes

you’re looking into as if they were brighter than your own.

PATRICK WHITE

IT'S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

IT’S NOT LIKE THE FACE IN THE FLOWER OF THE STAR

It’s not like the face in the flower of the star

grows more beautiful the more times it’s looked at,

it’s just that it’s humanizing

the vast, cold spaces within you

with your own awareness of it so that

when you spot Arcturus shining through the trees

as you have since childhood and call out its name

it’s you that shines brighter

a magnitude more for the moment.

Affable familiars in a big, lonely space

acknowledging each other in passing

as if, animate and inanimate, the same,

what we all hold in common

since we started kicking in the womb

is this life of perpetual exile. Shape-shifters,

driven out of the bliss of oblivion, to bury the bell

of our agony in the stillness of an alien place

and try to love everyone who’ll let us

as if they weren’t a stranger at the gate.

O the appellations the mind applies to its formlessness

in a world of forms to befriend its cosmic isolation.

That fills space up with stars and birds

suggested by its senses and then casts a spell

like a grammar of things to turn them into words

to start a conversation with chaos as if we weren’t all

talking to ourselves. We put lifemasks on everything

like an old Greek play and act out our tragedy

like a dilemma gored on the horns of the goat gods

as if they had a clear grasp of what we were talking about.

Asking a question doesn’t change

the ambiguous nature of the issue

and when no one answers isn’t proof

the silence is divine. Bright vacancy, dark abundance,

nothing includes everything in it

like a table of contents for the mind

that plays host to its own imaginary guests.

The door bell rings and the world’s

standing in the doorway bearing gifts

that have no other meaning other than

they’re addressed to you the way life

nourishes itself on its own emptiness

as if every moment were a cause of celebration

engendered by your own inspiration.

Every song in the distance is the ancestral echo

of your own voice in an abyss

you’re trying to relate to by listening

as if you were sounding the depths

of the mystery you must be to yourself

to live among your own creations as if

someone signed you too. Your name

scrawled in cadmium red blood across

a white canvas of albino eyes in the dark.

Imagination obedient to the freedom

of its own lawlessness to create as it is urged to

on a caprice, a gust of stars, the nudge of an atom,

whole new paradigms of space and time

it will answer to as if someone called its name.

If the same eye by which I see the star

is the eye by which the star sees me,

then who’s the creator, who’s the creation?

So if someone were to ask me the colour of my eyes,

I’d show them a painting I did

of blue weed towering beside a dirt road

or a moonscape I dashed off one starless night

between the clouds. Or even further afield,

if I felt they’d been siderealized sufficiently,

the blue auras of trace elements grinding galaxies

into mirrors they can see themselves in

like leggy gazelles come down to the shore

to drink from their own reflection of themselves

like telescopes alert to the eyes that lie in wait for them.

Everywhere I wander down these pathless ways

through my homelessness, I meet myself

like a mirage at the end of a cul de sac,

and I walk through it like a wall

or two galaxies passing through each other

without disturbing a star, I embody such distances,

and I encounter hypnotists from all quarters

that call themselves seekers of the truth

trying to wake up from their own magic

as if they hadn’t caught on to their own minds yet

and were still underestimating the power of their illusions.

Why wash the stars off the windows, or sweep

the scars of the autumn leaves off the stairs

expecting the enlightened arrival

of the lord and lady of the manor any day now

as if you could get a grasp on the nature

of your own emptiness like a servant

looking for a master in your own image?

Everything nasty and blind,

everything beautiful and sublime

are the facets of a clear jewel

turning in the light of the void.

All that is separated, all that is enjoined,

all that are searching and finding

and losing themselves again like solar flares

on a return journey back to the sun

or rivers flowing into themselves

as if every wave crossed the threshold of itself

into an openness exhilarated by

the expansive gesture of its presence,

are just the hidden secret of you

wanting to be known by a world

you whisper into your own ear

as if you’d never heard the sound

of your own voice before the wind

began to throw the sea into turmoil

and you were swept ashore out of

the inconceivability of your own emptiness

like a myth of awareness sadly in need of an origin.

So you end up creating a world

out of your own inner resources and calling it

mother or father in the hopes it might be able

to explain what you’re doing here by yourself.

And that’s how you get lost in the labyrinths

of your own being, that’s how your wires get crossed

in the short circuits of your lifelines

tangled up in kites like morning glory

that wouldn’t fly. You keep asking simulacrums

of your own creativity about things

that only you on your own, lonelier than God,

projected imaginatively like a lifemask

you created in your own image

onto the formlessness of an invisible space within you,

can be the answer to. The moment

you say I am to yourself and realize

that you’re not even there to recognize it

the little thumb puppet in three pounds of starmud

dematerializes like something solid

into the presence of the real. You revel like a child

in the creative liberty of not keeping your own distance

from anything in existence, knowing

in the crazy wisdom of your second innocence

the only thing that binds you to it

or separates you from it, is a sense of play.

That everytime you say I am without

including the whole universe in it as well

it becomes the wayward paradigm

of another brilliant mistake with feet of clay.

Or as Archibald Lampman said

dead of a heart attack at thirty-six,

poor shining angels whom the hoofs betray.

PATRICK WHITE

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